You Just Don’t Understand

I was so lonely when I adopted my soft, fluffy, little black cat. I had never had a cat and that first night when I got in bed and began my nightly struggle with sleep, I felt a tiny movement, then a tiny weight on my chest. I put my arms around her, then let go quickly, not trusting the miracle of being wanted.

Such a few short years later, she became ill and began to suffer. I put my face in her face when she was on the vet’s table and said I love you I love you I love you because I didn’t want her to have a single moment when she was going down without any possible comfort my love and presence could give her.

I sobbed when I wrote that. I put my cat down almost five years ago. I have never gotten over it.

I have never before written the sentence, “I have never gotten over it,” but it’s true. I’m guessing others might say I took it too hard, I shouldn’t dwell on the past, and I should get on with my life.

You just don’t understand.

Let me try to explain.

When I was driving my mother to one of her radiation treatments about six months before she died, she looked out the window and said, “I was never really a very maternal mother.”

So that’s my mother. I was unable to have a child. I was divorced. And I adopted a cat.

I felt like I had a hole in my heart the shape of a cat-sized puzzle piece. And there she was.

Can you understand a bit better what that cat meant to me? And having to decide to end her life? When I discovered she was ill, I took her to the vet, was told of treatment options that would be miserable for her, found her not sleeping on my chest but watchful on a blanket in her own urine –  which she would have hated if she had been well – and that was it.

Some might argue I ended her life too early. My poor little cat, not getting to be her whole and true self? No.

I’m an alcoholic.

You just don’t understand.

Let me try to explain.

When I gave up alcohol, I killed my solace. Always, always I will live with the emptiness and desolation and finality of never again.

Regardless of why and how I became addicted to alcohol, whether I quit too early or not early enough, whether I’m to blame or not, what it did to me, my mind, my body, my brain, whatever terms or explanations one wants to use for the phenomenon of my unstopped drinking, when I gave up alcohol 28 months ago, I entered a state of perpetual grief.

Whether my mother was maternal or not, I loved her with my whole, however perforated, heart. I would do a deal with the devil just to see her again. I’m not greedy. I just want to see her. And my cat, my darling cat. I wouldn’t want her to see me because I think it would distress her to have glimpse and no more but, oh, to see her beautiful, perfect self again.

I have to do stuff all day, every day not to make a deal with the devil to drink again.

“Just stop,” alcoholics and addicts are told by loved ones, by neighbors, by bosses and co-workers, by society.

Maybe you understand a little bit better what that asks of me, of people like I am.

It’s lonely out here with my holely little heart and you not understanding.