19 Doors
We are still a family, because this is what a family looks like - love choosing love - the outer shape of the heart of no consequence.
1
When I am in high school, the seniors write a play called Closed Doors about all things terrible and wonderful that might happen behind them. It is a magical experience, an opportunity to share hearts and minds, to explore limited life experience, personal and peripheral. I am in such awe, I fail to consider what goes on behind the closed doors of my own house. Now I know. Theatre has shaped my vocabulary for life.
2
When I wake, I open the door to our bedroom and leave it ajar. I trespass the halls of our house, now silent, vacant, void. I open shades, pour myself a cup of coffee. I observe the ease with which I now travel through doorways. I have been closing doors, barricading spaces, for nearly 20 years. In a single day they have opened. Little alarm bells ring in my head every time I cross a threshold. Close the door! Only now, I no longer have to.
3
When I am in college, I fall in love with a boy. We share cigarettes on my balcony, scheming our escape to New York. My neighbor below pokes her tired head through her doorway and calls up, Hey Romeo and Juliet, some of us are trying to sleep! One day I open the door to find this boy holding a kitten, a tiny tabby with sparkling green eyes. He smells of rot, is sick for the first few days as he detoxes whatever has kept him alive between his mother and me. I call him Fiyero after the soft spoken, bookish character in my favorite novel at the time, but he emulates the Broadway musical - a cocky homecoming king jock. I fall in love with this boy, too.
4
When I wake, I remember, and this is often the worst part of the day. The remembering. The cascade of renewed realization, becoming aware of the vacuum. They are gone.
5
When I drive to my parents house on a blistered afternoon, just after college graduation, I see a blur of garbage smeared across the 287 access ramp. When the smear lifts its head, I pull over and creep close. A tiny ginger cat crawls toward me. I call him baby lion before naming him Seymour, this time purposely after a musical. I take the doors off the cabinet in the bathroom for the litter box. Fiyero bites Seymour’s ears until he screams. They spill the garbage, knock over books, shatter glass. I close the door to my bedroom to protect the few nice things I have.
6
When I write a sort of confession to one of my dearest friends, I find myself sharing a dark secret. She reflects back to me a profound wisdom of kindness. I am speechless in the blessing of her friendship, her willingness to hear what is spoken beneath the words, between the letters. She unlocks one of the many doors inside my heart, extends her hand and says, If you cannot love yourself right now, borrow my love for you.
7
When I work my 2nd summer stock, I fall in love with my future husband. I also fall for Augustus, a sweet and sour mush with sprouty whiskers at the top of his nose. We blend our fur families three years later and I’m sure everyone thinks us crazy cat people. When anyone asks about children we point in their furball-hacking direction. Our life shapes around closed-door routines. The cats eat separately in shut-off rooms so that Fiyero will not devour more than his share. We lock the bedroom door to prevent pacing across our heads. For years Fiyero shouts from the other side, a dependable 5AM alarm. Each morning before walking to the 7 train, we rub bellies, scratch ears. Be good, we say just before the heavy door swings shut. I hear three beating hearts on the other side of the deadbolt.
8
When we move to the Berkshires, the cats fall in love with the glass door overlooking our critter-filled backyard. This is after I spend three frozen months on a mattress in an empty rental, watching Gilmore Girls with Seymour while the rest of our family waits for spring in NYC. In April, when Fiyero throws a blood clot, I hesitate to permit the advised euthanasia. This cat is my baby, I wail, and I see a look cross the vet’s face, telling me he is about to do something he has never done before. He administers a blood thinner. I am about to give consent when he says he wants to wait. Fiyero’s heart responds in a way he’s never seen, and he becomes our miracle cat. A year later I bring home a puppy and the cats take turns throwing her down the stairs. She absorbs all my time and focus, becomes an extra limb, an outer body extension of my heart. She is a participant in the world, my shadow from place to place while the boys stay home, peering through windows.
9
When I try to write about the doors of my life, the words stall in the threshold of my heart. I click over into my email, seeking a distraction like a snack when you aren’t hungry, and I am greeted by a poem called My Name Is A Doorway. Since I have no words of my own, I borrow someone else's. They invite me to step through and into love.
10
When I pick up their ashes, I am only able to whisper their names. The receptionist hands me two gift bags, so dark I think them black, but they are really midnight blue. Inside are little wooden boxes cloaked in velvet. I sit in the parking lot and sob. My dog trembles in the backseat. We are in our own little box of what remains.
