Have you ever loved a cat so hard it made you puke?
I was going to kick this blog off a little differently, but here I am.
(When your cat dies and you remake her out of beads.)
Philomena, Archduchess of Floof, called Mina by her intimates and familiars, departed this life at 3:30 pm on 11 February, 2025. She was euthanized at home after being diagnosed with advanced oral tumors.
Mina was approximately thirteen years old, a grey and white domestic longhair that my father once called "just about the prettiest cat ever was."
She came into my life ten years ago this month, on a February night when I was searching southwest Baltimore on foot for a house I'd never seen before. I turned a corner and saw, amidst heaps of dirty snow, a fluffy grey and white vision sitting on a stoop and watching me with polite curiosity.
I remember thinking that for such a small cat she was remarkably confident. She allowed me to get close enough to notice her tipped ear and yellow eyes and pink nose. She also had a tiny gold patch in the white fur over her mouth, but I didn't notice that until later.
That night, when I tried to pet her, she bounded off. But then I stood up and realized that the stoop she'd been sitting on belonged to the house I had been looking for. She'd led me to my new home.
I moved in a week later and about a month after that I saw my neighbor feeding the stray cats, including a fluffy grey and white one. I approached her the next night with an open can of tuna and scooped her up while she was still eating. I took her inside the house and up to my room and I shut the door.
From that night, until two weeks ago, we were never apart for very long.
Below are the (lightly edited) journal entries I wrote in the week following Mina's death.
12 February 2025
10:45 am
…I never felt that Mina was an animal—or rather, she gave me my first true understanding of what an animal is. She made me understand that I am an animal, the same as her, that the only meaningful difference between us was that I had more power over the world around us. Power to put her in my home and keep her there against her wishes.
When I met her, I began to feel that after years of being stranded on some ice floe, I had been gifted a small, soft bundle of warmth and life, like an auxiliary sun that burrowed down in my lonely bunker, where other light couldn't reach.
Mina was almost the only person I saw or spoke to or touched for several years. I didn't care for her as she deserved in the early years. I wasn't functional or financially stable enough to get her vaccines for years. Any creature as good as her deserves the utmost that human effort can do for their health, comfort, and enrichment. But I was not caring for myself. If I had been better to myself, I could have been better to her. But all I could do, all day every day for years, was read in bed while she purred next to me. I have never had such a loving cat. I have never been so grateful or so pathetically dependent on someone else's affection.
13 February 2025
12:34 pm
The death of my cat is the first time the death of a single individual has stopped me this way. I have lost people to whom I was intimately connected, but that's different from losing someone with whom you have no boundaries at all. Someone present for so many of your moments that their presence becomes a default condition of your universe, so you can't imagine yourself without them any more than you can imagine your home without windows.
She was a window for me. She was the only means by which light was admitted to my life, for so long.
10:45 pm
Already the grief is less sharp. And I hate that. While I was burning alive with the pain, it meant her loss was recent. So recent that it must be impermanent and negotiable.
But she left no hole anywhere except in my life. She was here in this room two days ago. I'm still getting fresh layers of her white fur on my new black sweatpants. But I had her food and medications packed up for donation before the vet even arrived. I washed her food dish that night for the last time. The physical signs of her existence are already fading.
I'm a survivor. I've survived things. I've learned how to process grief efficiently. That skill has kept me alive. I resent it now.
I am questioning myself on the deepest levels.
I believe that my only fixed identity is as the person who changes in response to what happens to her, but I don't want to change for this. I want to be the version of me that is broken by my grief for Mina, for the rest of my life. I want to linger at the at site of the hole she punched through my universe when she left. I want to stay there forever, or until she comes back through again. If she never comes back, I don't want the hole she left in my life to close over. I need for there to be evidence of her immense importance, of the catastrophic loss her death represents to the world. (To me. My world.)
If that hole closes, if my wounds heal, if I forget for a second that something is terribly empty and lonely and wrong with this room—then she'll be dead.
She will be dead, and I won't even have the decency to be broken by it. I'll just be diminished. Just a version of me with no cat. Brittany minus Mina. No one who meets me from now on will even know an amputation took place. When I forget this pain—and inevitably I will, monstrous survivor that I am—something will end. A reverberation will still. A wave will collapse. A final flicker will die out, rekindling occasionally until the end of my life.
