Lessons from Sabbatical - Week 4

Grief, upon grief, upon grief.

 

Paka
April 1, 2007 – March 1, 2024

 

I adopted Paka from the Thunder Bay District Humane Society the summer after moving back to Canada from Tanzania. Lily (8 years old at the time) did better with another cat around, and since Ambrose had died while I was overseas, Paka joined our household once Lily had had a chance to make it her own.

 

Paka was the little grey kitten in a cage full of grey kittens who wouldn’t let me put her back into the cage.

 

She is probably the smartest cat I’ve ever been owned by. She taught me how to play fetch with her pompoms, but she never fell for the red dot of the laser pointer as she figured out right away that it was coming from the thing in my hand. She could open closet doors from the inside or the outside. Treats are reserved for an after-claw-trimming reward - usually by the time I finished trimming Nuru's claws, Paka would be sitting by the treat cupboard and I would trim her claws right there. In the pandemic, she discovered the joy of Zoom calls and livestreaming - I swear that she could hear when I pressed "go live" or "join call" on my phone or computer, and people on the other end learned to recognize her tail sticking straight up in the air as she jumped up on my lap.

 

 

She wasn’t a lap cat for the first half of her life, but sometime around her 8^th birthday she figured out that laps were a good place to be, and then she would jump up on my lap as soon as I sat down. In the last year, she has moved further up my body, and her favourite place became tucked right under my chin.

 

 

My cats generally don’t eat people-food, but I occasionally snuck her bits of salmon which she enjoyed. Nuru also taught her, in the past couple of years, that yoghurt is a good thing. Her bizarre human food preferences were for unsweetened grapefruit and porridge. It’s going to be hard to make myself my usual Sunday morning porridge tomorrow without her by my chair begging to lick out the bowl.

 

Paka lived in more provinces than most Canadians. She was born in Thunder Bay (ON), moved with me to Kenora (ON) for 8 months when I relocated temporarily for work. She moved half-way across the country with me to Dartmouth (NS) when I went back to school in 2014. She moved all the way across the country with me to Chetwynd (BC) for my internship, and then she moved all the way back across the country with me when I accepted my call here in Nerepis (NB).

 

 

She had been failing over the past year and a half or so, and her vet and I were on the same page with respect to no invasive tests or interventions for my old-lady cat.

 

Right from when she was a kitten, Paka liked to sleep under the covers with me, curled up behind my knees. On the hottest nights of summer, she still needed to be on the bed with me, but fortunately not under the covers – just reaching out to make sure she was touching me with one paw. As she got more frail, she found it harder to move around under the covers, but she still wanted to be near me (and unfortunately gave me some bad scratches in the past few months, crawling over my head in the middle of the night, which usually resulted in her being banished from the bedroom for the remainder of the night). In the past couple of months, she would only try to get up on the bed once a week or so.

 

Last week, the night before I flew to Ontario for the week, was one of those nights. She crawled up on the bed in the middle of the night, and eventually settled down in front of the other pillow, and we had a good cuddle even though I had to get up early the next morning to catch my flight.

 

 

When I got home late Thursday night, she was clearly telling me that it was time, and so Friday morning I called the vet’s office. They had an appointment at 11:30 (with my favourite vet in the practice, no less), and the vet affirmed what I already knew. Shortly before noon, with assistance from the vet, Paka fell asleep in my arms, tucked into her favourite spot under my chin.

 

When I was making my sabbatical goals, I didn’t predict that so much of my time would be spent processing grief.

 

I went home from the vet’s on Friday, had lunch, and changed my clothes to go to Catria’s funeral (my next door neighbour who died a couple of weeks ago). I sat in the back row of the local Catholic church and let myself cry.

 

I cried for Catria. I cried for Paka. I cried for Alison (a friend and colleague who died on Ash Wednesday). I cried for all of the people whose funerals I have conducted in the past 5 ½ years (most of them people I cared very deeply for).

 

It was strange but good to be at a funeral with no responsibilities other than to grieve. It was good to have permission to let my sadness out. And there was so much comfort in the funeral liturgy, even though it was from a tradition not my own. The reassurance of resurrection. The call of “come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Fr. David spoke words that my heart needed to hear on Friday afternoon, even though I was a snotty mess through all of it.

 

Nuru knows that something isn’t right. She sometimes wanders through the house meowing, as if she is looking for Paka. But we are both going to be OK. (And when the time is right, there will likely be another feline joining our household.)

 

 

Grief, upon grief, upon grief. And yet there is a time for everything (one of the other readings from Friday afternoon), and so I know that this season won’t last forever. Lent will continue to unfold into Good Friday, and suffering will be replaced by resurrection. But for now, this season seems to be a season of moving through grief.