/a lifetime.

I never know what to say about time, about the time. It has no fixed pace. I don’t know whether it’s a ‘long time’ or a ‘short time’. It does continue to pass. The first time I found myself forgetting how many weeks it had been was a shock. It really upset me.

I don’t always know anymore, but today I know. 26 weeks. Six months.

We’ve bookmarked the winter now. As it descended, you left and I stayed. I remember the panic tingling icy cold through my frame as I lay my hand on your stiff body the evening of the day you died. What do I do without your body? How do I stay if you’re going?

I’ll tell you how. For 26 weeks, I have built an altar for you at every place I’ve been. I’ve moved around too much and I’ve taken you with me. I took the bed I bought for you 10 days before you died so that you’d be comfortable in the car and filled it with a bag full of tourmaline pebbles for weight, lavender from your death rites, a felted, matted clump of your fur, your collar, and a little imprint of your beans baked into a stone of polymer clay. I carry it with me every time I move to another sleeping place. I have not yet slept without it, and when I sleep alone, it is with the shape of it curled into my body where yours used to be.

I come home to our last house (the last of 14, I made a list of every address and I visited every one of the Melbourne ones in order of appearance), the house where I live without you now, and this is where it hurts the most, and this is where I am the most comfortable. I carry around an envelope of photos I’ve printed of you, some of your greatest hits. We cast your paw in Clone-a-Willy because it was the only sculpting product available after 5pm on a Sunday and I have two of these to hold and I can have as many more of them as I want. Maybe that’s the Kevin merch. The original is made of plaster and the definition of your beans is fading and the bobby pin used to anchor it is sticking out, but it was the first one and it touched the thing that touched your body and I’ll have it until it’s dust.

I noticed a lot of this over the last 26 weeks; a sort of homeopathics of grief as each item associated with you saw its connection titrated. I kept topping up your last water bowl as if to imbue the new water with your magic. When I found your fur on something I put it onto me, wore it like a badge, because now there’s a finite amount of it out there. I didn’t want to wash the blanket you died in, I left your last poo in the litterbox and the paw prints in the litter undisturbed. These material things will erode over time. Your bones will degrade, your fur will feature less prominently in my laundry. They say so does the sharpness of the loss. We’ll see. Time does continue to pass.

I framed a print of your paws. I wear your collar around my forearm and the tinkling of the metal of the tag on its ring brings your sonic shadow into the room and everything warms for a moment. I go to a Zoom call once a month full of queer pet grievers. One time someone played a song on their accordion that they’d written for their dog: ‘Why can’t we live as long as each other?’ The chat goes off. Everyone shares their ‘greatest hits’ photos and the emojis are animated and you learn how many people choose Cat Power’s ‘Sea of Love’ as ‘their song’ with their animal friend. Our love is unique and unoriginal.

I borrow books from the library about grief. I listen to podcasts about grief. I go to shows about grief. I find all of the pet grief meditations on Insight Timer and place them on my annoy me/destroy me axis of grief supports. If I hear ‘people might say, “it’s just a pet”, but our pets are so special and your loss is real’ one more time I’ll…wait patiently for something else that dives beneath the surface of it all to cross my field.

What is there but grief? I am majoring in it and I love to learn. Sometimes I wear earrings that bear your likeness. I talk to you, but only in a small and pithy selection of words: I love you so much, I miss you so much my love, I wish you were still here. That’s all that will tumble out of my mouth, whispered to your bed (the bed of you?) at night, or in the morning when I wake missing you, which is always. I can’t feel you. People ask. They also ask if I’m thinking about getting another cat. I’m your widow. That’s simply unfathomable.

I play chicken with the grief sometimes. I know I’ll lose but it’s interesting to find out what’ll push me over this time, even if it’s me. It’s not that I don’t want to feel it; you just have to learn to titrate sometimes and I remember that I have the rest of my life to grieve yours ending. I always want to feel it but it’s actually not about what I want anyway, grief doesn’t care what you want. It’s one of the few authorities I respect.

I think about my own death and the death of everything I love which is everything natural, infinite, yes. I think about the death of that humpback calf stuck in the net in Coledale and every cat I’ve seen carried along a dry, occupied road through Gaza.

I couldn’t pull from the tarot deck where your last cards are from. I did it for the first time the other day, it was finally time, and I got an upside-down cat and a right-side-up owl. I think it might be our conversation. I watch most videos of you, but not the one when I removed your collar before the cremation people came to get you. That’d be too much.

I think a lot about how you might have died and which organ was first and about your experience of your body in those last weeks and whether I should have tried more things or whether I just heard your message and stood by to support your process at your pace. I think a lot about how much more time we spent apart than I wanted over the last few years. I think about the tick, and I’m sorry. Today I listened to Jessica Lanyadoo talk on her podcast about how animals find the dying process less distressing than humans do. They are able to take it more gracefully. You showed so little distress. You just allowed your body to wind down. I am so glad I was able to come to your pace on this, to get with the program. You’re the boss, boss.

I make mandalas out of your bones. I rub the long, smooth ones over my skin because your body is still exquisite, even in the reverse-sum of its parts. I keep my eye on these raw materials. If there was ever a fire I’d take you, and that’s still true; I’d take your bones and your fur and your claws, I’d take the framed paw prints and the paw stones and the paw casts. I want to learn to spin your fur into yarn and I want someone who cares that you existed to teach me. I’m trying to learn to knit so that I can stitch this into something I can wrap around me. So far I’ve cast on a row of stitches of the scarf I’ll incorporate you into. It’s in the round and I am afraid of doing something wrong so I haven’t progressed.

The other day I stopped at a rest area along the Hume and I watched a man sit in the sun on the grass with a free-ranging, unharnessed cat that stuck to his side as though he was the most interesting thing within 50 metres. No chasing birds or flies, no running into the taller grass; the busy-ness of cat consciousness overridden by the power of connection. I pointed my face forward and looked out of the corner of my eye because I didn’t want to give away my gaze. I think the guy was pretty aware of his good fortune.

I listen to your playlist. I made most of it, with a few choice selections from the automated overlords. I’m in the grief algorithm. It’s fed me death announcements for perfect strangers to whom I have no other relationship than the fact that than someone they know and I have both lost something we dearly loved. Songs and poems that have stung the skin on my face. Videos of cats with extraordinary relationships with their people. It’s an abundant time to be on the grief algo. It’s bloated as fuck because everyone is teaching themselves how to do it now because if you don’t the sickness will take you faster.

The time wears on, the time I always knew would come. This is the way of things and I can’t be mad, it’d send me bonkers. Cringe as it may be, ‘And So It Goes’ is on the playlist to remind me. And so it goes, and so it goes, and you’re the only one who knows.