The Grief Portal

We took a vacation. My first travel unjustified by work. There were hotels, and a budget.

The morning after our return we found our firstborn kitten killed near the road.

Papa cat had been the first to adopt us, shyly visiting for more than a year before he discovered how nice it felt to be caressed. Mama cat showed up one night and never left. We named her after how we first saw her, a ray of Moonlight in the garden. The summer of 2023 we had too much work. It destroyed us. In the midst of dreadful tension, one day we peered into a cave in the stone wall of the barn near where we were working. A tiny face looked back. A dirty face, like she’d been eating chocolate chip cookies. She saved us from that summer by loving us and calling out our love. When I was angry at Daniel she would stand on my feet.

We called her Baby for months, eventually giving in to the only name that made sense. Cookie was always good and careful, staying close. Always there, always with us. When we moved back into the house in the winter she was usually on her chair in the kitchen, but underfoot when I folded the laundry on the garden table and following us out to the field to shoot movies. Every time I picked her up she felt to me just as when she’d been a baby, round and heavy, sinking into my chest, happy there, rarely asking to be put down. Her fur was the softest, and she had a special sweet smell.

Just after Moonlight pushed Cookie away to get on with her life we found in the garden what we guessed to be her abandoned brother, anyway he looked just like Papa, grey-black-brown. Choco and Cookie grew up together with us in the summer in the barn, fell in love, played and snuggled. When Moonlight’s next litter came, I doubted I had enough love for four more, but they stole my heart. They lived at first in the half-walled bathroom in the barn. I would sit on the floor every night, covered with blankets, drinking wine and watching Big Bang Theory with the 4 babies sleeping in my lap, Cookie and Choco wandering in and out to check on us all.

Once he got used to them, Choco loved the four babies, snuggled and licked them, and taught Cookie to love them too. All six would sit on my lap when I worked at my desk. Cookie would often sneak in last when I didn’t notice.

When she was born in June I was allergic to cats. I fell in love with the first cat I ever saw, who was about my size. I remember trying to pick it up. Eventually I had stopped even touching cats, because the reactions took so much energy. When winter came we realized these babies weren’t wild. We couldn’t leave them outside when we moved back to the house. I decided for exposure therapy and by Spring I could press my face into their fur with no reaction. I loved Cookie too much not to lift that sweetest face to mine.

In the Spring we started to let everyone out to play. Sometimes we left without succeeding in getting them all back in the house. We would travel an exhausting cycle of anger at whoever had been at fault for not keeping track of one of them, followed a few hours later by chagrined relief that of course they were ok and whoever had been hysterical was overreacting.  Cookie was never missing. She always stayed close. We never worried about her, because we couldn’t imagine losing her.

How could I not have understand this possibility? How did I simultaneously fear and not consider it? We said “the cats must be free”. That’s easy to say until you have to deal with the consequences. Which, for us, turns out to be impossible. Losing her was beyond imagination. “It’s a cat.” People say. People who have children. That was our first baby.

One night Daniel let me take his tiny charge to my room, in a wooden box with a blanket on the floor next to my bed. I woke up all night to check on her, precious white glow in the dark.

No one understands our grief, which goes on ill-abated for months. The only thing that motivates us is taking care of the babies, avoiding speaking the numbers 8 or 6 because we do not want to have to correct them.

One day a few weeks before the vacation, we put a GPS on her and its records revealed she had made a big tour, several kilometers, and crossed the big road twice in the mid-afternoon. We were alarmed, but we did nothing. We went on with our vacation plans. I did consider going alone, since the vacation wasn’t really Daniel’s thing. I did consider confining the cats to the barn for the days we were away. But, overwhelmed by far less consequential tasks and demands, I did nothing. Helpless.

I have been learning the last years to be a vigilante about helplessness. But once again, my commitment is inadequate.