The last pieces of her will be faint memories, so inadequate compared to the living softness and warmth of her, the audible texture of her purrs, the intelligent curiosity in her vocalizations, the electrical field of her presence.
I want to keep telling you what she was like, but here is the truth. If I described her to you for fifty pages, at the end of them you would smile and say, "what a nice cat", and then her memory for you would collapse into the memory of every other cat you've heard of who wasn't yours.
But if I explain to you what the loss of her has done to me—if I can sketch for you the dimensions of the exit wound, if I bring everything I have to bear on this task of conveying just how little of me was left in the shell of my body in the first few hours after she left the world. If I can make you understand how much the gravity of her pulled on me as she passed out of existence, if you can put aside all the propaganda that ever made you believe that a human life was worth more than the life of a cat in the cosmic balance—
If I could pull that off, as a writer, then maybe I could help you understand who she was. That she was a person, and I knit my soul to hers when I had no other living creature to love or to love me. My loneliness did not make her important. My loneliness allowed me to understand how important she was.
And now that I have written all this, I am already further away from Mina than I was before. Writing about my pain is a highly efficient way of processing it. Dulled pain means dulled memory. I don't want relief for this pain; but I do the things that will dull it, because I am in the habit of being alive.
If I can do more than process the pain. If I can drape an old sheet over its sharp invisible corners. If, in the process of writing the pain out of my body I can brand the paper with it. Maybe she still won't come back. But maybe I will stop feeling like I failed her so badly.
17 February 2025
12:15 pm
I can't roll around on the hot coals of grief forever. Right now, while I retain lingering impressions of the brutality of the early pain of Mina's death, I see how my life can't continue in that condition. Death holds still. The first ecstasy of grief slowed me to a stillness, but I won't be able to stop with Mina without dying with her. I wanted that, in certain moments. If Mina's death had come in 2017 or 2018 I would have been tempted. But my life isn't the endurance race it was until my late 30s. I have a lot to live for now. I would even say that, nowadays, I love to be alive. But the day after Mina died, I sat in an armchair and looked at the wall all day, except when the clock said it was time to work. It rained all day and I didn't turn a light on until dinner. Eventually I got in bed just to feel warm. The electric blanket created a pocket of warmth under my pillow that reminded me of how warm Mina was when I scooped her up sleeping and tucked her under my chin.
Over and over, I remember that when I put her in the ground she was still warm. She had been lying on my bed all day. I had spread her favorite soft green and white blanket over the electric blanket. When the vet left, I laid Mina in the middle of the blanket. I arranged her in a circle. I tried to close her eyes, but they wanted to stay half open, which made it harder to banish the fear that she was still alive. I put one of her soft toys under her head. I tore a rose off the bush outside and covered her in rose petals. I wrapped her in the blanket. Then I panicked and uncovered her face, because—I now realize—I was still trying to fix her, comfort her, care for her. That was what burying her meant to me.
I put her in her carrier and zipped it, like when I took her to the vet.
The day Mina died, Raleigh had the kind of weather that turns gardens into mud puddles. My friend had dug a grave for me, but rainwater filled it as soon as we removed the cover. I looked at the water in the hole and imagined lowering the warm soft bundle of paws and whiskers and rose petals into it. I started to scoop the water out with my hands, but one of my friends found a cup.
I lifted Mina out of her carrier and knelt in the mud for a moment, considering how to place her. The shape of the hole was irregular, deeper than it was wide, and the blanket I wrapped Mina in made her bulkier. I was worried that she was too bulky, that the dirt wouldn't cover her enough and her body would be dragged out by scavengers. When I placed her in the hole, I realized that I'd lost track of whether I'd placed her head down or tail down. I was still afraid that she might magically be breathing, even though I knew what death looked like and had seen the signs.
Suddenly, I understood that all my anxieties were being washed down the drain of her death. Whether or not I had fucked any of it up—the timing of the euthanasia, the choice of vet, the care I gave her before, the preparations since—none of it was mattered. Neither my love nor my mistakes could change anything now.
