My mom used to tell me that I was born with grief. She used to tell me that as she was pregnant with me, she was mourning, and when I was born, I was born with that hurt. I grew up thinking I understood grief.
My mom has been grieving for my entire life. Before I was born, my mom had a son named Michael. He was the only other child in the family with brown eyes like me and he held french fries in his left hand like my mom.
It’s unnatural for a parent to bury their child. It should be the other way around.
I never knew my mom before this. To me, she’s a helicopter mom, doing everything she can to keep me out of harm’s way. I’ve always felt her anxieties. Every time I leave the house I’m reminded of all the ways I could die. Car accident, kidnapping, shooting or all the above.
My mom used to see mediums and psychics, but sometimes they will tell you things you don’t want to hear, like how there will be a major death in your family that will affect your youngest daughter so deeply she will go missing after a manic episode resulting in a police search for her.
I am my mother’s youngest daughter.
“That would only happen if you died,” I told her. I did this to make her feel better; to show her I really cared about her, but I followed it up with a laugh. “Or Brody.”
Brody was my childhood cat. When he died, there was no police search for me. There were no missing posters with my name and weight stapled to every telephone pole in town. There was no dramatic story to be told.
There was nothing.
I used to believe that I understood grief, but holding Brody in my arms after the vet administrated the lethal injection into his furry little body changed everything I thought I knew. Never in my life had I experienced something so raw and so painful.
It was less than a year before I experienced death again. When my father died, I thought of Brody. I thought of the tears that I wept for him, the pain that I felt for him, and how I felt none of that for my father. He was not in my life like Brody was.
Recently, I sobbed on the kitchen floor of my boyfriend’s house because his roommate’s cat greeted us at the front door after a night out. In two and a half years, nothing has changed. I still miss Brody as much as I did when he first passed. Suddenly another cat was greeting me at the door like Brody used to, and I would never get to hug him again.
I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. I stood off to the side, in a black dress I never wore again, feeling more than ever like the overused trope of “abandoned daughter.” Some looked at me with confusion, others looked at me with guilt. Strange faces hugged me and apologized for my loss. Where was this when my cat died?
