I am slowly posting the entirety of Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents, here on Patience & Fortitude for free. General warnings are in place: this book address grief, mourning, self-harm, anger, poverty, and pet death, all in the context of becoming an adult orphan in my twenties. You can still buy the book if you would like (doing so helps support my writing!).
A glaring hole in this narrative is the story of the family pets. I grew up with dogs in the house all the time, so it was natural for me to have animals around and I missed them when they were not there. I moved out of the dorms in my second year of college but I knew I did not have the time to spend on dogs so got a twin-set of kittens from a co-worker who found an abandoned litter by her house. They were both black and I called them Thing One and Thing Two, which was convenient because even I could not always tell them apart. Eventually I figured out that the girl twin was a little rounder-faced and had a profile lower to the ground, but most people just called whichever one was present “Thing”.
As I said, convenient!
They moved with me when I went home to take care of my parents, who had two dogs of their own. One was a cairn terrier named Ruffles (although Mother claimed it was a play on Raffles) whom we had adopted when I was about fifteen, after our previous cairn terrier died. The other dog was a standard poodle mix that Mother found alongside the road side, took in and named Tiffany (I have concluded simply that Mother liked fluffy names).
Ruffles was as stupid as a rock and barely had a grasp of the whole house-broken issue, but was funny and lovable and happily oblivious to any problems in the world outside his head. He had major knee issues that would eventually morph into arthritis and back problems.
Tiffany was smart and sweet, and bonded to Mother like glue. She had a naughty habit of petting herself by walking under low-hanging clothes in the closet, and always looked hysterically guilty when caught at it. Otherwise she stayed on Mother’s bed, and I think contributed a lot to Mother’s mental well-being during her final year.
When I moved back in, the cats were renamed because my parents rebelled against the whole “Thing & Thing” thing, becoming Princess and Pirate (accurate reflections of their personalities, to be honest). Poppa, who did not like cats in principle, eventually warmed to them, often holding Pirate on his lap while they watched TV.
Terrible photos but the only ones I have left of them.
Unfortunately, due to his stroke, Poppa could not open and close doors quickly and often left them partially open out of forgetfulness. After a lifetime of being indoor pets, the cats got out and short of locking them in my bedroom there was no way I could stop it. Pirate took this as his opportunity to lounge in the back yard playing with squirrels and rolling in the sand. Princess, however, had wanderlust. A few months after Mother died, the inevitable happened and Princess was struck down late one night by a car when she tried crossing the road. She had been on her way home, and the impact threw her body far into the side yard of our corner lot. Poppa helped me pick her up and we both cried like children as I dug her little grave by our dinky orange trees. I know Poppa felt guilty, but I could not ever blame him. He loved her too.
After Mother died, Tiffany aged very quickly, losing bladder control and seeming doing a doggie version of senility. We had no idea of Tiffany’s actual age, but she was very likely at least ten years old when Mother died. By the time Father died Ruffles was twelve, and it was honestly hard to tell if he went further downhill at that point because there was always something about him that was mentally lacking.
The upshot is that when I moved into the apartment after Poppa’s death, I had all three animals with me, each with varying degrees of trauma. Pirate was still acting weird after his sister’s death (they had never, ever spent a day apart since they were born) by licking his skin raw; Tiffany wet the bed, floor and couch all the time; and Ruffles could barely walk.
It was less than a year later that I had to put down both dogs. I had delayed it far longer than I should have. My only excuse is selfishness. They were my parents’ pets, and as such were simply another aspect of my lost past that I did not want to let go of.
Pirate eventually stopped the crazy licking affliction and kept going until July 29, 2009. I call him the Last York, although technically that would be me. I feel he deserves the honorific more than I do.
It is bad enough to be forced to deal with the feelings of death and destruction from losing one or both parents; to lose even non-human members of the family is an additional devastation. It is easy for other people to see your pet as a pet and not put any meaning to that. Anyone who has invested part of their heart and soul into living with pets, though, knows that these animals are more than furniture to be shuffled around. Mother’s death literally shattered Tiffany, who started life as a filthy and seriously ill stray before being taken in and given the protection and love she had never known before.
Pirate went a little crazy after his sister died, and spent a lot of time sitting in Poppa’s chair waiting for him to come back after Poppa’s death. Ruffles was an idiot and constantly ran back to Mother’s room to see her, or asked to go outside to sit with Poppa on the porch, even though both people were no longer there. I am not convinced Ruffles ever really grasped the idea of their deaths, and thus suffered a real depression when put into my new, parent-less apartment. He slept on the couch for a week, morose, utterly convinced that he was being punished for something.
This all might seem like so much anthropomorphizing, and I cannot actually say it is not just that. But for me counts at the emotional level, and dealing with the pets after my parents died was just the beginning of my realization that grief was not just something that hit me at night, in the dark under the covers: it reached out into every mundane aspect of my life. I was surprised by this realization although logically I should have known better.
Of course, logic has nothing to do with it.
