Published

Welp, there goes nothing. It's up and nothing left to do but the crying.

https://claudbalog.medium.com/princess-and-the-ghosts-eab6b9877ba7

Princess and the Ghosts 

When Losing Your Pet Opens up the Floodgates of Grief 

 

“Do you want us to bring her home?” 

My daughter responded with giant eyes and a vigorous head nod.  

Our little family of three was sitting in the guest room of our friends’ rowhouse, the cat looking at the child warily. My daughter was five. The previous year she had begged for a baby sister, she’d even created an imaginary one for a Pre-k “My Family” assignment. The toddler was curiously named Kathleen, and the Pre-k teacher was shocked when I explained at our parent-teacher conference that she didn’t exist. Maybe this cat was what my daughter needed. 

Princess was two-years old, taken in off the alley by our friends who also homed some boy cats. The boys were jerks, they bullied her and ate her food. During our first introduction to Princess one of them shoved his paw under the door trying to get in, an attempt to interrupt our quiet moment. A fitting illustration of the kind of nonsense this girl had been forced to deal with. 

She was very sweet and very calm. A great fit for a household with children. Maybe she would be happier living with our small family as a solo cat? I was a New Yorker raised in tiny apartments and never had a pet; I didn’t have the first clue on how to care for her. But my husband had grown up with a cat, he could lead this adventure and deemed Princess a good fit. 

Lurking unspoken in the background of this decision: I had just lost my fifth consecutive pregnancy in two years. I no longer believed I could successfully bring another living human into the world. The last baby survived into the second trimester, losing her was more devastating than any of the previous lightening-strike blows of my earlier miscarriages. She should have lived. I gave her a name. 

Small wonder then that my daughter’s pleas for a sibling felt stabbing. I had been warned by friends that all kids might go through a stage where they loudly proclaim the wish for another baby, but this no longer felt like a run of the mill childhood request. “Mommy, I hate being so alone.” 

Oh, my love, what you don’t know. Or do you? Amid my grief, my daughter’s cries for a sibling took on creepy, metaphysical characteristics. Did she know? Could she tell something was awry based on my mood swings, this never-ending rise and fall of hormones? At my most desperate moment I sought out a medium, a bridge to the spirit world. I began to believe that there was a person(?), a soul(?), who was supposed to join us in our home and they (No, she — I believed it was She) couldn’t find her way.  

Perhaps the pretty Tabby with the big yellow eyes and thick striped coat belonged in our home. Perhaps she could have the peace she deserved. Could her love fill the empty spaces for my five-year old? 

A few days later our friends brought Princess over. My daughter and I sat with her in the kitchen by the back door, acclimating her to the house in one enclosed room, stroking her fur, gently cooing. That night we learned how much she loved to be scratched on the softest fur by her ears, and on her cheeks. We learned to avoid her belly.  

The first evening in an unfamiliar home. 

Over the next two weeks we opened the rooms of our house for her to explore. Meanwhile, each day brought a new purchase that solidified her status as a member of our family. A bulk buy of her favorite dry food. A cat tree. A scratching post. A new and improved feather stick. 

Tucked away in my mind, one important piece of health information: Princess was spayed, but not before she went into heat. She has an increased risk of breast cancer as a result. 

Then the unexpected happened: I became Princess’ designated human. She tolerated the louder, skittish smaller person for whom this whole experiment was designed. She accepted the snuggles of my tall husband who would gather her into his arms. But I was the one she chose to curl into every night. So I dutifully read articles on caring for her. I studied her tail movements, I tried to mimic her blinks (weren’t they smiles?), I threw myself into believing I could learn all the things that made her tick. I became a cat mom.  

My own mom, never a pet person - but always a proud grandmother - would send me texts with pictures of cats that looked like Princess on bags of cat food. What a super-model she was. My mom mailed me a stunning framed shot she took of Princess — the kind of picture that looks like it came with the frame. I placed it on my office desk next to pictures of my daughter. 

