i've spent my life eulogizing everything i love

Letters to the Ether: on loss, and how it stained me

Dear whomever,

I keep thinking of my childhood cat, Cas. I’ve mourned Cas since we took him home from the shelter. I didn’t choose him; I didn’t walk through cages of kittens: he was handed to me. I’ve mourned him since that very moment, I’ve waited for his death like I wait for the alarm to go off when I wake up before it. I’ve waited for his death since that first night, when he jumped onto my bed and slept at my feet. Cas rarely purred, but I always knew when he was content. He’d glare at me, and I’d know he loved me. I’ve mourned him even seven years after adopting him, when his tooth fell out while we were playing, and he looked at me, eyes wide and confused, as I began crying, as if to say, “Why are you always overreacting? It’s just a little bit of blood.” I understand my mother better - when we were growing up, my siblings lived far away, and she’d pout about how she couldn’t bare to see them on video, that it made her miss them more than she already did.

“How’s Cas?” I’ll ask my mother through the fuzz of Facetime video, in some kind of twisted sort of karma, and she’ll laugh and respond with something along the lines of Oh I wish I was Cas as she flips the camera to the mass of beige, that soft wooden tan I’ve seen on no other animal, that special color that makes my heart churn, and then I would begin thinking about her, and what I’ll do without her. My mother’s hands always come to mind, when I miss her. That sweat of a long day at work, mixed with the relief of her cigarette, a scent always permanent to her palms. She doesn’t smoke anymore, but there is still a smell that is my mothers’. She left a shirt here last she visited and whenever I wear it she is there, no matter how many washes. Whatever scent it is. Would be too difficult to describe, the scent of my mother. Anyway, her hands. On her ring finger is the band my father slipped on the night they married - they forgot to switch them during the ceremony, so they did it quickly in the car, after. I imagine them laughing, shaky, giddy. She’s never taken it off since - so she says.

That ring. Those hands. When I miss my father I think of that curl of metals my mothers’ finger has clearly overgrown. I never had the heart to ask her to leave it to me, because I don’t have the heart to imagine her leaving. My father’s dead and I’m fine with it, but something about that loss has affected my nose; I’ve lived with a constant phantosmia of death. For my engagement, someone dear to my fiancé gifted me a second ring: her own wedding band, metals curled the same way of my mothers’. As girls they must have walked into the shop and chose the same ring - it must have been in style then, in the 90s. They picked it then and here it is, the exact same ring, regurgitated through time to find my hand. I guess sometimes when you want things bad enough, the universe finds a way to gift them to you. Now I have this constant reminder of my mother, and my father, and my lover, and death. At least she can be buried with hers, as she wished; I have my own to take with me, to give to my daughter, to do whatever. Everything about life is so bittersweet.

My neighbor is in the hospital. Hollow cheeks and a smile that takes up her face, she has a never ending stream of stories and laughter I can hear through the walls. She is sweet like honey, really, a slow-moving waft of roses. Shy, I am, but nostalgic: I start missing a moment while I’m still in it. My neighbor gifts me fresh berries from her trees in the spring; winter comes, and she urges me pick the lemons that grow straight into my kitchen window. I miss her and wonder how she is. I pick up the phone, then put it down again. What would I say, how would I say it? When my rescue died suddenly two years ago, they called, told me he was gone, and asked me what I’d like to do with his body. I was so shell-shocked I couldn’t say. The silence takes me. What is death if not silence? My neighbor is in the hospital. I wait in the living room for the sound of my doorbell, the one only she ever used, and her smile awaiting me, my cheeks prematurely blushed with the knowing that she was about to offer me a kindness I didn’t possess the language to thank her for.

