January was a very difficult month for me.
For nine years I owned two female Maine Coon cats, Molly and Lily. They were a gift from my father and stepmother. Molly was the bigger of the two, smoky grey with a black face, Lily being the smaller and salmon-colored, both with yellow eyes. They were half-sisters.
In late December of last year, I noticed something wrong with Lily; she was grooming herself too much and seemed restless, out of sorts. But Lily had always been the highly strung of the two cats and I chalked it up to either stress or some form of allergic reaction.
I made an appointment with the veterinarian for the following week. But before that Lily began to show signs of clear distress, so I took her in immediately. My fear was that her kidneys were failing, but it turned out to be cancer in her abdomen. Surgery only had a slim chance of success—at great expense—and the veterinarian did not recommend it.
So, I said goodbye. I was with her when she went to sleep, and my father and stepmother with me. If this all seems terse on my part, it’s because it’s difficult to write about.
The first days after Lily’s passing had me on autopilot, routinely going about daily tasks in between bouts of grief and despair—and anger, a growing sense that not only had Lily been cheated of life but that I had been cheated as well. Here I was, middle-aged and autistic, never entirely sure of the world or my place in it. Couldn’t I simply have the unconditional love of an animal that accepted me for me?
I made a mistake then—one I think many people make and those on the spectrum are particularly prone to: I attached my personal loss to other problems (great and small) and decided that The World is Not a Good Place. Bad things always happen in threes—here, I’ll show you the math. The weather was grey, the landscape brown. It was only January, but I’d already written the New Year off as a loss.
I did reach out in support of friends and family, thankfully. Not all people on the spectrum are this lucky—believe me, I’ve read their stories online. The routine of work also allowed me to circumvent grief with, well, work, and it occupied enough of my time and energy that there was little left for depression to feed on throughout the week.
And then this, a message from a friend containing a quote by Francis Ward Weller on the nature of grief and gratitude:
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.
My long commute back and forth to work allowed me to think this over, and other things occurred to me.
Lily was here for only nine years—but they’d been nine very good years for us both. If bad things happened in threes, what prevented good things from doing so? And wasn’t this a very arbitrary way to interpret life, a justification to just heave a long sigh and give up?
I reminded myself that there was more to Lily than those last hours—much, much more. A given life is a book, not just an epitaph.
And if it is a book and all I recall are its last pages, then why read it? Why even look past the cover?
Rest easy, Lily.
Mike Minnis is a guest blogger and client. His books can be purchased on Amazon. Visit his website at: www.michaelminnisbooks.com/index.htm
For nine years I owned two female Maine Coon cats, Molly and Lily. They were a gift from my father and stepmother. Molly was the bigger of the two, smoky grey with a black face, Lily being the smaller and salmon-colored, both with yellow eyes. They were half-sisters.
In late December of last year, I noticed something wrong with Lily; she was grooming herself too much and seemed restless, out of sorts. But Lily had always been the highly strung of the two cats and I chalked it up to either stress or some form of allergic reaction.
I made an appointment with the veterinarian for the following week. But before that Lily began to show signs of clear distress, so I took her in immediately. My fear was that her kidneys were failing, but it turned out to be cancer in her abdomen. Surgery only had a slim chance of success—at great expense—and the veterinarian did not recommend it.
So, I said goodbye. I was with her when she went to sleep, and my father and stepmother with me. If this all seems terse on my part, it’s because it’s difficult to write about.
The first days after Lily’s passing had me on autopilot, routinely going about daily tasks in between bouts of grief and despair—and anger, a growing sense that not only had Lily been cheated of life but that I had been cheated as well. Here I was, middle-aged and autistic, never entirely sure of the world or my place in it. Couldn’t I simply have the unconditional love of an animal that accepted me for me?
I made a mistake then—one I think many people make and those on the spectrum are particularly prone to: I attached my personal loss to other problems (great and small) and decided that The World is Not a Good Place. Bad things always happen in threes—here, I’ll show you the math. The weather was grey, the landscape brown. It was only January, but I’d already written the New Year off as a loss.
I did reach out in support of friends and family, thankfully. Not all people on the spectrum are this lucky—believe me, I’ve read their stories online. The routine of work also allowed me to circumvent grief with, well, work, and it occupied enough of my time and energy that there was little left for depression to feed on throughout the week.
And then this, a message from a friend containing a quote by Francis Ward Weller on the nature of grief and gratitude:
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.
My long commute back and forth to work allowed me to think this over, and other things occurred to me.
Lily was here for only nine years—but they’d been nine very good years for us both. If bad things happened in threes, what prevented good things from doing so? And wasn’t this a very arbitrary way to interpret life, a justification to just heave a long sigh and give up?
I reminded myself that there was more to Lily than those last hours—much, much more. A given life is a book, not just an epitaph.
And if it is a book and all I recall are its last pages, then why read it? Why even look past the cover?
Rest easy, Lily.
Mike Minnis is a guest blogger and client. His books can be purchased on Amazon. Visit his website at: www.michaelminnisbooks.com/index.htm