 

A few months later, my inevitable. I was pregnant again.  

All apologies to my husband, but from here on in Princess was always the first to know. She had superpowers when it came to my fertility. Whenever I wasn’t pregnant, she slept at my feet. When I was, she curled into a ball by my abdomen.  

And then the day would arrive when I would come home from another terrible visit to the doctor. Another heartbeat undetected. Another threatened miscarriage. Another likely D&C. Another series of sharp and fast breakdowns in the shower. That late morning had begun with an invasive ultrasound wand capturing the deadly silence in my uterus. I took the rest of the day off from work, drove home and crawled into bed while my daughter was still in school. Only this time, Princess met me at the door. She waited as I kicked my shoes off, followed me up the stairs, jumped on the bed with me and curled up into the crook of my arm.  

Oh. So, this is what pet owners were talking about all my life, what unconditional love looked like. This is what everyone meant when they casually tossed the word therapy around. Princess was my companion. Surely, I wasn’t a living breathing graveyard, if this primal creature led by instinct deemed me worthy of her attention. 

On the day I returned home from my fourth D&C, gutted and raw, the house was not empty. My husband was at work, and my daughter was at school, and one of my only friends who knew I was pregnant had driven me home from the hospital. But as soon as I put the key into the lock on the door, Princess appeared.  

More time passed and everyone settled into the composition of our family: Mommy, Daddy, Daughter and Princess. The household new normal may have included a cat, but I was doomed to be perpetually tilted off my axis. I had officially given up trying to conceive. I was in therapy and working to move on. And still, I would get pregnant without even trying. When the dust settled after my 8th consecutive loss, someone was still missing. Princess was my comfort, and yes, my baby. But the spirit was unsettled. My super-fertility was a sick cosmic joke. I lived each day casually haunted by ghosts.  

Two years after Princess joined our family, with the help of my parents and a home equity loan, we made a drastic change. A new team of Reproductive Endocrinologists was assembled. This time everything would be different. This time a pregnancy would involve lab technicians, medications and an endless daily array of needles piercing through my skin.  

The next pregnancy -my ninth since the birth of my one light- was different. Week after week, Princess watched from the floor as my husband delivered injections and ice packs to my backside. Afterwards, she jumped on the bed to curl up at my slowly growing belly.  

My pregnancy calendars hadn’t been marked by adorable size comparisons to fruits in years. This one was a clinical series of goalposts. Blood labs for rising HCG. Ultrasounds for proper implantation, then later heartbeats. Early graduation from my RE to a Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist. Genetic Screen. More weeks passed; a sharps cup filled to the brim with used needles that delivered progesterone. An18-week anatomy scan that I finagled from 20 weeks, so we could hopefully share good news with our daughter during a family vacation. At 20 weeks, my bump now visible, I shared with my boss that I might be planning for a maternity leave. There was work-travel at 22 weeks where I realized how preposterous it was to try to hide her existence with giant scarves. Then a fetal echocardiogram. 

Princess curled by my belly, every single night. 

When we made it to my third trimester, I began to breathe a little. Viability. A picture with my daughter in dance clothes — featuring my now large round stomach in a ballet leotard —  was my official social media announcement to the world at 32 weeks. At 34 weeks we finally decided it was safe to assemble a nursery. Only during the last six weeks of my pregnancy did I truly believe that she would come home. 

Three years after Princess’ arrival we brought our newest daughter home from the hospital. Maternity leave was a joy, despite being an endless blur of nursing on demand. Our newborn was often found curled on the pillow on my lap, with Prin at my side. She always managed to nudge her way onto the pillow with her.  

 

The PTSD of recurrent loss would still creep up on me in the quiet moments — regularly around the 2am feed — but over time it dissipated. I was so terrified those first few months. I constantly checked to make sure my daughter was breathing while she was sleeping, but eventually my responses to grief evolved. Any lingering metaphysical inquiries into the spirit world were put on pause by the day-to-day reality of mothering a precocious tween and a tiny ball of pure energy, nine years apart in age. 

