A morbid post for a Sunday afternoon.
So, we had to decide what to do with Tazendra's furry little body.
Yeah, I'm throwing this out there so that I don't have to try to talk around it. If it bothers you, feel free to skip it or drop me, but protesting that my method of dealing with her is wrong is not likely to make me friendlier.
Cremation was high on the list, but I need something I can touch. Burial was right out since it would not only leave me with nothing to hold, but it would have to be at a spot where I could have unrestricted access to it 24/7 for the rest of my life, and that is hard to find (even if I would never NEED access at 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve, the idea that I COULDN'T would make me angry; I hate being told where I can and cannot go more than almost anything). It also bothers me, thinking about her out there like that; outside, when she was never an outside cat. Away from me, when she was never away from me. I've moved away from buried pets before. I don't like it. I feel guilty and sad, and the times I've dug to try to move them, I've never found anything.
So, I'm having her bones cleaned. Not articulated, just prepared as a group. We drove out to the Skulls Unlimited processing facility the Tuesday before last, had a brief look inside (so cool!) and saw the attached Museum of Osteology. (INCREDIBLE! More about it at some other time.) I left her there, in good hands, and while I will worry about her, it's oddly less worry than I would have letting the vet send her off to be cremated. I am quite sure I will recognize her skull, the feel of it. When the vet gave her back to me as a catsicle I was able to verify it was her by touch, through the bag, even though I DID look inside just enough to see her fur and smell her smell, so that I could be certain. It was terrible, but I had to know.
I'm aware that some people might find the idea of stripping her bones horrible. This isn't something I decided to do lightly; I have been thinking about it for several years now. I am familiar with the process and while it isn't what one would call pleasant, it is, in fact, cleaner and faster than decomposition; it's only more disturbing because it requires human involvement to perform or accelerate all the jobs that nature would otherwise do very slowly. That seems to us to be brutal and hard, because we are used to being able to turn away from these processes, to not look, to pretend that it's all over once the spirit goes, and that's where our obligation to think about what happens to our little buddies ends. But this way is far less prolonged and she will be attended by competent people. Five days to strip the bones of flesh, probably done by now, a few months to clean and whiten them.
I will have her back soon. Not as soon as I would like, not nearly, it already feels like a year has gone by since I left her there, but the work they do is the best I've yet seen, and good work takes time, it cannot be rushed, so I am willing to wait.
So, this is the way that makes me most comfortable. It leaves me with something to hold. I've gotten used to having skulls and bones around, they comfort me, and I'm sure she wouldn't mind staying with me in any form, especially if it made me feel less lonely.
People's reaction to my collection of skulls often encompasses an element of "Wow, morbid much?" Bones don't seem sad to me, though. They are what endures longest. They are strong and beautiful, evolved perfectly for their functions, but never too well. They survive to tell the stories of our lives long after everything else that made us us is gone. They are the essence of what we are, marked by our lives and livelihoods, a story written in breaks and spurs and calciferous deposits, in the rough Braille of muscle attachments and the smoothness of closed sutures. And, as each animal's physiology is the product of millions of years of evolution as well as its own life, the bones hold within them the essence of everything we were. Evolution's fingerprints. I cannot keep what made Tazendra purr, or the way she pranced toward the food bowl, or how she would look at me all cockeyed and adoring. But I can keep part of her. The part that sheltered or supported all the rest. A tiny part, but it's a framework from which I can hang memories, I suppose.
I may paint her skull, like I did this cat, who was no-one I knew. I may not. I'm going to make a box to put her in, but haven't settled on the right one, or even thought of what I would want painted on it. I really don't have any ideas. None whatsoever. That part of my brain seems . . . turned off. I fully trust it will come back with time.
At any rate, she won't be for display, just sitting out. I doubt people coming to my place would be disturbed by one more skull, but I want to put her in the closet, down in the corner where she most liked to lie, because that seems where she would most want to be second to right next to me on the bed. I'd love to work a bit of her bone into a cabochon I could wear all the time in a ring, but I'll have time to decide how and whether to do that.
I may post pictures, I may not. I may decide it's too personal a thing. I really don't know.
Sigh.
I am mostly okay, if not better. It still seems wrong and impossible that she is gone forever. She was a fixture, one of the things that made my life my life, something that defined me to myself. One of the three beings on Earth I love the most, and I still love her that much. That doesn't change just because she's gone. When I look at pictures of her, it's like looking at pictures of part of myself, which is not a feeling I get with the other cats, nor even the kittens, to whom I was so close. Yet I was always keenly aware of her her own little mind, her little spirit, distinct and real and very very alive. I saw her face more often than my own. I spoke to her more often than any other living thing except maybe Sargon. Missing all of that is a huge, incomprehensible void, too deep to even be painful. I can miss her acutely in the moment, but that's based in a momentary wanting her here. Thinking about "never again" . . . I can't wrap my head around it, I can't make it make sense, and so it's not painful so much as just bewildering and unthinkable.
