Earlier this week, on August 2, 2022, my cat Frodo was euthanized. Similar to our other cat Snowflake – who died on May 8, 2020 – he had blood work done which showed he was starting to have kidney failure. He had lived a good long life, and we didn’t want things to get worse for him like they had for Snowflake, so we made the decision to have him euthanized that day.
Snowflake lived to be 14 and Frodo lived to be 16. It’s typical for strictly indoor cats to live to be about 13-16, so I’m thankful they both lived a full life. I’m glad for the time I had them, and as painful as the end was with both of them, I’d do it all over again if given the choice.
Frodo was a trooper and survived many times I wasn’t confident that he would. I know that no amount of time with a beloved pet (or any loved one, human or animal, for that matter) will ever feel like “enough” time, and the end will always hurt in a way words fail to describe.
Summer is always the worst time of year for me for a number of reasons. It seems like every year, there are grief/trauma anniversaries and often there are new incidents that come up that are painful. There’s a lot I don’t feel ready to talk about at this point, that I may or may not talk about one day, but 2020 and 2022 summers have been pretty brutal. 2021 was thankfully not that bad for me, and 2022 hasn’t been as hard as the summer (or really the whole year) of 2020, but it’s still often felt like hell.
Although Frodo’s death wasn’t completely unexpected, it still obviously hurts badly. I’m also still grieving that my church is shutting down. In late November/December 2019, I started listening to Collective Church sermons. Rob Carmack’s words were so healing for me. There was no pressure to fully agree with a set of doctrines; there was no coercion to giving time, energy, or money when you felt stretched thin; as a neurodivergent, disabled, and chronically ill person, I finally had found a church where there was no expectation that I would end up being healed. There was no pressure to “just have faith” or “just pray more” to be healed – I could simply be me. The church valued inclusion; not in a “it’s fine that you’re here” way, but in a “you belong here” way. I had found a church that truly valued things like anti-racism, LGBTQ+ affirmation, egalitarianism, accessibility, helping people living in poverty with no strings attached, etc.
When I first began listening to sermons, I was very wounded from experiences within churches and told myself I could stop listening if I needed to. I wasn’t going to force myself to stay if I was triggered.
In January, when Rob stepped down as pastor, I felt crushed. Many guest sermons had been deeply hurtful and triggering; very few gave me the sense of solace that Rob’s did. I’m grateful for the leadership Megan and Courtney provided over the following few months as co-pastors, and appreciated the sermons I was able to listen to. I have still considered this church my church through all of this, but I didn’t listen to sermons often.
I don’t know if or when I’ll have another church. I expected this to be my forever church. What I do know is that I will not force myself to find another church, because tending to my trauma and grief and pain matters more than church attendance. And loving Jesus doesn’t require being part of a church. I have some in mind I know I can check out if and when I feel ready, but I’m still grieving and I’m not ready to call another church my church yet. What I do know is that if & when I ever do find another church, it needs to be one that is unapologetically anti-racist, accessible, egalitarian, and LGBTQ+ affirming. I’m angry that churches that are indifferent about these things, or opposed to them, continue to thrive while a church that was passionate about social justice is coming to a close.
Similarly, I think I’ll always consider Frodo and Snowflake my cats. Having had at least one cat for 16 years now, it’s so strange and heartbreaking to not be a cat owner at all anymore. I definitely want more cats in the future, but I don’t feel ready for that yet. And I’m not sure if or when I will feel ready, or when it would be practical to have a new pet.
In the midst of all of this – processing my cats’ deaths (and I’m referring to both, because Frodo’s death has certainly brought up some emotions about Snowflake’s death, especially considering they both experienced kidney failure), continuing to process religious trauma, job searching, finishing up my summer class and preparing for my fall classes – I’m also still dealing with chronic pain. For the last 2-2.5 months, my symptoms in general have been worse. Over the last two weeks in particular, my migraines have been worse. I didn’t cry as much with Frodo’s death as I did with Snowflake’s, and I’ve been distracting myself a lot, mainly because I know crying always brings on a hell of a migraine for me.
And I gotta say, I hate this shit. I hate that I have to choose between feeling the feelings about my cat’s death and pain management. Grieving as someone with chronic pain is a unique hell because of the fact that I have to make this choice. I just want to be able to cry about my cat, fully let myself miss him, without getting a migraine. Migraines triggered by emotions like this are often much harder to get rid of – and I have already been experiencing a lot of pain that my medications aren’t working well (or at all) for. So let me just say that you should check on your grieving friends, and check on your disabled/chronically ill friends – and also, especially check on those experiencing both. It’s horrible and I wouldn’t wish this hell on anyone. I don’t want to, and shouldn’t have to, suppress my emotions or distract from them in order to manage my pain, but this is just the reality I’m dealing with. I absolutely hate it and no one deserves this.
This week has been a hard one, to say the least. I’ve been watching Smosh and Mythical/Rhett and Link videos to laugh, and I’ve been watching Koramora and froggycrossing videos for Animal Crossing content to relax to. There are plenty of other YouTube videos I’ve watched lately as well, but these channels in particular have been comforting during a very difficult time. I’ve been sleeping with a pillow and a blanket on my bed that Frodo loved, and tried to not focus much on their deaths so as to avoid crying (which as I mentioned earlier, is a major migraine trigger for me, and always produces migraines that are extra difficult to treat.)
Some words I have often reflected on during various periods of grieving (from https://verse.press/poem/blessing-for-the-brokenhearted-6973785118333689337):
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.” -Henry David Thoreau
“Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love. Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound, when every day our waking opens it anew. Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made for precisely this – as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it, as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still, as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but will save us nonetheless.” -Jan Richardson, “Blessing for the Brokenhearted”
Through Her Eyes 