I didn’t spend his last days with him, that cat, that stupid rescue, that tiny, annoying thing that latched onto my lips, my neck, the in-betweens of my fingers, looking for the warm milk of the mother I took him from. I didn’t say goodbye to him, that full-of-life thing, I left him alone in a foreign cage in his final moments. Because I was afraid. I was afraid to see him, afraid to meet with the reality of his leaving. They’d told me he was getting better, in my defense. So I went along with life, childish and fucking terrified, as I always am, shaking with fear. I can’t call my neighbor, I can’t look at my childhood cat through the camera, because in the reality of their breathing comes the certainty of their ending. My best friend is wine drunk, telling us, “No one’s allowed to die before me.” My mother is calling, checking on me after they removed my wisdom teeth. Cas is waking her up, 5AM in the morning, hungry. I am hungry, hungry for certainty, tired of endings.

I miss my childhood cat, who lives continents away. I’m terrified of the day I get the call, I leave my phone on do not disturb. I miss the sun-filled days when he’d lounge in the sunlight of Amman, in his home that was still mine, and I’d lie on the ground beside him, stare at his little body, his stomach rising and falling with life, his fur everywhere, on my clothes, everywhere, in my mouth, everywhere, in my bed. Maybe the hardest part of moving away was losing him in the gamble. I miss the simplicity of childhood, when I believed I was immortal, before I wasted my five prayers begging Allah to please not let anyone else from my family die. I miss the moment before I realized my best friend would never laugh in my ear again, high-pitched, Italian accent. Death stains everything around me, even in my happiest moments I am aware there is an ending, incoming.

I don’t know what to do with this grief, which is really just love, immense and overpowering. I don’t know what to do with this love, which is really just grief, premature and futile. On this fools-errand of being alive, I lose so much time wondering if I’ll ever be strong enough to see those I love go. I’m just a ball of anticipation anxiety, imagining worst-case-scenarios into the dead of night. Please don’t go, I tell them, as soon as they arrive. Please don’t go.

My mothers’ best friends made her laugh at my father’s funeral - so ridiculous, I can’t forget it. It saved my life, she told me. My mother asked to be buried with the ring he slipped on her hand, which she’s worn forever. My mother says Allah gifted her some kind of bright light, some kind of deep feeling of calm, even in the height of the most absurd, painful thing that could ever happen to a person.

I do hope it’s true. I think it must be. Sometimes you get the news and sit under the shower, wondering how you’re able to lather your hair, how the water knows to warm, how the people are waking, the cars still going, despite. Is there any truth other than death, anyway? Is there any reality other than surviving? Any biological factor that’s more important than carrying on, moving forward?

Only the lucky ones get to die without grieving.

With love,
Amal

---

I got the news my neighbor passed away after I scheduled this email. I feel an urge to publish it now. I ask that you keep her in your prayers, whatever they are, to whichever God you pray to. My neighbor was a woman whose roof has housed me these last two or three years; she has fed me, laughed with me, and extended to me so much kindness with no expectation of return. She watered her plants, she shared the berries she picked from her well-loved trees, she let me keep my cats despite the rule against them. She lowered my rent, after my first six months here, her husband explaining that it’s because she liked me, and nothing else. She decorated every Christmas, her tree placed on a table, so that it reached the roof. She touched my cheek, told me she loved me, told me to not let my marriage take me away from the building. She watched my cats from her garden, who sat by the windows watching her right back, and told me she worried about them. What if they fall? What if they run away? She’d ask me. I’d be too afraid to grab them, return them to you. She’d hear me come in after long days at work, share a plate of whatever she’d cooked. She loved, only like a woman from her generation could love, openly and without remorse, with that childlike glint still alive in her eyes. She was lovely. She is lovely. I won’t ever forget her. She has given me beautiful days, she has changed time and made it pleasant. She has eased my lonely. I hope she’s somewhere stunning, beautiful, with orange trees and bushes of berries.

“Today, it is a lovely day. The sun peeks through the clouds. I opened my front door, and my landlord gifted me with fresh berries she picked from her garden: perfect, fresh, a deep shade of purple. I deleted Co-Star off of my phone, sat on my couch under my window, and I ate the plate-full in one sitting. I am a child again, for just a moment, as my tongue turns magenta. The weather is as it often is in this town: confused and seesawing between hot and cold. My cats jump around me. And I decide, on my own, that it is a lovely day - it took the whole universe to make this day. There will never be another like it. It is today.”

i deleted co-star, then had some fresh berries

The berries.