There I was every day, my heart cringing every time I let all the little darlings run out the door. Knowing how much I loved them and doing nothing to protect them. Looking back, it seems insane. I knew we were taking a risk. I had fears, images in my head, but I never went so far as to imagine how my heart would feel with that dead baby in my arms. How nothing was worth that risk, certainly not a vacation. Certainly none of the loot we brought home, no adventure or pleasure or discovery that we had experienced. All bitter and sour and stupid.

We believed they were wild and free. We did not believe in our own love, that we had taken them in so deeply. That they were more important than anything else. Now we know.

We locked the babies inside for three months, designing and constructing a €4000 90-meter cat fence. “It’s going to be ugly” says everyone. I ground on, grim beyond negotiation. They would not dare say that about anything related to child safety. While the fence is being researched, fabricated, and endlessly installed, we take the kittens out one at a time for supervised walks, wearing a GPS in case they run out of sight. I miss the cats following me around while I work. I miss all our little rituals, Cookie jumping everywhere excitedly when she heard the milk bottle as I made coffee in the barn apartment.

In the brutal calculus of our stupidity…. We would have had to lose someone.

The softest fur, the sweetest smell, somehow even two days dead as I kissed her paws.

Daniel and I threw ourselves onto the gravel driveway.  Howling “no no no no no”. Pounding until our fists bled. Daniel punched himself so hard he gave himself a black eye. I threw myself on him, trying impotently to restrain his strength. We passed her back and forth, holding her, thanking her, screaming.

I had been on my hands and knees cleaning the floor of the shower for the immanent arrival of a guest when I heard Daniel’s furious heartrending cry from the drive, piercing 3 thick walls. It was unmistakable, I ran to find him on his knees, our dead baby in his arms.

The guardian immediately tried to tell me that a lot of things die on farms. She offered to bury Cookie. “No. We will do that.” She kept saying that she has experienced a lot of death. Farm animals, children, now a husband who is dying. Yes, but I have not. Yours does not make it easier.

I am surrounded with my failures. Daniel is generally suspicious and anxious. During the months between my making the arrangements for our vacation and departing he said over and over “but what if one of the guests slams a door on a cat? What if we come back to a dead cat?” Over and over I said “We can’t live never trusting anyone. We have to be able to go away.” So of course I felt responsible for delivering on his premonition.

Daniel knows how to cry. He weeps and wails. I admire his strength to experience his feelings. I do not have the strength for my emotions. I go back to work.

I do not know how, but he very graciously found a way not to blame me.

He escaped in sleep. I escaped in robotic work. But the moment I stopped, or tried to sleep, I too was occupied by grief and guilt.

Ringing in my head without relief, Joan Didion’s words about the death of her daughter. “She was given to me and I couldn’t take care of her.”

I annihilated myself with iterations of culpability, but I could still stand and walk and work. Daniel could not. He was mad with grief.  He was closer to her than I was. I imagined that I would also have been mad and paralyzed if it had been Choco who had clung to me since we found him, or maladroit little Blacky who so obviously needed protection. I defended Daniel’s grief because I respected his capacity to feel. And I suspected that had I allowed my feelings to surface, I would not have been able to stand up.

Kneeling in the gravel, my face in her fur, I had to get back to work. I sent people to the farmers market to buy bread and milk. Guests would arrive from the airport any minute. Did the show have to go on? I don’t know. It did. Poorly. For 6 weeks Daniel sobbed and slept. I served incompetent meals and trembled with the effort to concentrate enough to coach the clients. They gave us the infinite kindness of not leaving reviews.

We mostly didn’t eat. I resented all the food we had brought from Italy. At the price of our baby. What madness. My stepfather had come from Italy with us. He held me quietly.

My best local friend, farmer Arnaud who lost 24 chickens to a vicious fox the other day says “living in the countryside, you will deal with death.” He lost his sister suddenly just after we lost Cookie. I didn’t try to say anything. I just put my hand on his heart.

