Troll Echos

This is the second part in a three part blog series dedicated to the life and death of Sasshi our cat.  To read the other parts, head over to Sasshi – The Tragedy and Sasshi – Happier Times.

With Sasshi resting in peace in his kitty coffin in the office, the full weight of the events began to chip away at my previous numbness.  A weird desire to avoid the office entirely set in pretty deeply.  I figure this wasn’t just that it was the “scene of the crime”, but that it was also where the most solid and real reminder that our cat was dead sat.  My desire to avoid the office was superseded several times before the night was over since it is the place where my cell phone sat on its charger, and a surprising list of individual things kept coming up that sent me once again in there to brave the room.  This invariably left me staring at the box with Sasshi in it as I passed by, and on several occasions checking in on his body repeatedly trying to make sure he was really dead and that this was not in fact just some terrible dream I couldn’t wake from.

With a box of tissues in hand and my wife still crying, we attempted to retire to bed.  My brain was repeatedly reliving the horror without any way to make it stop and before long I too found myself uncontrollably crying.  Any attempts I made to remain stable to help console my wife were undermined by flashes of the event and an on-going series of attempts to figure out what had actually happened, all while attempting to even process that Sasshi was gone.  In other words, I was a mess.  The best we could do for each other was to be there and to offer each other fresh tissues as each previous one retired to the pile of damp ones.  I believe we actually fell asleep at around 3:00 AM, and slept badly until just before 6:00 AM.  My sleep was dreamless but filled with a sense of absence.

Immediately upon awaking I was once again reliving the previous night.  I got out of bed and cautiously approached the office once more.  I checked Sasshi again, and this time he felt stiff and cold.  I turned from the box and began to cry again as though I had never stopped the night before.  I grabbed his green bunny from his cat condo and placed it into the box with him.  I felt it was his favorite thing in the whole world and it really should be with him despite the various thoughts of Egyptian burials this stirred.  Before leaving the office, I grabbed the mug that had some ice cream in it the night before and that I was enjoying when Sasshi died.  It was never finished.

Once in the kitchen to clean up the mug, I found myself surrounded by reminders.  For example, Sasshi’s food bowl was no longer on the floor, but instead sat on the counter.  I decided to clean it up one final time and began to feel like someone had punched me in the gut.  Sasshi was gone, and I realized I genuinely had no idea what had really happened.  Thus began the process of remembering the event on purpose to try to uncover new additional clues I may have missed.

While I was busily trying to pretend I was some sort of crime scene investigator, the truth began to set in.  I had no clue what had happened.  I had my back to the entire event because I was programming homework when it occurred.  Worse than that self-accusations began to accumulate.  “What if I had never opened the window in the first place?”  Would he not have died?  “What if I hadn’t opened the blinds too?”  Would he not have bothered with the window at all?  To my pile of theories, my wife added “What if the iron wasn’t there?”  At this time, the prevailing theory was that Sasshi had jumped out of the window, clipped the iron, and as if by magic it perfectly landed on him and broke his neck.  The odds of this seem so low as to be impossible.  It could have landed at a different angle and done almost no damage.  It could have hit a leg and broken that instead.  How did he get out ahead of it with it coming down behind him?  It just didn’t seem right, but for the time, it was the best we had to go on.  How else could Sasshi have died without obvious cause?  We weren’t sure, but I was hopeful I might figure it out somehow.

Later in the morning, at around 8:00 AM, we headed over to my mom’s house with Sasshi in his kitty coffin buckled into my back seat.  I truly felt like a hearse driver, but I rather doubt most hearse drivers cry during the funeral procession.  It was the one and only trip I made with Sasshi in my car where he was quiet.  Having arrived at my mom’s house, we nibbled some food, told the story, and sat around either in a daze or crying for most of the morning.  Eventually it was time to bury Sasshi.  His last moments to suddenly pop up and say “I was just kidding” had arrived, and he missed his chance.

I cried less watching Sasshi being buried than I thought I would.  I assume the mild numbness that had returned was being caused by nearly no sleep, and the constant mental anguish involved in reliving those fateful two minutes over and over.  I placed with him his green bunny, leopard print mouse, and the elastic string he loved to play with that hung from his cat condo.  These represented three of about forty different toys that were his over the years, but they were only three he ever played with.  I rubbed him one last time and folded the towel over his body.  Like any story involving funerals, there was the overall feeling that he could just be sleeping.  Unfortunately he wasn’t.

Over the next few days, I told the story to friends and fellow cat lovers and I researched cat diseases.  The iron hitting the floor with the cat seemed wrong, which really only left various diseases and fatal attacks and I was determined to find it through research using the only information I had.  His condition during the event.  I dug my way through blog posts, discussion forums, a site devoted to cat diseases and their symptoms, and I read countless sad stories and horror stories.  Nothing lined up properly.  I’m pretty sure cats are some sort of alien super life form.  Cats almost can’t have heart attacks.  Cats can have strokes but they very rarely kill them, and oddly enough, many recover on their own.  They can have seizures, but generally recover on their own from those too.

I was running out of hope for closure.  The closure I sought was some clue about what had happened.  Something that would help me to believe I had done at least some things right in my failed attempts to save him.  Something that would grant me understanding about why I had a perfectly happy cat, and two minutes later he was dead.  Anything at all.  In the end, I had to make the conscious realization that there was no way to know.  Sasshi had died, had been happy before it happened, and frankly didn’t have time to suffer.  He was buried at peace and certainly wasn’t going to be unearthed for an expensive autopsy that may not answer any questions anyway.  I was forced to accept closure in the simple fact that I will never know what happened.  An unpleasant truth, but it was the best I had.

As the week since Sasshi’s death advanced, I found myself telling people more about the gaping hole left in my heart and in my everyday life, and less about how he died.  I also discovered that it was possible to go from 100% fine to crying like Niagara in literally one second flat.  This provided new information about how children seemed to be capable of this feat.  I had always sort of figured they were faking it to get what they wanted out of their parents and that turning on genuine crying like that wasn’t really possible.  How wrong I was.

Every day I feel a little better and the cat that acted as a shadow is simply missing but I get more used to the loss and I’m starting to be able to at least tolerate the pain without breaking down.  Well, most of the time anyway.

This story continues with Sasshi – Happier Times.