Things found on a hard drive.

Grief is such a strange thing. You suffer a loss, you are gripped by anguish, and slowly, slowly that grip releases until the hurt is largely gone--or at least put away for "safekeeping" in a very dark and quiet corner. Today I was searching for a document on my work computer and literally stumbled upon a poem I wrote last October about the little kitten whose death affected me most. Suddenly I felt that old grip tighten around me once again, with surprising strength.

Anyone who has read the passages I've put here can probably conclude that I am a rather sensitive person....I can be audacious, I can be wry, I can be pissy--but I don't think there is a soul on earth who has met me and could say I am heartless. If anything I am too "heartful". That's okay though; life is for feeling. Perhaps what I find most tragic about drug addicts is the sense I get that they are people who don't want to feel. Sure, they might "enjoy" the heightened perception of some things--or at least they believe they do--but ultimately it must come at the cost of dulling or even destroying other colors in the spectrum of human emotion. This is not to say I have the answers to anything--God, no....but I do understand quite a lot.

I've endured a couple of major surgeries, being filleted from hipbone to hipbone and I don't know what I would have done without morphine. (I used to shudder when I watched the old episodes of Gunsmoke and the Doc would use some kind of red-hot grasping tool--and plenty of whiskey--to dig a slug out of some poor hapless sonofabitch who'd have to bite--what else??--the bullet.

When I went home from the hospital to convelesce (which took two months) it took rather large quantities of opiates to get me through the day--hell, sometimes through the hour. I took the stuff for several weeks, because the pain was so bad that I had to hold a pillow against my stomach just to make a wimpy little cough. I can tell you, weeks of mind-altering drugs change your nervous system--you grow more receptor sites, which become ever more hungry for yet more of the stuff, which is why drug tolerance--and ultimately dependence--happens. Along with the physical change comes an emotional change. Thus, I recall little of those weeks other than the highs and lows, followed by the irritiblity I experienced as I tapered of the medications. What I don't recall is much in the way of real emotions, though.

My but that was an interesting little twist this writing took....all because of a poem I found on my hard drive. I was caught off-guard by the tears that welled in my eyes and the lump that stuck in my throat as I read--and relived--the story of the little kitten who couldn't. I was lucky enough at the time to be co-fostering her with a dear friend who is not only a sucker for kittens like I am, but a grief counselor as well. We made the joint decision to put the kitten to sleep, and met up at the Eastside clinic to carry out that final, but terribly painful gift of love--such a double-sided sword indeed....calling the end to a life while there was still some quality to it. Here is that poem:

Dazzle

A sickly little kitten came to me
She wasn’t much to look at from the start
An orphan that was never meant to be
Until I learned to see her with my heart

Her will was strong, she seemed to challenge fate,
Her little body struggled just to live
Her name was Dazzle, as if to compensate
She tried somehow, with all she had to give

Confined by pain and illness all the while
It wasn’t long before I realized
As she frolicked when she could to make me smile
An angel looked at me through those blue eyes

For weeks I pulled out every trick I knew
The needle pricks, the countless medications
To help her mend but nothing seemed to do
It turned into a hopeless situation.

Isolated in a hospital cage all day
She could have dreaded me and such assaults
She lived for moments free to run and play
and Dazzle saw my love and not my faults

Through my attempts to help her body heal
With infinite, sweet humbling kitten grace
Dazzle bravely tolerated each ordeal
and purred and sweetly kitten-kissed my face

But all the modern science couldn’t mend
With sadness I was finally forced to see
The ravaged body of my tiny friend
The time had come to set her spirit free

It felt like such betrayal on my part
I thought and held her while she softly purred
To still this little kitten’s trusting heart
She nuzzled me, as if to reassure

That what we had to do was only right
She was sick and she had had enough
And it was time for her to say goodnight
She had her happy times and she knew love.

Then gently came the serum….she was gone.
I held her silent body and I wept
The world just then seemed very cold and wrong
While heavenward a tiny spirit crept!

She rose above it all and wished us well
And traveled far beyond these painful things…
A butterfly in heaven left its shell
That night another Angel got her wings.

And to Enid Traisman, my pal, my cohort, you beautiful soul--I love you--Thank you for being you.

current mood: thoughtful
current music: Crystal Ship--The Doors