One Year Later

I expected the weekend would be mightily sad. I expected lots of tears and consolatory hugs. Maybe even a little bemoaning. Does that sound excessive? Knowing it would all be for a cat?

Well, maybe it is. Maybe that’s true. But I expected it nonetheless because that’s exactly what Rick and I were doing a year ago. Carter was magical. Carter was only 4. His death hit us hard.

Also, Carter was a centerfold.

Ok – Friday night we cried. We pretended to be Buddhists and we projected what sort of creature Carter might become in his next life. We debated whether human was a step up on the reincarnation chain, or if pampered housecat was penultimate (and I still think it is, Rick). I hoped that, if human is the next step, Carter wouldn’t be so unlucky to come back as a child neglected badly enough to be left in a locked car all day. During a Texas summer. It might sound like a strange thing to worry about, off the cuff like that. But it happened. Recently. (If you want to follow up on that terrible story, it's here.)

Rick is a nurse, and the picture we can create of that experience is vivid. It hurts me to the core to think that something like this happens at all. And I would be devastated if it ever happened to a soul I love so much.

So, yes. We worried and fretted and cried our eyes out. But then, on Saturday – on the exact anniversary – we were fine.

Actually, I spent a lot of time fussing over Lila, who also suffers from polycystic kidney disease (Carter and Lila share a father). I tried to read the tea leaves of her variously intoned meows. – Are her Dick Cheney-like mehs evidence of distress? Is she fussy today because she doesn't feel well? – I tried to check the size of her kidneys by feeling them up casually as I rubbed her belly (which she never lets me get away with).

I wonder how these anniversaries will go when they are both gone. When the era of Carter and Lila is over. I will overflow with missing them. That much, at least, I know.

This picture was taken by Carter and Lila's foster mom
when they were still too little for us to adopt.

During the preceding week, Rick and I talked a big game about cooking up some fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches (Elvis also died on August 16, and Carter shares with him a love of edible pleasures). I promised to bake a cake, and we would throw ourselves a little party to celebrate our memories of him.

But we didn’t do any of that.

Instead, we sat outside a lot and marveled at the perfect weather. The three of us lay in bed, snuggled, and watched movies. I knit something to completion for the first time in a year. It’s nice to have that back.

Hmm, I wonder if there’s any connection there. Any thread that ties losing Carter and will to knit together. Carter was, after all, a great lover of knitting.

It seems a bit ridiculous to me to pursue this theory with any earnest. Particularly since the connection has only just occurred to me right now. But another part of me sees a beautiful symmetry in this idea. And I want to claim it as if it is true. I want to say it enough times that it actually becomes the reason I haven’t knitted much this year.

I’m not sure yet if I’m worried about how silly that might sound.

See that smile? "Mmmm. Knitting," he purrs.

So anyway: this weekend that I was dreading turned out to be luxurious instead. Full of smiles and laughs and closeness.

Really, everything that it needed to be. And, if I may (though this threatens to tie up ends too neatly), everything that Carter would have wanted it to be.