I never saw the earth being shoveled in over her. I placed her and stood up, walked a few feet away, then doubled over and sobbed as I had never done before when other people could see me. I was taken indoors and given water to drink and dry things to wear. After I regained coherency, I was taken to dinner. I've never been friendless but I have usually been far away from my friends, in one sense or another. I have usually tended my worst wounds in private. To be cared for in the moment was to discover that it was possible to be deeply wounded and feel deeply loved at the same time, for the same reason. A perpetual motion machine of suffering and joy. It kept the pain from becoming void.
Thirteen days now since Mina died.
Most days I don't cry at all. Sometimes hours and hours pass when I don't think of her.
Next to the sliding glass door where she liked to sit and plot squirrel murder sits one of her beds, which is really a thrifted doll's bed, complete with headboard. She used it less than any of her other beds, but a few days before she died she noticed that I'd piled some oranges and books on top of it. The pointed look she gave me was as clear as an edict. I cleared my things away. Mina took temporary possession, to prove a point, then went back to ignoring it until she died.
Back in Baltimore I have a tiny shrine atop a bookshelf that contains mementos of all my dead. There have been a lot, in recent years. On the silver tray of candles and glass bottles and raw gemstones, there is a bundle of Mina's whiskers that I've found lying around and saved over the years. I have a lot of her grey and white fur. For awhile I saved the fur from her brush with the idea of using it to stuff a tiny toy some day.
I don't have a shrine here. I perch lightly on my present, temporary living space. There is a disc into which the vet pressed an impression of Mina's paw. There is still cat hair everywhere, and on all of my clothes. There are faint stains on my white blanket and fuzzy white pillows, from Mina's drooling. I don't plan to wash them any time soon.
I cannot explain to you how dear she was. I also can't seem to stop explaining.
Hug your cats for me. Also: everyone you hold dear.
I understand the urge to explain, the feeling that if you stop explaining, something you can't name but is nevertheless precious will be lost.
Explain anyway.
As much as you need.
Unapologetically.
When my mother died, I did this, but was in too much pain to understand why. Over 20 years later,
even though I understand the *urge*, I'm still not entirely sure *why*, other than sense that it did help me get through it.
When my mother died, I was not on the internet beyond the most ridiculously basic way--I learned how to send an email only after her funeral--but it did open a world to me that I still haven't found the edges of and it gave me the opportunity to meet people who, though newly-met back them, are still friends today, 20+ years later.
And how it now gives me the opportunity to say to you that I understand this urge to explain, the raw need to communicate how uniquely and singulary important Mina was and still is to you.
You won't forget her, but I won't lie to you: you will remember her differently.
But know this: the difference will not mean you remember her less or love her less.
She will not be diminished. She will not be forgotten.
She will be a part of you in the way you carry home inside of you. In the way that when home is inside you, home is everywhere and anywhere you are.
And so will Mina.
So, remember: Let the pain take its course. Mina is the signal. The pain is just the noise. When the noise dies down, you'll pick up her signal again.
I understand the urge to explain, the feeling that if you stop explaining, something you can't name but is nevertheless precious will be lost.
Explain anyway.
As much as you need.
Unapologetically.
When my mother died, I did this, but was in too much pain to understand why. Over 20 years later,
even though I understand the *urge*, I'm still not entirely sure *why*, other than sense that it did help me get through it.
When my mother died, I was not on the internet beyond the most ridiculously basic way--I learned how to send an email only after her funeral--but it did open a world to me that I still haven't found the edges of and it gave me the opportunity to meet people who, though newly-met back them, are still friends today, 20+ years later.
And how it now gives me the opportunity to say to you that I understand this urge to explain, the raw need to communicate how uniquely and singulary important Mina was and still is to you.
You won't forget her, but I won't lie to you: you will remember her differently.
But know this: the difference will not mean you remember her less or love her less.
She will not be diminished. She will not be forgotten.
She will be a part of you in the way you carry home inside of you. In the way that when home is inside you, home is everywhere and anywhere you are.
And so will Mina.
So, remember: Let the pain take its course. Mina is the signal. The pain is just the noise. When the noise dies down, you'll pick up her signal again.
❤️