A few months before my cat died, he started sleeping in the closet. I would search the house for him and find those green eyes staring back at me from the corner, underneath the jackets and behind the boots. I knew exactly why he’d chosen that spot, the far-back place where harm couldn’t reach. One night, I pulled my duvet off the bed and lay down beside him to let him know I would stay at his side. About a minute into this routine, he bolted downstairs and hid behind the sofa. What part of “I want to be alone” did I not understand?
I was overwrought about my cat dying. I knew this would be the scariest loss I’d experienced since I gave up drinking. I worried about the incoming grief: when I would lose him, how it might rearrange my heart. But here’s the problem with worry—it doesn’t actually do anything.
A cancerous mass was growing on the side of his face. He looked like a squirrel hiding nuts in one cheek. I measured the growth with my fingers each morning. From a nut to a lime to a baseball. I would meet his eyes before we went to sleep. You have to tell me when it’s time, I would say, knowing full well he could not.
One afternoon, I kissed his nose, and only half of his little face squinted. That’s odd. I ran one hand over his eyes, and his left eye refused to close. It had turned glassy. I called Jennifer at her vet clinic, and her soft voice told me what I already knew. The next morning, she came to my house in her blue scrubs and sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom and let me hold Bubba as she inserted the IV into his tiny orange paw.
“This will be fast,” she said. “Are you ready?” And I was not, but I was as ready as I was going to be.
She pushed the plunger on the first syringe, and he made a purr like an engine coming to a stop. His body slumped in my arms. I don’t remember the second syringe. What I remember is opening my eyes, and Jennifer leaning over him with a stethoscope, and the way she met my gaze to tell me he was gone. His body was warm against my face.
My mind couldn’t keep pace with the change. I carried Bubba to Jennifer’s car and lay him gingerly in the front passenger seat. As I walked back into my carriage house, tears dripping off my chin, what I expected to find, more than anything, was him at the top of the stairs to help me through this ordeal.
The pain of his loss was enormous, but I never once thought: Drinking would make this better. You know what this horrible day calls for? Booze. I finally understood alcohol was not a cure for pain; it was merely a postponement.
I don’t know when it happened, but I stopped longing for the drink. I’m not saying I never miss drinking, because I do on occasion, but the craving and the clawing is gone. Happy hour comes and goes, and I don’t notice. A foamy pint no longer beckons to me like a crooked finger. Bar signs lit up with blinking neon look exactly like what they are: beautiful distractions.
This shift seemed impossible at one time. The woman hiding in the closet knew her life was over, and she was on some artificial lung now. I wish I could have known how much easier it would be on this side.
For so many years, I was stuck in a spin cycle of worry and questioning. Am I an alcoholic? Is alcoholism a “disease”? What if this, or that, or the other thing? Overthinkers are the most exhausting alcoholics. I have left a trail of soggy Kleenex that could stretch to the sun, but the equation is simple. When I cut out alcohol, my life got better. When I cut out alcohol, my spirit came back. An evolved life requires balance. Sometimes you have to cut out one thing to find balance everywhere else.
I watch women at bars sometimes. I watch them holding the wineglass in their hands, the wet curve of the lip forever finding the light. I watch them in their skirts small as cocktail napkins and their skyscraper heels, but I don’t envy them anymore. Maybe at some advanced age, we get the gift of being happy where we are. Or maybe where I am right now got a whole lot easier to take.
A woman I know told me a story once, about how she’d always been the girl in the front row at live shows. Pushing her way to the place where the spotlight burned tracers in her eyes and the speakers rattled her insides. When she quit drinking, she missed that full-throttle part of herself, but then she realized: Sobriety is full throttle. No earplugs. No safe distance. Everything at its highest volume. All the complications of the world, vibrating your sternum.
I go to meetings, and I can’t believe the grief people walk through. Losing their children, losing their spouse. I can’t believe how sheltered I’ve been. Here I am, undone by the loss of my 17-year-old cat.
“I wish I was tougher,” I complained to my friend Mary.