Love on four paws

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“We’re going to the hospital, okay honey? We need to go check on your baby sister. But either we or Grandma and Grandpa will be back for you later tonight. Okay?”

He looks up at me from his bed beside the hearth, his yellow-green eyes searching my face.

Cats don’t have eyebrows. They’re not supposed to have very expressive faces – at least, not ones we primates can interpret with any measure of ease. But even so, his expression in this moment is unmistakable – so unmistakable that it is seared into my memory.

Simmering apprehension, bordering on panic.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” I try to reassure him, and myself. “We’ll see you soon, G. We love you. Everything is going to be okay.”

Everything is not going to be okay.

His eyes bore into me, willing me to understand. He knows. He knows she is already gone. (Of course he does. He has spent the last nine months sprawled across my belly, pressed up against her through my skin, his feline super-hearing only centimeters from her heart. Of course he would be the first to notice.)

And so I know he knows. But he doesn’t know how to tell me. And I’m not ready to hear it.

I’ll never be ready to hear it. But I’m not given that choice.

Twenty-four hours later we are reunited, only on a different planet, one where everything is surreal and horrifying and wrong.

Dead baby land. One-way tickets only, and the whole family gets to come along for the ride! All for the low, low price of your firstborn child’s life!

We can’t bear to go home yet, to her empty nursery, to her clothes on a drying rack in the sunroom – the clothes I’m going to bury her in. So instead we go to my parents’ house.

Gio is there waiting for us, along with the rest of our shell-shocked loved ones. We walk in the back door, into a house brimming with heartbreak and tears. The family is gathered round the kitchen table, and they all jump up at the sight of us.

I can’t remember what any of them say. (What could they say?)

But I remember him.

I look past the table and see him padding gently into the room, coming to investigate the commotion no doubt (he’s always been a dog trapped inside a cat’s body). I watch as he registers the sound of my voice and looks up. He sees my face, and his figure goes rigid.

Pure disbelief. Like he’s seen a ghost. (I am a ghost, at this point.)

I sense immediately that, somewhere along the way, he has deduced that we – my husband and I – have died, too. That’s why the family is so devastated, he must have reasoned, and why we are not there. He does not expect to ever see us again.

And now, he can’t believe his eyes.

I call his name, and I can see the relief flood from the tips of his ears to the end of his tail, one impeccable tabby stripe at a time. He takes one tentative step towards me, and then another, and then suddenly he’s bounding to me, little paws flying across the kitchen tiles.

He leaps up onto the table, and he purrs and purrs, as fiercely as I’ve ever heard. He nudges my face with his kisses, and then my husband’s, and then mine again, alternating between us for the next ten minutes at least, as the rest of the nightmare world falls away.

I am a person who is lucky enough to have been smothered by love my entire life, from dozens and dozens and dozens of people.

And even so, I have never felt so loved.

The next year is a hellscape.

And he becomes my sentinel. He does not leave my side.

I spend countless hours in a heap on the nursery floor, or slumped in the rocking chair, heaving choking sobs as I clutch her weighted teddy bear against me in an ill-fated attempt to seal the chasm that has opened up in my chest. And he sits with me in my stifling pain, silently, faithfully, patiently. He makes himself comfortable on her changing pad beside the crib – the one he knew better than to even consider laying a toe on while she was alive, but immediately staked a claim to the very first day we were back in our home after her death – and settles in for as long as I need to mourn.

He shadows my every move, a loving headbutt always at the ready.

And when the despair threatens to overtake me, when I am staring down the long tail of grief and wondering how I am ever going to make it through another day, another hour – let alone the rest of my life – without fail, I am brought back to the present by a gentle whisker brushed against my cheek, a furry forehead pressed against my brow, a silky paw run down my shoulder.

And when a new baby makes a home inside me, a baby I worry I do not have the energy or courage to love as I did the last, Gio takes matters into his own hands. I fall asleep each night with him cradled in my arms, his face on my face, or his weight on my chest, his crown pressed against my chin, and I cannot help it: each time he nestles against me, I am besieged by love, and so, by extension, is his new sibling.

He proves to be the wonderful “big brother” that we knew he would be, and he is our faithful companion for the better part of the next decade, the center of all our worlds.

But then time catches up with him. His organs begin to fail. She has taught me, though, how to advocate. How to fight. I get him the very best care, and I am able to buy him years of quality time with my devotion. After all he has given us, it is the very least I can do.

And one day, long before any of us are ready, it is time to say goodbye. I know what needs to be done, and I make those excruciating calls without flinching; she has made me unbreakable.

And unlike with her, this time I know I have done everything I can do.

Our hearts break, but we have no regrets.

If there is any justice in this world, they are together now.

And I can only hope they both know how very, very much they are loved.

What new griefs did your child’s death prepare you for? What have they taught you? What do you know how to do now that you didn’t before?