11
When I don’t know what to watch, I choose old shows to see how they have aged. I rewatch Sex and the City and it feels like coming home to some younger, less jaded if more naive, version of myself. Like time traveling. I am 22, eating ice cream in my underwear on a sofa I hauled out of the trash. I am falling for Mr. Big while listening for my lover’s wrap at the door underscored by Carrie’s ifs and just-like-thats. This is the same sundrenched past of late night balcony chats, kittens found on steps and in the middle of the road. In my present, my husband watches with me and it’s a balm to my soul to time travel with my body pressed against his. One night I say, When I first watched this show is when the cats came into my life. I think, I could have called Fiyero Big.
12
When I gather their medicines, dozens of bottles, tubes, and vials, I put them in a paper bag along with half-gone packages of treats. I wonder why I withheld, like a mother telling her children, Just one now. I wish I’d given them the whole bag. I wish I had dumped them in a pile for gorging. I remember feeling this way when we lost Augustus in 2020. Here I am again. I open the door to the pet food pantry. The towers of tins wrapped in colorful sleeves are a sucker punch. I feel my face contort. It hurts to cry but I cry anyway. A podcast on pet grief explains that this sort of weeping brings no relief. Rather it is a doorway to a bottomless pit, a tunnel of black, and the only way through is through.
13
When I move from room to room, I see them. A tiny body curled on the bed. Another stretched out across the sofa. I hear them on the stairs, in the hall, scratching in the entryway. Each time my heart jolts. I think of a line from my favorite ghost story: Most times, a ghost is a wish.
14
When I wish for them to come back, I know it is a fool’s errand, but I wish anyway. I wish for the warmth against my heartbeat, but without violent vomiting. I wish for the sweet sound cues at every entrance, but without the incessant nagging. I wish for their comforting company when I cry and when I laugh, for the sleek, full-bodied health of 15-pound felines, not the wasted wobble of diminished 7-pound waifs. I wish for more time knowing it will never be enough.
15
When I research grief, I learn that people feel shame when they cry more for their dog than their mother. I learn that people cannot get out of bed after losing their cat. I am deeply thankful for the friends who call and text and send cards, for the neighbors who check on us. These touch points are a flotation device between us and drowning.
16
When my hurt is reflected back to me, I am reminded that not everyone has loved an animal the way some have loved an animal called a human. I sit on the coffee table with Seymour’s ashes. I have just removed them from their velvet bag. Where to put them? All I can think of is the missing weight, a sensation now vacant, a hollow void and it feels so wrong, so unnatural I cannot contain the brackish waters within. My chest aches. I cannot breathe. Science says our emotions can cause physical symptoms. I no longer doubt that my pain is real. If you tell me you hurt, I promise to believe you.
17
When a friend from high school says, A week, I start a timer. A colleague says, Maybe a week to stop sobbing every day, but then it will hit you randomly for months. This is the day after we stand around a stainless steel table, our hands on both bodies, bearing witness to the moment their hearts stop. I believe friend and colleague, though my timeline is my own. A podcast explains that grief impacts mind, body, and spirit. I think about how grief is like a doorway, one we will all pass through. We will pass through many doors in our life where our existence will be one way on one side of the threshold and another on the other. Loss is one such demarcation.
18
When my heart experiences a moment of peace, a break in the surly clouds where the bright moon may bathe the landscape, I am reminded that love will forever be the true final remains. A little box of dust is nothing compared to the timeless memorial erected within. Still, I line them up next to my dad in the living room. Together they watch the windowed world pass by.
19
When I stop suddenly in the middle of anything, my husband pulls me into his arms and whispers, Me too. The only-way-through-is-through has become a threshold between hearts. Our dog sits at our feet and participates in the moment, her eyes locked on ours and I know she misses them too. Her world has also been furever changed. We are still a family, because this is what a family looks like - love choosing love - the outer shape of the heart of no consequence. All that matters is the shared feeling within, casting a bright, warm glow on the other side of the door.
Dearest friends, thank you for reading. I write about loss often because it has been such a profound force in recent years, and it is a path along which we will all walk from time to time. Writing, sharing is a healing process, as is reading the words of other survivors. No matter the point at which you are at in your path, I wish you love and courage and strength to withstand hardship and embrace wonder.
This newsletter is dedicated to Fiyero and Seymour, who lived for 19 years, and to Augustus, who lived for 16. We were with them for all of it. When they passed, my sweet husband said, The end of a f*cking era.
And it is.