03/24/2022 - 9:17 a.m.

We had a beautiful cat. Magnificent. Majestic. I have a picture of her that I took on Sunday, when she leaned against my rib cage. The picture looks down my body -- so you see my feet in the background, and the jeans, and then the shirt up in the foreground. And off on the right -- casually leaning, looking proudly off into the distance, like the world's cutest sphinx.... Our cat. Our beautiful cat.

I've been crying a lot. We had to put her to sleep on Tuesday. And I kind of don't *trust* that I'm also having these remembering-her-in-better-days moments. Like, I must be in denial. Have I grieved enough? That's part of why I'm here now. I'd tried to write an email to a friend of mine -- but men don't sob and sob in front of the other men. So then the email turned into a lie -- oh, there were good times, back in the day; in the larger sweep of things, all and all and by and large, that cat really had a good life and I'm grateful for it and not sad at all...

There's a web site that helped a lot. I found it from a Google search. I'd been doing what is probably one of the stages of grief -- worrying whether we'd done the right thing -- and then found a very good essay about that by Ingrid King. She said what I needed to hear -- that that's really not the right path for our thoughts. That that's what steers us away from the grieving we need to do. That it's easier to think there was totally some solution that, at least now with the after-the-fact hindsight, we could identify and know and salve our feeling that there wasn't anything we could do.

And then I cried and cried because I knew that she was right, and I was just very sad that our cat had died. And I was avoiding it with this other thought-exercise... And then it felt good to just cry. You get wrung out, and eventually you get sleepy. And then you have stupid dreams, and another morning comes, and you eat your breakfast and start your day and write on Diaryland and without realizing it begin to heal.

A new thought came to me today. That we did do something. All that dehydration and lack of nutrition -- all the days of suboptimal health: we brought them to an end. Like the brave little boy in "Ol' Yeller". I'll take care of you, kitty cat. Even the hardest thing of all -- I'll step up. You're welcome. I'm sorry. I am so so sorry...