Joy And Grief Travel Together
We lost Merkah this week. I came home from rehearsal on Wednesday and found him.
We don’t know for certain if his death was in any way related to the surgery, because we chose not to have him autopsied, but I don’t think it was a direct cause. We’d been checking in regularly with his docs and things seemed to be pretty normal. I think maybe it was just his time.
We’re grieving, and it’s hard to write these words. He was always full of joy and love. He was never afraid to be silly. He always knew when we were sick or sad or hurting. He was always a big orange weirdo who was spectacularly and singularly himself.
We miss him, and we will miss him, but the joy of having known and loved him is powerful.
On the last morning, I kissed him on top of his head before I left and told him I loved him. I’m glad I did.
This was a rough pairing: it came on the same week that NEBT announced my addition to the company. Literally on the same day that they posted my pics and bio on Insta, so I had this very weird experience of my friends being really excited for me and me feeling really grateful and happy but also incredibly, incredibly sad.
We learn by living that joy and grief can travel side by side. One does not have to diminish the other.
It feels strange sometimes – like sunshine in the midst of a downpour – but honestly, life is like that sometimes.
I am grateful to have known and loved Merkah.
The last thing: on Wednesday I kept thinking about how I wasn’t ready for this, but how also he could’ve lived another fifteen years and I wouldn’t be ready, and that’s okay.
Most of life kind of happens when we’re not ready. We seem to live anyway.
Posted on 2023/10/06, in life and tagged death, grief, loss, Merkah. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
danseur ignoble 
We’ve been in contact for 10 years now Asher (you’ve come a long way from the thoughtful and youthfully naive pushbike enthusiast I met in 2013) and I guess that means there’s lots of data-points in both our lives from which to draw coincidences. But I’m struck by how often we seem to hit the highs and lows in parallel. Sometimes our lives seem to dance to the rhythm of the same bipolar drum.
About a month ago I lost the last of a long series of pet rabbits. She too was elderly but the end came quickly and unexpectedly. She was perfectly normal over night but slightly off her food and a bit less social than usual the next morning. That’s not terribly unusual, but by afternoon she was unchanged and I had to decide whether to continue my wait-and-see approach or take her to to vet before it closed. I chose the latter.
The vet found a moderate build up of calcium in her bladder which was probably causing discomfort but no cause for alarm. Considering her age it was better to flush her bladder gently in several sessions than try to get it all out in one go, so we decided to leave her there overnight to enable good spacing, observation and recovery between procedures. I had no reason to think wouldn’t be picking her up the following afternoon.
Around midday I got a call to say there was some blood in her urine and they wanted to keep her in for further tests. That gave me my first chill but the vet reassured me there was no cause for alarm and she’d get back to me in time to say whether I could pick her up that day.
It was half an hour after the vet closing time when I finally heard back. The bleeding had gotten worse and a vet and vet nurse were staying back to try to stabilise her with coagulants. No-one was pretending it wasn’t now serious.
At about 9pm they called to say they’d done all they could for now but the situation was obviously dire. I was given the option of going to pick her up – which was basically a death sentence – or leaving her there overnight in the hope they could perform a transfusion early the next morning that still held out a slim hope. To my subsequent regret I grasped at the straw and went with the transfusion.
At 8am I got the call I’d been fearing as I tossed all night in bed. The autopsy revealed she’d suffered systemic organ failure, probably as a result of an infection that got in through her abraded bladder lining and went crazy in her kidneys, liver and peritoneum.
I was trashed, but didn’t actually cry until I carried the pet case containing her corpse in through the door of my home. Over our nine years together there had been countless other return journeys from the vet when that act signaled the end of a traumatic time for her (and me) that would soon be relieved as I opened her cage to familiar surroundings and she hopped back out into her home territory. My muscle memories of her weight in the cage in one hand as I unlocked the door with the other momentarily triggered that now inappropriate sense of relief, only for it to be swept away in a crashing tsunami of grief. I’d barely closed the door behind me when I fell to the floor blubbering uncontrollably.
It’s now been a month’s slow climb out of that pit of grief. I no longer have nightmares every night of being unable to reach her as she suffers life-threatening distress. The number of times I think I see/hear/feel her going about her usual business as I move around the house – or am caught out expecting to – are now down to once or twice a day. I still haven’t fully come to terms with my decision to leave her to die alone in a cage in a strange, threatening environment instead of bringing her home to spend her last hours being stroked in my lap surrounded by familiar sights, sounds and smells. But everything passes and so too will this.
There’s no real getting over grief. No true closure. But bit by bit it and you grow together to become something new. It stops being the nightmarish invader clawing away at your peace of mind and becomes another part of the complexity, contrasts and contradictions that make you what you are. Luna is no more, but her touch is a permanent part of me. Or at least until anicca overwhelms what I think of as me in the same way it did her.
Peace be unto you Asher. I don’t believe in empathy, but know you have my sincere compassion.
Peace be unto you as well 💙 That’s a hard loss, and a hard way to lose someone you love.
I don’t have better words right now, but you have my sincere compassion as well (and you’re right: it is definitely interesting how our lives seem to run on very similar tracks, even with much of a planet between us).