The Writing Time

“The Writing Time” — that time of day when normally, I would be ink-deep in the pages of a notebook — comes each morning and goes each morning. Like a coward, I run from it.

The Aged Cat’s blog, to which I resorted, in part, as a means of looking sideways, rather than straightways at what was coming for him, for us, now sits neglected. I sit down to it a few times a week. Then, like a coward, I run from it. I do dishes. I do laundry. I run errands. I go to the library, the bank, the market, the post office. When home again, I busy myself again — with mail, phone calls, cooking, TV. I don’t even like TV. Lately, I will do just about anything not to really think about The Aged Cat, not to “do the work” of grief and not to do the work of writing.

They say you cannot heal from grief until you do the work. To begin, you have to look at the loss and the pain it brings straight on. You have to accept it, process it, let it have it’s time with you, and tire of you, before it moves on and you move on. I tell myself that this concept is incompatible with the spirit of The Aged Cat.

I tell myself, it would be wrong to “wallow in grief.”

“Honor the things this companion taught you.”

I tell myself I am doing just that by “getting on with” things. I tell myself I am tending to the things that need tending to. But when all the busyness of the day is over, when I can no longer keep my eyes open, and I roll over to turn out the light, I hear The Aged Cat. I hear his last pitiful calls to me and my heart plummets with sorrow, with remorse. It isn’t finished.

But why isn’t it finished?! And why this voice?! Why not his normal voice?

The Aged Cat was not just an old cat. He was an old soul. You cannot bullshit an old soul. They see through your bullshit immediately, instinctively, effortlessly. They don’t have to tell you they see it. You know. If your eyes are open and your heart is open, you know. And it shames you. It shames you to know that an honest creature looks at you and sees that you aren’t being honest.

Still, even after death, my number 1 bullshit detector is calling me out on the carpet. He is dismayed. I am letting him down.  I am being a coward and I am not being honest about it.

It is time I began the work.  Let me begin by being honest.

I have been a coward. I have not honored my companion. There are things left untended. I cannot busy them away.