September has come. Ah me.
I begin a day early with A Whiter Shade of Pale: my beloved companion and husband used to say this was an important piece of music at the time; a wall of sound he said, a new idea for rock-and-rock at the time in a song that became widely popular:
Dear friends and readers,
The Everyly Wheatley home had taken down the video of Jim’s life they said would be up on their site “forever.” I went looking for it the other week and couldn’t find it again. I had not been able to find it for a couple of weeks. This time I determined to ask where it was. It took several days for a response. They put it back up and apologized.
As I watch it nowadays I shake with desolation. My beloved seems to me to have died many times. The whole month of September last year and part of October. Tomorrow is September 1st. April 28th he was diagnosed and I saw the photo of this very ugly set of three lumps I was told were at the bottom of his esophagus and were very bad looking. Then home to read on the Net that 40% of people thus diagnosed were dead within a year and to my horror I saw the the same confirming photo on the Net. “Oh it cannot be” I thought. Then Aug 3rd when we were told “liver mets,” Aug 4th I realized this was probably a death sentence, that Thursday that it was, sometime after that soon began to keen. September he stopped drinking milk, one of his few forms of nourishment for a previous 2 weeks. Then stopped eating just about altogether with drinking only water. A cracker, a biscuit, a cup of tea, barely. His urine began to go brown as October arrived. He lost consciousness on Oct 7th.
It’s apparent to me the original was taken down as the new video has a different set of background pictures. My theory is they take down all such videos within a few months on the expectation the family doesn’t care. For the few who do enough to complain, they reassemble and put it up again. I expect if I wait a couple of years I’ll find it down again and if I demand to see it up, they will reassemble again (probably taking more time). But when I die, then they’ll save whatever money they do by keeping the semi-permanent stock of videos to a minimum.
A propos, a friend sent me this poem the other day — her beloved cat of many years died recently — and I held it over for Sunday:
END OF DAYS
Marge Piercy
Almost always with cats, the end
comes creeping over the two of you –
she stops eating, his back legs
no longer support him, she leans
to your hand and purrs but cannot
rise – sometimes a whimper of pain
although they are stoic. They see
death clearly through hooded eyes.Then there is the long weepy
trip to the vets, the carrier no
longer necessary, the last time
in your lap. The injection is quick.
Simply they stop breathing
in your arms. You bring them
home to bury in the flower garden,
planting a bush over a deep grave.That is how I would like to cease,
held in a lover’s arms and quickly
fading to black like an old fashioned
movie embrace. I hate the white
silent scream of hospitals, the whine
of pain like air conditioning’s hum.
I want to click the off switch.And if I can no longer choose
I want someone who loves me
there, not a doctor with forty patients
and his morality to keep me sort
of, kind of alive or sort of undead.
Why are we more rational and kinder
to our pets than with ourselves or our
parents? Death is not the worst
thing; denying it can be.
Published in Rattle, Vol. # 14, Issue 2, 2008,
forthcoming in The Hunger Moon: Selected Poems, 1980 – 2010.
Another friend whose blog I read regularly recently lost her cat to death and has been writing about her grief (the story begins here) and a new kitten she bought
Vincent Van Gogh: “Field with Poppies” — Jim liked the poetry of Rupert Brooke and he paraphrased some lines from one of Brooke’s best known poems for his urn.
Miss Drake
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 