#9: Losses large and small

Actual Updates

Alright so listen. I’m not feeling great. I’m sad for a good reason and sad for a stupid and unavoidable and universal reason, and I’m going to tell you about them, and if you don’t want to be bummed out you should just scooty scoot on down to the links where it’s business as usual.

My sweet little scruffy cat Nona has died. That’s the long and the short of it. Well, that’s the short of it. May I tell you about her? She was question mark years old, somewhere between 12 and 15 probably, because when we adopted her, the shelter didn’t know when she was born since she came from a hoarder house. And then at a routine checkup a few years ago, the doctor found a suspicious lump, and on the day after we brought Hap home from the hospital (so, you know, a really stable time emotionally), we got the call that she had cancer. The photo above is from early on in the cancer days, which is why her neck fur is half short, from having it be shaved to allow some scan to take place.

She responded amazingly well to treatment and the tumor shrank like crazy, and they told us she had probably 1 year if everything went well. Hap is about to turn 3. So she eked out 2 extra years, and I’m so glad for it even though once she felt like herself again she loved nothing more than getting underfoot and yelling up the stairs at nothing or possibly at some kind of cat-specific ghost that we have. And then things went sharply downhill over the course of a day, and the decision had to be made, so I made it.

I went in with her alone. There was… a surprising amount of waiting, alone, in a little room, first with her and then without her as they set her up with a line to, you know, deliver the drugs, and finally they brought her back in. The one thing I can tell you about doing something like this during a time like this is that a mask does a great job of soaking up tears and concealing a nose that you can’t wipe because you can’t take off your mask to wipe it.

I didn’t get to be with the cats I grew up with when they reached the end; they both lived to a ripe old age (19 and 16!), but that meant that I had grown up and moved away by that time, so I wasn’t there. This was … I’ve just realized that this was the first time I’ve watched someone die in person. There’s a story there, but it’s for later.

The other day, her ashes arrived in a little box. I don’t want to keep it sitting on the mantelpiece, but we haven’t had time to bury her yet. It also came with a little plaster cast of her pawprint, which I was not expecting and which took me a little while to recover from.

I’ll be okay; I’m okay most of the time. But I keep thinking I see her sleeping on the rug by the front door, out of the corner of my eye; I keep thinking I hear her. Hap kind of gets it. He knows she isn’t coming back, and that she was very old and sick, and that I’m sad about it, but I don’t think he knows that this all adds up to she is dead (or what “dead” means). Our other cat, Marty, seems like he’s coping. He was extra snuggly for the first few days and now he’s just getting used to only having one cat’s serving of food to eat and not his plus whatever Nona didn’t finish. So. Anyway. I miss her. It’s lousy.

As if that wasn’t enough, we watched a movie about CBGB’s - it’s called CBGB - and it featured all these iconic bands and artists playing to (at first) a dozen people and then a packed room, and okay, this is definitely going to sound much more full of myself than I meant it, but it just made me miss singing in a band so much. I miss being able to really let it rip in terms of volume, I miss having a band with me so that things sound right and so that the song doesn’t need me, I miss working together with them as a team so that we can all make the song good in a way that works for us, I miss practicing, I even miss playing shows even though they are nervewracking and I always mess them up disastrously. So this issue is the issue about what I miss, I guess.

Some links

Not a super heavy link month today. I don’t know if I’ll ever top my “two longreads on crimes of yore” issue, really. But anyway, here you go:

This is fascinating. I’ve been on a space kick lately - space and space-adjacent books (5 in a month, whoops), and planet and star facts in my Slack statuses at work every day, and this just blows my mind. Researchers Propose a Supernova Triggered the Late Devonian Extinction

First things first, if you’re on Twitter, you should be following the Museum of English Rural Life (@theMERL) because their Twitter presence is hilarious, and also sometimes they start trends like asking all the other museums on Twitter to share their best… duck pics. Anyway. This is a post from their website, where they’re featuring an exhibit about the Women’s Land Army in WWII, and this is specifically about a young Black woman who tried to join up and was turned away: Breaking the Colour Bar

It sounds like I should be watching Murder She Wrote. Being Jessica Fletcher: How binging Murder, She Wrote in quarantine is helping me be a better person

How did I not know Italy had a queen who reigned for just over a month during WWII and then lived until 2001? Call myself a history major. Unbelievable. Anyway, this lady seems basically awesome. The extraordinary life of the beautiful, and radical, last Queen of Italy

FETCH MY GUILLOTINE: “All These Rich People Can’t Stop Themselves”: The Luxe Quarantine Lives of Silicon Valley’s Elite

First of all, what? And second of all, the “why” is also fascinating. Yes, This Interchange in Houston Is the Same Size as an Entire City Center in Italy

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

I heard this song when I reviewed their EP back in my music-blog-contributing days, and the chorus sometimes still gets stuck in my head. Do I get to call them “the pride of Hamilton, Ontario” even if I don’t know if they actually are? I assume they are. Honestly, Hamilton, you could do a lot worse than being super proud of these guys.

Another chorus that gets stuck in my head. Heard this earlier this month and have been murmuring “who will you wait up for?” ever since, basically. Also, I don’t know why but I decided the first time I heard this song that the Veda in question is Veda Hille. Hmm… it’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Veda Hille, too.

Bully just put a new album out, but this is the classic. Try not to identify with that whole first verse, you can’t! Also, this video has skee-ball in it, a thing that I think I am good at until I actually play it (see also: volleyball, although years of experience have reminded me of this before I embarrass myself and lose a game for the whole team).

This month’s top 5: Nona facts

1. She lived in a hoarder house with 30 other cats before the city stepped in and sent the cats to shelters; then we adopted her.

2. She was truly the most upside-downiest cat I’ve ever met. Always wanted to lie on her back with her tummy out.

3. When we first got her, we put the litterbox in the basement, but she refused to go down there. So we moved it to a bathroom closet. When we adopted Marty, he was too big to fit into the litterbox under the bottom shelf of the closet, so we tried again with the basement, and suddenly that was fine by Nona.

4. She had a wonky eye and maybe half of her teeth, and her fur - the softest I’ve ever felt - was prone to knots. I told her she was pretty all the time.

5. She was basically concierged to us - my dear friend (who does not subscribe to this newsletter but might be reading this and if you are, why not just subscribe, huh???) worked at the shelter where she was, and he asked us a bunch of questions about our ideal cat. Our only real requirement was that she not be fazed by loud music, and indeed she was not. We were playing Crass in the car when we went to get her and I was singing along “do they owe us a kitty? COURSE THEY DO OF COURSE THEY DO”

6. BONUS NONA FACT: She is named after Nona F. Mecklenburg, the character on Pete & Pete, played by Michelle Trachtenberg. She always had a cast on and her dad was played by Iggy Pop… she called him “Pop.”

Hug your pets; sing at the top of your lungs if you can (by which I mean if it’s feasible, not “if you’re good at singing,” which is a baloney metric anyway); remember that “things I miss” include you and your beautiful faces even if I have seen them over the internet within recent memory.