My grandmother died a year ago, and I’ve been grieving for my cat ever since.

Two falls ago, I officially moved away from home and moved to Bratislava, Slovakia. A few weeks later, Oliver, the cat we’d had for almost twenty years, died. He was old, but generally healthy until that point. When we moved to a new house in seventh grade, we lost him in the neighborhood twice, and I cried myself to sleep in the closet, hopeless, until my sister found him. He woke me up in the morning, sat outside the shower, welcomed me at the door, slept on my pillow each night. I cried when I found out he’d died. I was sad when I visited home again, and he wasn’t there. That was the closest thing to tragedy I’d had in my blessed life, and I feel I handed it appropriately.

When my grandmother died early last May, I was living alone in Haddonfield, New Jersey. We got the phone call that she’d fallen and broken something on a Saturday morning. Mike and I were making lunch at the apartment, and remember where I was standing in the white, pasty kitchen when we laughed about how old people are always falling and breaking something. I sent flowers the next day. A few days later, she declined due to hospital complications, and the next thing I knew, we got a call that she didn’t make it. “Okay,” I said, and called my brother to break the news. “Okay,” he said.
The rest of my family was at home with their spouses, but I found myself walking in small circles in my upstairs bedroom. I finally broke down and called Mike at Starbucks. He drove an hour and a half on a weeknight, and slept next to me that night, waking up early to make it to work the next morning.

That day, I got someone to cover my shifts, I drove to Exton, I bought an iPod, I took a long shower. I missed my cat. For sixteen hours, we drove to Tennessee through the night. Mike drove, I slept. I drove, Mike slept, and I cried quietly in the silence, praying I didn’t wake him. Once, when I couldn’t take it anymore, we pulled over at an abandoned gas station off the highway so that I could crawl into his driver’s seat lap and weep. I cried because that’s what you do when someone dies, and it was sad as hell that she wouldn’t be laughing and smiling when we got there.

Before arriving at the memorial service, Mike and I stopped at a hotel to change and wash up in their lobby rooms. In the parking lot, he kissed me in the most significant way, and I was pretty settled on marrying him in that sun.
Since then, I have rarely stopped thinking about Oliver. I chose to shift the grief I have for my grandmother to my cat because it is easier and safer. It keeps me from being bitter that God took her away the very year I’d be engaged, married, and would graduate. I’m too busy grieving over Oliver to bother with shaking angry fists at God.

In Peru, that theory collapsed on itself, and I cried like I had in the broken-down gas station. Anger, exhaustion, and pure grief as the very truth of it sank in and took over me. Mike slept next to me that night, too.