Cheery photo of shelves. Eagle-eyed family members will spot visual representations of themselves from earlier eras. To the right is a box with many little compartments in it that my father made for me out of a beer box decades ago.
This morning I began to make some plans in regard to the euthanizing of Thelonious, such as things to do to help myself through the day of the event. I think it will be a good idea to do what they call “bookending” in 12-step programs: I will call someone before I call Dr. Bolivar, call the same person after I talk to him, and once again after Thelonious is gone.
I made a list of some things I need to do afterward: Maybe go to the SPCA’s pet bereavement group. Notify her longtime vet. Give Tom yet more food, including meat that is in the freezer and eggs that are in fridge. Donate a hundred cans of cat food to the SPCA. Put opened cat food into the compost bin. Wash the bathroom floor with bleach.
Even there isn’t life after Thelonious, there will be chores.
I have been taking many deep breaths and observing the very noticeable difference between telling myself, “Oh, my god! My cat’s little white Melmac dish, never to be used by her again,” as opposed to, “It’s OK. Everything will be OK. You will definitely survive this. You will be happy again, I promise.”
As always, I think there is a place for encouraging or kindly self-talk. It does help and can completely change the emotional tone of a moment. But Steve Hagen’s book cautions against relying on thoughts, as they so easily flip from one point of view to its opposite. It will probably be most helpful of all, after a bit of cheering self-talk, to drop the story and feel the feelings instead.
This evening Tom and I got together to watch a couple of DVDs. Usually we pick out two together, but I proposed that we each just pick one, with one party watching the other’s and suffering in silence if necessary.
But the one I picked—The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things—made us both suffer so much with its scenes of child abuse (is it possible that doesn’t mess up the child actor?) that we had to abort and go on to Tom’s, which was Grand Prix, with James Garner, Eva Marie Saint (why is her name not Eva Saint Marie?), and, of all people, Brian Bedford, a stage actor I saw with my family at a Shakespeare festival in Canada about 35 years ago.
I had a crush on Brian Bedford after that but never had any idea he was ever in a movie. He had a prominent role in this one, but I had trouble getting fully invested in it, plus I became hungry, and lonely for my cat, so I went home. So I’d have to say like-it-or-lump-it movie-picking was a failure.
I woke up terrified in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago. There have been many episodes of this in the past couple of years, always in the middle of the night, easily handled mainly by noticing physical sensations (switching my attention to a neutral body part like my hands or feet, if necessary) and reassuring myself, but this was a diabolical one, with Mara whispering, “That thing you say to comfort yourself? It isn’t true. You’re all alone.”
It passed, as they always do. Probably not one of these lasts for longer than 30 seconds (except for the first one, which lasted for hours).
I realized later that perhaps the severity had been due to resistance on my part. I was sound asleep and it caught me off guard; when I woke up, it was in full swing, and I felt that I very much didn’t want it to be there, and employing my customary techniques was clearly about getting it to go away.
I’m guessing that the night fear (which is not fear of the night; it’s just fear; if anything, I guess it’s fear of losing my mind or somehow being irretrievably engulfed) may happen more than usual right after Thelonious is gone. (Thelonious gone! It still seems impossible, no matter how much I try to get used to the idea.)
The next time it happened, I said, “Welcome, fear. Come in and bring your friend,” and it was an easier experience.
Later today, after all the planning in the morning, I realized that, as with cheery self-talk, plan-making has its very useful place, but that I didn’t have to worry about the right time to summon the euthanasian (euthanacist?), because at some point it will become clear.
I had a wonderful phone conversation with a friend this morning who reminded me about Anne Wilson Schaef saying, “I don’t decide, I discover.” Exactly.
I told my friend about welcoming the night fear and she said she does a very similar thing with physical pain, describing the sensation to herself in detail—burning, throbbing, dull ache—and then saying, “OK, thumb, I’m here with you.” Next time I will try that with the fear.
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