One night in mid January, I heard muffled sobs coming from my son’s room. I looked at my husband. He looked at me. Baffled, we made our way down the hall to find our son with the bed sheets pulled up over his head.
“I miss Sammy!” he wailed, inconsolably.
I crawled into his bed and held him. The next night and the next would be the same. It had been well over a month since our cat had died. My own grief had finally begun to fade. I’d assumed the same for my child. The boy and the cat had never been close, unless closeness is measured by their proximity when she ambushed him in a dark hallway or left scratch marks across his hand. In old age she was game for the occasional pat, but these rare moments ended in a hiss and a startled cry more often than not. Even so, he deeply loved her and wanted to be loved in return.
Hindsight is a bitch when you’re a parent. Looking back, I can see that the holidays only distracted him from dealing with her death. By early January, his pain had begun to trickle out in ways that didn’t clearly connect to grief. His interest in school waned enough for teachers to comment. At recess he retreated from boisterous boy games to the soothing predictability of a girl friend. He fought more and more with close friends. Our evening negotiations over homework and piano ramped up into epic battles. He read nothing but Calvin and Hobbes. That should have been my first clue.
One morning I found him waiting outside my bedroom door.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m not feeling very good.” He led me back to his room and had me read a Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin finds a wounded raccoon. After the raccoon dies, Calvin says, “I’m crying because out there he’s gone, but he’s not gone inside me.”
I looked into my son’s tearing eyes. “Oh, honey,” I said, and he fell into my arms. His dormant grief had finally bubbled over. That week I sent out feelers to the adults in his life and heard frightening reports in return. He told one that he wished he could trade places with our cat. He told another that our cat had been the one thing that made being an only child tolerable. He expressed guilt that he’d gone to a friend’s house and “had a ball” while we put her to sleep.
We spent the next few days talking about death and how it’s a natural part of life. Nothing lives for ever. Then one night he told me that he hopes to die before I do because the pain of my passing wouldn’t be bearable. Likewise, I wanted to reply, but instead I hugged him close. It occurred to me that he might be struggling not so much with the death of our cat as with the death of his own innocence. We go through so many of these little deaths as children: when we find out about Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy, when Halloween loses its appeal. When we discover our parents are fallible and the world is not so kind. Perhaps the hardest is when we first experience the finality of loss. Loss comes with a kind of pain that isn’t quick to heal. As Calvin so astutely understood, it resides in a place that band-aids cannot reach. For the first time in my son’s ten years, he understood and feared its strength.
“You’re wrong!” he cried out when I suggested that such strong feelings would diminish with time. “I’ll never feel better again!”
I wondered how we’d get through it. The answer came the next day. My father emailed out of the blue and invited us on a short, unplanned trip to Cabo San Lucas. I jumped at the opportunity. Sun and sand are no cure-all for age-old reckonings with life and death, but in the midst of a Colorado winter it’s a damn fine place to start. Perhaps time on a beach would remind my son of the joys that life still delivers.
For four days, we played in the sand. We swam in the pool and ocean. We saw whales breach from our hotel room balcony and rode in a glass bottom boat. He began to laugh and smile again in the cocoon of his grandparents’ love.
We’re home now, and I’m holding my breath. Earlier this week we had to pick out a baby photo for his school’s year book. I pulled out the old albums, and we trolled through the pages together. He came upon a picture of himself sleeping on the floor beside our cat. I waited as he studied the photograph.
“I miss her,” he said softly.
“I know,” I replied.
He stared down at the picture for a moment longer and then slowly turned the page.
They never really got along, but he loved her all the same.
Allison Johnson has a hard time remembering when her son was as small as a cat. She can be reached at www.allisondjohnson.com.
