what colour is grief, i wonder. do i want to know? i am oscillating between hating loss and welcoming grief. sometimes i think it is a blessing to love someone so much that it can hurt this bad when you lose them, other times i think it’s all shit, and the stupidest thing to love and not worth it. not at all. i can see why people close up and refuse to let anyone in. i am grateful that i haven’t lost anyone significant in my life. i can’t imagine having children and worrying about them constantly, yet i want to be a mother. but the magnitude of the loss that is possible there is staggering. right now i have only lost my cat. she is a cat. i didn’t think it could hurt this much. maybe i never thought about it. my eyes are puffy. i have been crying on and off for three days. i have been watching episodes of greys anatomy, because it always makes me cry and i am hoping to push it all out. it is the worst when i come home and hope that i will see her crawling out from under the bus, meowling her totally pissed off meow like it’s the end of the world that i left her for the morning to go to work.  but she doesn’t show up. so i don’t want to come home, because i don’t want to see her not showing up. her food dish makes me cry. and that i have nothing of hers to hold onto makes me cry. and that there is no round divot in the duvet from where she was sleeping makes me cry. and the memory of picking her up and cradling her when she is a limp rag-kitty from lying beside the woodstove heat makes me cry. and the memory of how she would let me hold her paws (and squeeze them) makes me cry. and thinking about all of that makes me cry. writing this makes me cry. i want her. i want her soft grey fur against my face, in my arms. i want to be able to say goodbye. i want to ease into it. but it’s not fair and we don’t get to choose how we lose someone. life happens beyond our control. it is worse because i don’t know what happened to her. i think an animal got her, but i don’t know. she just wasn’t outside the door when i got up on friday morning. and she wasn’t there when i got home from work, and she wasn’t there the next morning, all pissed off that she had spent two nights outside. or the next. there is no trace. and i know her. i know her patterns. she was my companion for 13 years. she was with me through everything. through three major break-ups i held her. she let me grieve into her fur. she was the one. always there. humans aren’t even that consistent. what unbelievable love and loyalty and trust. what a gift. what a blessing. to have had that time with her. if it had to be this way. i will be ok. just not right now.

these are the choices we make, right? we weigh the risks versus the benefits. walking down by the river today, i think: a cougar can get me at anytime. but it’s worth the risk, because of the beauty, because of the way living here makes me feel. i know khurue liked being back here, away from the -35’s of prairie winters. there she might’ve died getting hit by a car. at least here she was maybe food for a wild mammal family. i just hope it was fast. painless. there is so much in grief. so many contradictory emotions. and i think to myself: the universe must have something good in store for me to take away my only constant companion. to take her away like this. right? there must be something good around the corner. something worth the loss.

“i believe that everything happens for a reason… good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” – marilyn monroe

fall together please. make the loss a little bit less.

i am looking for a way to honour her. a sense of closure. i am at a loss. if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.