Feline Warrior

Suzy, 37, died Sept. 20, 2005.

The last time I saw her, I knew she was in trouble. It wasn’t good. And that terrible sensation of not being able to fix it, hands are tied, none of your business, go away, leave me alone, this is my life - all of it in a single glance. Some call that powerlessness, and it is. It’s also one of the bitter, horrible aspects of being a living creature in a world of other living creatures. Sure, one can go live on a mountaintop, but it gets lonely up there, probably pretty chilly, and nobody is around to say stuff like, “Hey, cute shoes!”

You can’t live alone on a mountaintop and care about cute shoes.

And so we -I- live here, among the living, the dying, and with memories of the dead. And now there’s another one: Suzy. This just in, extra, extra, read all about it.

It may seem to you that I take death personally, and to be honest, I do. I always do, always have, and probably always will. It’s just my way. My husband says that it’s part of why he loves me - and I don’t even know how you’d label it. Just part of my charm, I guess. She can’t leap tall buildings, but boy, she sure can soak up pain and suffering like a top-shelf mop!

I didn’t know Suzy as well as you might think. I don’t have to have - we were close in age, and there was something in Suzy that I recognized. In Suzy, I saw a bit of myself. We had a few core things in common, defects, you might say. Vulnerabilities would be a better descriptive, actually. And I’d found a way to deal with mine, and even though she had walked through some of the same doors I had, Suzy turned away from the very places that offered me comfort, peace, life.

But Suzy… Perhaps this is more of the “rich imagination and strange, intense emotional capacity,” I don’t know. I do know that I felt scared when I heard about her death - scared and sad. Scared, maybe, because of my own nearness to death at various times. Add to that a faded desire to be gone. It’s as though we belonged to a club, and she fulfilled the ultimate requirement. Maybe it’s time to give up membership in that club -I haven’t paid dues in years, and I live life differently than I did when I might have been in Suzy’s shoes. (Shoe references again…) And even though checking out is not an option any longer, at times that darkness whispers into my consciousness. Like long hidden fingers running slowly through my hair, it’s seductive and creepy all at the same time.

Gone is that fabulous smile, that great hair, that seemingly carefree outlook on life. (But below the surface, apparently, she was not so carefree after all.) Gone is the hope that I’d see her around in our one familiar haunt. And again, animals left behind… and friends, family, and stuff. And someone like me -no, not like me, me!- wondering, should I have stopped that last time, said, “To hell with your glance, you’re coming with me!”? or could I have tried that number one more time?

When they want to go, you very often can’t do a thing to stop them. That’s the part that hurts. That’s the part that haunts with fragmented memory flashes, sound bytes, what-if’s, and regret. Oh, and sadness. Deep, blue oceans of sadness.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 25th, 2005 at 10:50 pm and is filed under The Everyday Tiara. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.