I stumbled across a video today that stunned me—an echo in time. As I watched my recently passed, beloved 19-year-old cat, Aubry, and listened to the background soundtrack of an ordinary day in my life from 2015, a message began to come through that I recognized was from him.
A recent traumatic experience that landed me in the hospital, fearing for my life and questioning my survival, left me facing yet a deeper layer of grief and powerlessness than I have ever felt.
This came on the heels of Aubry passing on my mother’s birthday, a day I had felt certain my newest grandchild would be born. I had known he was in hospice, preparing for his transition by placing battery-operated tealights around the family heirloom Victorian tea cart where he spent his days, snuggled beside Pinky in the sunshine.
The morning of his passing, I knew it was swiftly approaching and reveled in being by his side. Later that day, I had a medical emergency that took me to the hospital for evaluation, though it wouldn’t be until the following week that I was admitted.
While we were away, Aubry had tried to climb up onto our bed, on my side, but his claws got caught in the bedspread. With no one there to hear his distress cries or assist him, his worn old body gave out in the struggle. Gratefully, it was my husband who discovered this, so I didn’t have to see it, but the devastation was swift and heavy.
He was climbing to his final rest right there in the place where my body has lain in dorsal vagal paralysis for years, where his presence had sustained me with exquisite, loving devotion. In the month prior to this, he had taken to making “kitty biscuits” on my chest multiple times daily, with such fervor that I relinquished the discomfort, trusting there was purpose in it. It was, after all, directly over my heart.
I referred to it as bosom-buddy time.
Aubry was everybody’s favorite cat. The manner of his exit felt like another cruel blow.
I was angry and devastated that, for the first time in my life, I had completely trusted my intuition, boldly sharing my prediction regarding my daughter giving birth on my mother’s birthday, despite the ever-present lack of support for my psychic-intuitive abilities from family members who have consistently invalidated them and continue to diminish me as “crazy” as if I can’t feel it as physical discomfort to my bones.
This unfortunate set of circumstances, combined with a dangerous medication protocol from a new psychiatrist who was attempting to help me wean off another prescription to which I had proven to have an adverse reaction, created the perfect storm that led to my four-day hospital admission.
Trying to stabilize after this life-threatening medical emergency has felt like entering another secret portal to a hell I have struggled to make peace with. It has been the Tower moment that was foretold in the months leading up to it. Still, nothing could have prepared me for what it feels like to be forsaken by the people I love the most during a fragile, rock-bottom time in my life as I welcome my sixth decade.
It feels, figuratively, as if I am suddenly blind: a world cold, dark, and unfamiliar; a door permanently closed on a version of my life that I am just now beginning to understand I could not go on living.
The message that Aubry sent me through this video was crystal clear. It came after days of asking Spirit, for a sign, to help move me back into my natural state of loving gratitude and joy.
His message was this:
Why are you allowing every moment of your life to be defined by your level of grief over the uncontrollable circumstances of things past, when there has been immeasurable joy and light that has sustained you through it all?
Here is proof of the beauty and love that you were able to create and be surrounded by, even in the midst of overwhelming trauma at Squalor Holler, that we, your beloved furry earth-angels bore witness and gave wings to.
This builds on what I have been wrestling with over the last week: Why, with my truest, most humble heart overflowing with the highest form of Christ-like love, grace, and mercy, does darkness seem to keep pummeling me in waves that I can’t seem to catch my breath from?
Slowly, through my new daily trials, I began gaining clarity regarding what I have control over and how I must proceed in a way that catapults me away from daily fear and from reducing myself to accommodate the frailties and dysfunction of others—as if I am the painful misery they project and try to belittle me with.
I am beginning to understand that reclaiming my life means no longer abandoning myself to preserve the comfort of others.
I feel this is what Aubry was reminding me of: that grief and gratitude, joy and pain, are not mutually exclusive.
I can’t change what has been lost any more than I can force what is yet to come. But I can choose where I focus my attention, what I nurture within myself, and whether I enable the darkness to eclipse the light that has always existed alongside it.
Maybe the way forward is not to stop grieving, but to remember that I carry the depth of my grief because of a tremendous amount of love from which it’s shadow was cast. And to let that love, rather than the pain of its absence, have a say in what comes next.