Getting used to it, feeling better, feels wrong. I don’t want to get over it. No. Cookie is not here. It’s not possible. I don’t want a future without her. Daniel says “I can’t imagine any future.”

The overwhelming sensation is time. The very thing I didn’t have before. the thing we do not have more of with her. Suddenly in the place where I had been working as fast as I could all year, everything is in slow motion, because it doesn’t matter. I fucked up the only thing that counts –my family– by not having priorities, not having imagination, not taking responsibility. Two weeks ago I was very upset about something to do with a piece of furniture.

The habit of annoyance fades away with the impotence of anything about the one sole things that matters, our baby is gone.

She was always there quietly under foot.  Always somewhere napping. So often in the kitchen that we put her name on her chair.

Cookie’s venture down to the big road was not the only strange thing. After that we had found her one day nonresponsive. Unable to stand. We rushed her to the vet, paying the emergency fee for an immediate visit rather than waiting two hours for an appointment. One paw was swollen, so perhaps a wasp sting. Unlike lazy Cookie to hunt or adventure. They kept her overnight. Daniel called to check on her every few hours. Was it her third attempt?

We were the perfect family, two who look like Papa (Choco and Butterfly). Two who look like Mama (Cookie and Mousie). And then Blacky and Inky (white with black ink splotches). Three boys. Three girls. All so sweet with each other.

No one understands. Daniel and I do not try to speak to one another. We know that nothing helpful can be said and that any memory or thought we might share will only add to the pain of the other. For the first month, we can hardly communicate at all. Our emotions are so loud that they block our hearing. We scream at each other just to communicate simple things.Anyway, none of the important concepts in my mind can even be translated to French: helplessness, firstborn, take for granted.

Taking things for granted is some foundation of sanity. And yet in this cruel world, it is irrational.

I took a photo of Daniel in the garden in front of our big house with Cookie in his arms, smiling. Everything was perfect except it wasn’t. We were miserable with overwork. I was teetering on collapse. We were powerless, unable to prioritize, bereft of imagination. I was obsessed with renovation. We put the cats on the road every day in utter helplessness. We took for granted that we could survive losing them.

The only comfort for me is mysticism. Elizabeth Gilbert says it’s one of the three things she needs, along with boundaries and priorities.

My best friend Andrea gives this mysticism form: “Honor her. This is a moment of awe and reverence. I am sure she is still there. She needed to be bigger than that little kitty body to do what she needed to do.”

In our helplessness, someone was going to have to die on that road before we did anything. Cookie, thereby, factually, has protected her brothers and sisters, who will not have access to the roads anymore. She has protected her adopted brother Choco, and caretaker of the babies. She has protected her favorite little brother, Mousie. That she might have had agency or intention in this regard is the mystical comfort.

While we were away the guests said she was always in the kitchen with them, or pawing at the door to come in. Then, 24 hours before our return, she disappeared. “It was a bad day” reported the guardian. The guests were drunk, the French military was doing sonic jet exercises overhead, the neighbor farmer was running a lot of trucks up and down the road. I imagine Cookie being startled by a jet and running into the road. I also imagine this as her third attempt. She decided against the big road because we wouldn’t find her.

Cookie knew we could survive the pain.  But the others couldn’t survive the road. Holy protector.

I think that we even thought we were ready to lose the more athletic ones. When Butterfly was a baby I thought she would be wild and probably disappear. Mousie was always on the run, free. But Cookie was in the kitchen. Surely we weren’t ready. And we didn’t get to choose. Maybe Cookie chose?

I am in a death grip. As I gratefully caress and kiss the babies, I imagine each of them dead in my arms. We used to wonder at them in the hallway, trailing me from the barn to the house, “so many cats!” I loved them so much that running out of words I would just babble and sing nonsense at them. I would sing counting while feeding them 1 2 3 4 5 6. Now we avoid counting. It’s an unreality that mutes me. 6 seemed like a stupendous quantity of cats beneath our feet. 5 seems somehow paltry. My joy in them is muted.