Over time Princess also had to adjust to her new normal. This baby was … a lot. She shrieked she cried she chased she grabbed, she needed constant reinforcement of the word gentle. Princess often took to hiding during the day, a completely rational survival instinct, and would re-emerge only after I put my daughter down, curling up on my lap to watch TV or by my side in bed.  

After the first year into this new life, with a little bit of guilt, I put a gate up in my bedroom doorway. Princess’ 4am wakeups for attention were ratcheting my exhaustion to new heights. So, when in March of 2020 our entire family started working from home all day, I like to imagine that Princess was having the time of her life. She had many hours of the day by my side, and for a full year she made regular appearances on zoom meetings. Like my embarrassed older daughter, she had to put up with me scooping her into my arms to show her off in front of a camera.  

And despite being immersed in the nonstop daily news of loss and death, my personal ghosts remained at bay. 

At her nine-year annual visit to the vet this past March, Princess was given a clean bill of health, with some standard warnings about her blood pressure and entry into middle age. But one day, less than two months later, she started only nibbling at her food. When she stopped eating entirely my husband took her to the vet. They called us two hours later with the terrible news. 

A mass had developed near her mammary glands, and lesions had spread to her lungs. This cancer was aggressive, and she would live at most another 1–2 months. We could try to give her painkillers and appetite stimulants but losing her too soon would be inevitable. She wouldn’t grow old by our sides. Our oldest child would no longer have her beloved cat see her off to high school. Our youngest child would likely have little memory of her at all.  

I needed more time. “Please bring her home, I’m not ready to say goodbye,” I cried to my husband. We chose to medicate her and closely watch her behavior for signs of pain. Princess returned slightly sedated and on her new painkillers. The appetite stimulant helped her eat a little dinner and she appeared to rest comfortably for the remainder of the day in our attic office. That night, after we put the toddler to bed, we sat down with our 12-year-old to cry and create an end-of-life plan for our beloved girl. 

Princess’ final days were brutal. At first, she seemed to rally a little, but with each passing day we realized that she was painfully dying. I sat with her every day, watching her little abdomen heave, her resting breathing rate that I learned how to take was now a pant. Her little body was working so hard to function that her distress was visible to the naked eye. Her original owners came to visit her, did she know they were saying goodbye? Just a few days after coming home from the vet she took to hiding in the basement, her instincts to protect herself from predators kicking in. She knew she would not survive. We brought her food and water, but she would only stare at it. Her spine became pronounced. 

Exactly six days after we learned that cancer was ravaging her body, we gathered her into her carrier to take her on a final trip to the vet. Our eldest daughter, the motivation for our bringing a cat into our home, came with us. The three of us snuggled with her in a tiny, sunny room, each of us telling Princess how much we loved her as tears fell down our faces. How we understood that she wanted to go. How it was okay for her to go. We watched together as she fell into a final deep painless sleep. For a moment in time during the car ride home we were once again a family of three. 

That night — for the first time in years — the ghosts returned. My protector was gone. I curled into a weighted blanket on my bed desperate for warmth, feeling the acute pain of losses that I somehow hadn’t felt in years. 

Princess is buried in our yard. Slowly, the remnants of her life in our house are disappearing, the tangible evidence of her happiness(?) fading away. “Kitty is sick and gone?” was the closest my toddler could get to comprehending her death. The water fountain and litterbox have been washed; they’re out drying on the back deck. One by one her catnip toys are being tossed into the trash as they’re discovered throughout the house. But I have yet to do a deep clean, we haven’t yet washed the furniture and blankets of her fur and dander. Have I mentioned that I was allergic to her? Every night despite her being gone, my back has continued to burst into hives. I sit here typing this ode and the marks of her life are still impressed upon me, raised welts on my skin. 

Oh, my sweet girl. You’ve joined the ghosts but you’re different. I knew you. I held you countless times in my arms, warm and breathing. This isn’t haunting, is it?