My time with Schrödinger's cat

Your girl is back with more sad stuff! Oops!

Hello, it’s been a while. I was going to write, but things were so messy and I didn’t know what to say about it. Grief, for everything difficult about it, is cleaner than what comes after.

A lot of organizing and decluttering begins with taking everything out and getting a good look at it before paring it down or putting it back in a way that makes more sense. Figuring out who I am while sometimes the grief is here, and sometimes the grief has dissipated, and sometimes (most often) I think it is gone but it’s just hiding, is very similar. Everything is a lot messier in the name of someday being a little bit more put together.

And then my cat Molly died. So rather than writing to you about how messy things have been (and they really have been), I am writing to you to say that I miss my cat. Things are no longer messy, they are once again achingly clear. I am so sad.

this is one of the very first photos I have of Molly, from October 2016. She was 9 when I got her, which is technically “senior,” but she very rarely seemed like a senior cat.

I got Molly from a friend of a friend who had to give her up. She cried when she had to say goodbye, and she sent me home with literally everything I needed. I still have the food bowls and the cat carrier and the brushes. She’s saved in my phone as “Molly’s Becky” and we’ve kept in touch for the eight years since I took Molly home with me. She would ask for updates, or I’d send her them out of the blue.

Molly’s Becky was one of the first people I told when Molly died. My ex, who knew Molly for four years and lived with her for two, was there. I am so lucky to know two people who loved my cat and who could also call her theirs. I do not mind sharing her. I’m thankful for it, thankful that other people are out there holding onto her memory, that I am not the only tether she has to the world. She is most alive when I talk to the people who knew her.

In the days since Molly died I’ve held myself so tightly, as if her memory lives in the space between my muscles and if I relax them I will lose her. The image that comes to me again and again is of two pieces of fabric that became so interwoven in the place where they met that they’re now one. The thing is, though, that she is both mine and her own. I can hold onto what was mine, but the parts of her that were her own cannot stay. That is where I become only a keeper of her memory, and that is the part I cannot bear (except, of course, I can. Here I am, bearing it).

When I told Molly’s Becky, she sent me this, one of her last photos of Molly before she came to live with me.

The first night Molly was in my home, she meowed the entire time. A full nine hours of nonstop meowing. I didn’t sleep. I got out of bed the next morning groggy and exhausted and worrying I had made a terrible mistake, that I wasn’t cut out for having a cat and I especially wasn’t cut out for having this cat.

Eight years later, and I worry that I will never be cut out for loving any other cat but her.

I’ve never found a better way to say it than I loved (love) my cat the way I love myself. Loving her was not the learning process of loving someone else, it was discovering that I had always known her. I love her like no matter what it is responsibility to, like she is the one thing that, like myself, I am able to be certain of.

That is another contradiction of a cat. I could know that she would not live forever but, as I told a friend the other day, I believed it in spite of the facts. I did not choose to think my cat would live forever, I just did. Maybe we have to, in order to love them so much, or maybe it is a side effect of it. What a power, to make us forget the one foundational fact of our lives, to make us believe in infinity in spite of it all.

During the pandemic, Molly would wander the front yard of my apartment building while I sat on the stoop. One day I ran back inside to make sure I’d turned off the stove, and through the front window I heard her meowing (yes, LOTS of stories about Molly involve her meowing. She meowed often and very loudly and I loved it about her but also sometimes I looked right at her and said “stop yelling at me” and to be clear, she never stopped. I wish she was yelling at me now.)

She was standing three feet from a turkey, yelling for her life. I ran outside and scooped her up, and to this day I laugh at the memory of her meow because it was so distinctly her yelling “ARE YOU SEEING THIS??? ARE YOU FUCKING SEEING THIS?!” as she and this turkey were locked in a staring contest. She was witnessing a mythological monster and no one was going to believe her. She was first contact for aliens and none of her friends were going to take it seriously.

so fast asleep she didn’t even realize she was falling off her pillow

I’m worried that I’ll never miss her less than I do right now. I’m worried for the time when I do miss her less. It is too hard while she is so present in my memory, while I reflexively check behind me in the kitchen because she always followed me there, but will forgetting mean that I have lost more of her? (no.)

Memory is less insistent than a cat (because everything is). I worry about forgetting her. I worry about leaving her behind. As much as I feel her with me, I want her to be an active part of my life, not a passive one. I want to keep buying flights for work trips to minimize my time away from her and I want to hold my cereal bowl in the air so she doesn’t drink the milk while I’m still eating. I want to worry about tripping over the cat in the dark when I get home and I want to have to clean the fucking litter box.

This is literally what it looked like every time I ate cereal. She knew the exact sound of cereal pouring into a bowl and would come running.

I don’t know how to be in my home without her. The last three places we’ve lived I picked and set up for the both of us together. She decided where I sit on the couch and the fact that I leave every closet door open just a little because she always wanted to be able to walk in and investigate. I remembered to take my own medication by taking it at the same time as I gave Molly hers every morning.

I don’t know what to do with all the little artifacts of our life together. Her carrier, her food bowls, her cushion, her cat bed. They are not mine to give to someone else, they are hers.

I always pack fairly last minute because she knew what the suitcase meant and it made her mad, so I’d try to break the news as late as possible.

When things with Molly’s health got bad, I would wake up each morning and lay in bed afraid to get up and look for her. As long as I was in bed, she might be okay. This is the real Schrödinger’s cat: it is not being willing to look at what we might have lost. It is the time I have always been the worst at living in, but to keep alive the chance of seeing my cat again I would live in it forever.

Eventually I would walk into the living room and she’d look up at me and every time it happened I told her “I’m so happy to see you.” It came out as an exhalation, the release of the breath I’d been holding while I didn’t know. I said it every time I walked in the door and she was still there. I just arrived home from a trip yesterday and she’s not here but I couldn’t help feeling this relief at being with her again.

this is us, together

A final contradiction: I feel her with me still, all the time, and yet I miss her because she is not here enough to satiate my appetite for loving her. I look at photos of her and say aloud to the room “that’s you, baby. That’s you.” because I’m so overcome by her, by how much she is still there, even in memory, even in photograph. I want her to see herself, to see how beautiful she was, to see how funny, how sweet, how much I love her.

I want you to see her, to see how beautiful she was, how funny, how sweet, how much I love her.

I would like to ask you to help me hold on a little, so that perhaps I can relax for a moment, so that maybe I can discover that letting go does not mean that there is less love, or less of anything that endures.

Every time I left the apartment I would tell her “I love you, I’ll be home soon.” I still say it, because it’s still true.

Thank you for reading.

Love,

Molly’s Meghan