Too guilty to kiss Daniel or let him touch me, I wondered “how can she protect our love now?” Poor Daniel. He fears he is losing me too. I didn’t know how I could ever receive his love again having delivered on his prophecy of a vacation guardian resulting in a dead cat. When I kiss Daniel I feel I can’t be present. Touching him links directly to having caused him all that pain.

The grief is a portal… Grieving our suffering in this beautiful place. Grieving that expensive vacation that we regret, resent, and never speak about. Grieving aspects of our relationship. Griefing our inability to appreciate this overwhelming wealth of house and land.

Maybe Cookie put all her love into us because she realized we were suffering. Long before she was born, Daniel decided we should indeed buy this too-big property because he had grown attached to the wild cat who would be her father. “What would happen to him if we left?” We didn’t ask what will happen to us if we stay?

Roberto and I go dancing for the weekend. One night has 100% nonunderstandable music. I sit shivering under the air conditioner for 3 hours, shopping for candlesticks on French Craigslist and getting drunk, which has its uses for perception. I realize that every person in this room has experienced this impossible shock. Everyone is dancing inside the reality of death and departure.

Am I distracted by my thoughts of her or is she thinking about me and being present with us? I wonder when people die if they try to come close and touch us, but we experience pain, so they stop coming? Maybe if I take those flashes of memory and sensation like sunshine on my face, she will keep coming?

In the night, I hear Daniel whisper “I love you Cookie.”

•   •   •

When Daniel started to recover, he looked through the brand new Tarot deck and chose 5 cards. He ordered and posed them on the mirror of the hallway desk.

I understood them immediately. They were a pathway.

First was Justice. The cold and arbitrary hand that took Cookie from us.

Second was Judgment, a drenching rain of guilt soaking all of us as we struggled to make sense of it.

Third was The World. I knew we must eventually reengage, although we fought it, not desiring pleasure, not able to imagine a future without our baby. “It’s a CAT.” People said. Fuck You. I was conscious as we started to try to taste, to live, to imagine. It was slow and halting. We were in and out. Most difficult was any affection between us.

The fourth card was The Lovers. I looked at it knowing we would have to find each other again, but having no sense of when or more importantly how that could happen. I could be comforted by one or two others but not by Daniel who I had destroyed with my careless lack of protection of the baby. His touch was like a rough hand on a raw wound.  The guilt was too much to see or breathe. “Most couples don’t survive the death of a child.” Patrick and Judy did. (I did not dare to ask them how,)

Daniel asked me not to speak about her.  I think we whispered to her, side-by-side, unable to touch in bed at night.

Then Roberto arrived for his first extended residence here with us. It was in fact the first time we’d lived together for more than a few days since 2015. It was a harvest of all we have invested in the last 10 years. We know each other, we know how to take care of each other,  we communicate with few words. We know when to be silent, when to defer to the other’s expertise, which themes require joint decisions. But most of all we trust each other. That trust, and the loyalty that undergirds it, was a warm bath on my aching, sharp everything. After so many hard years together, miscommunication, inept injuries, I never imagined that his presence could lift my spirits so. He reminded me who I am, he –our connection– levitated me above the grief into the landscape of my life again. There is no one else who could have put out their hand in the blindness of that moment and said “walk”, whose hand I would have gripped.

The Fifth card was the Magician. I knew everyone thought it was me, but all I can do is uselessly dig my fingernails into things.The former owner of our house arrived, now our business coach. He is an aggressive, dominant man who can produce a nonstop stream of analysis all day, supported by a couple of sandwiches. His review of our progress with the house was scathing. but full of hope, and clearly committed to our potentials. After he left we spent 3 days redefining roles and rearranging furniture –both psychic and physical– that had seemed bolted to its position. In less than a week, everyone found their purpose and power. Ultimately, he conjured us from our helplessness.

But every time I stop working I feel her fur on my face.