We are all just animals, and the heart is just a muscle, and she was just a cat.
Yeah, I'm throwing this out there so that I don't have to try to talk around it. If it bothers you, feel free to skip it or drop me, but protesting that my method of dealing with her is wrong is not likely to make me friendlier.
Cremation was high on the list, but I need something I can touch. Burial was right out since it would not only leave me with nothing to hold, but it would have to be at a spot where I could have unrestricted access to it 24/7 for the rest of my life, and that is hard to find (even if I would never NEED access at 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve, the idea that I COULDN'T would make me angry; I hate being told where I can and cannot go more than almost anything). It also bothers me, thinking about her out there like that; outside, when she was never an outside cat. Away from me, when she was never away from me. I've moved away from buried pets before. I don't like it. I feel guilty and sad, and the times I've dug to try to move them, I've never found anything.
So, I'm having her bones cleaned. Not articulated, just prepared as a group. We drove out to the Skulls Unlimited processing facility the Tuesday before last, had a brief look inside (so cool!) and saw the attached Museum of Osteology. (INCREDIBLE! More about it at some other time.) I left her there, in good hands, and while I will worry about her, it's oddly less worry than I would have letting the vet send her off to be cremated. I am quite sure I will recognize her skull, the feel of it. When the vet gave her back to me as a catsicle I was able to verify it was her by touch, through the bag, even though I DID look inside just enough to see her fur and smell her smell, so that I could be certain. It was terrible, but I had to know.
I'm aware that some people might find the idea of stripping her bones horrible. This isn't something I decided to do lightly; I have been thinking about it for several years now. I am familiar with the process and while it isn't what one would call pleasant, it is, in fact, cleaner and faster than decomposition; it's only more disturbing because it requires human involvement to perform or accelerate all the jobs that nature would otherwise do very slowly. That seems to us to be brutal and hard, because we are used to being able to turn away from these processes, to not look, to pretend that it's all over once the spirit goes, and that's where our obligation to think about what happens to our little buddies ends. But this way is far less prolonged and she will be attended by competent people. Five days to strip the bones of flesh, probably done by now, a few months to clean and whiten them.
I will have her back soon. Not as soon as I would like, not nearly, it already feels like a year has gone by since I left her there, but the work they do is the best I've yet seen, and good work takes time, it cannot be rushed, so I am willing to wait.
So, this is the way that makes me most comfortable. It leaves me with something to hold. I've gotten used to having skulls and bones around, they comfort me, and I'm sure she wouldn't mind staying with me in any form, especially if it made me feel less lonely.
People's reaction to my collection of skulls often encompasses an element of "Wow, morbid much?" Bones don't seem sad to me, though. They are what endures longest. They are strong and beautiful, evolved perfectly for their functions, but never too well. They survive to tell the stories of our lives long after everything else that made us us is gone. They are the essence of what we are, marked by our lives and livelihoods, a story written in breaks and spurs and calciferous deposits, in the rough Braille of muscle attachments and the smoothness of closed sutures. And, as each animal's physiology is the product of millions of years of evolution as well as its own life, the bones hold within them the essence of everything we were. Evolution's fingerprints. I cannot keep what made Tazendra purr, or the way she pranced toward the food bowl, or how she would look at me all cockeyed and adoring. But I can keep part of her. The part that sheltered or supported all the rest. A tiny part, but it's a framework from which I can hang memories, I suppose.
I may paint her skull, like I did this cat, who was no-one I knew. I may not. I'm going to make a box to put her in, but haven't settled on the right one, or even thought of what I would want painted on it. I really don't have any ideas. None whatsoever. That part of my brain seems . . . turned off. I fully trust it will come back with time.
At any rate, she won't be for display, just sitting out. I doubt people coming to my place would be disturbed by one more skull, but I want to put her in the closet, down in the corner where she most liked to lie, because that seems where she would most want to be second to right next to me on the bed. I'd love to work a bit of her bone into a cabochon I could wear all the time in a ring, but I'll have time to decide how and whether to do that.
I may post pictures, I may not. I may decide it's too personal a thing. I really don't know.
Sigh.
I am mostly okay, if not better. It still seems wrong and impossible that she is gone forever. She was a fixture, one of the things that made my life my life, something that defined me to myself. One of the three beings on Earth I love the most, and I still love her that much. That doesn't change just because she's gone. When I look at pictures of her, it's like looking at pictures of part of myself, which is not a feeling I get with the other cats, nor even the kittens, to whom I was so close. Yet I was always keenly aware of her her own little mind, her little spirit, distinct and real and very very alive. I saw her face more often than my own. I spoke to her more often than any other living thing except maybe Sargon. Missing all of that is a huge, incomprehensible void, too deep to even be painful. I can miss her acutely in the moment, but that's based in a momentary wanting her here. Thinking about "never again" . . . I can't wrap my head around it, I can't make it make sense, and so it's not painful so much as just bewildering and unthinkable.
We are all just animals, and the heart is just a muscle, and she was just a cat.