Losing Suzy: cat loss and childhood grief

I still remember that bright, sunny, spring Saturday. Or at least, I think it was spring–it was cold enough for Mom to decide that I still needed a winter coat. I remember the near cloudless skies because it felt like a day I should have been happy — but wasn’t. That morning, Mom had stopped by the apartment of a cousin’s elderly neighbors who had decided to adopt Suzy, our black and white older kitten. After handing her off, we drove to Long Island for an overnight stay at my parents’ friends.

I must admit that I was part of the reason behind the loss of Suzy–despite the fact that I had clamoured for a cat from the age of three. But as it was, no one in our family knew how to handle cats — let alone kittens; my father never had a pet and my mother grew up around German Shepherds. None of us realized how kittens–not unlike small children–can play intensely, quite unaware of the need to sheathe their claws while playing.

Adorable and defenseless as a barely month-old kitten, I had picked her out when my father brought us to a colleague’s home for dinner, an aeronautical engineering professor with twenty-some cats — and one of them had just had a litter. I enjoyed playing with her at the very beginning–the first two months or so. But the 5-year-old me soon became frightened of her as she ambushed me from around the corner of the hallway separating the living room from the bedroom and bathroom. In retrospect and four cats later (not counting all of the cat videos I have watched), I now realize Suzy was probably only playing, but the numerous scratches I got on my arms and legs were painful especially since I wore dresses: strange as it seems, I am not exaggerating when I say that I believed she was out to kill me! My parents were perhaps less scared than annoyed, for they too were ambushed daily. (Years later, we were able to laugh at how she had jumped onto the kitchen counter devouring the defrosted burgers we were supposed to have for dinner.) But when Suzy leapt into the air in the wee hours of the morning, pulling down all the Chinese lanterns in the living room of our apartment, that was the last straw for Mom. We can’t afford to keep her, she said.

I was initially relieved when we dropped her off with the new owners. No longer did I have to worry about her pouncing on me out of nowhere. And maybe, just maybe, I cherished a dim hope that Mom might get me a pretty, fluffy white kitty to replace her — one exactly like the stuffed toys I had and admired in pictures.

I don’t recall exactly how I felt in the hour after we dropped Suzy off. Maybe I was more shocked than I realized. But as the day drew on, I began to cry–even though I enjoyed playing with the children of my parents’ friends. Though barely older than me, they tried to comfort me and I would stop crying for a while. As dusk turned to night, however, I cried endlessly with every minute without her feeling more painful. It was the same the following night when we arrived back home. Reality had sunk in: I would never see Suzy again. Strange, given how she terrified me with her sneak attacks.

From that moment on, I don’t recall how long I mourned this loss–was it days? Weeks? But I do remember Dad buying me a beautiful cat book with photos by the famed photographer Walter Chandola the next day. Knowing how upset I had been that weekend, he had come home early from work just to present it to me.

So even though the loss Suzy was not technically a loss caused by death, it was nonetheless my first taste of grief: the sense that something I was used to and had perhaps become accustomed to had just been permanently erased from my life. Perhaps I loved her more than I realized at that age, despite the gashes from her claws. Or perhaps I felt secretly guilty for yielding her to the unknown.

I only know that this first unmistakable sense of childhood sadness would not resurface until four years later when my parents informed me that we were going to move from the Bronx to New Jersey that summer. I was to be uprooted from the school, apartment, and the general area I had known practically since birth, losing everything I felt I knew like the back of my hand. Maybe I didn’t like all of my classmates at P.S. 86, but I had wonderful friends and teachers. I was not ready to say goodbye–and even recall deciding not to go to the extra day of cleanup for fear that I would burst into tears. And when we finally moved to the surrounding suburbs of Princeton, New Jersey three months later, I struggled hard not to cry — after all, I was a big girl, a nine-year-old — until I could no longer suppress my tears that night. My mother tried to tell me this was actually my “real home” since I was born not too far away at Princeton University Hospital. But it didn’t matter. I found myself missing my old school, the local playground just down the street and the grocery across from it, the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Gardens as well as the exciting trips to downtown Manhattan and Chinatown. For the first six months then, I would feel completely uprooted, torn from what I would always refer to as my true home — the Bronx. And indeed, decades later, as I commuted between Hartford and New York City to teach during the spring semester of 2017, I would inevitably put my books down as the bus headed up Deegan Expressway just to catch one more glimpse of the Washington Bridge and my old neighborhood.

So what does my moving to New Jersey have to do with losing Suzy? There is, in fact, a common bond: grief. Grief is triggered when we lose something, someone, or some place that has become a part of our lives. Or as the Grief Recovery Center suggests, “Grief is defined as the conflicting feelings caused by the change of, or the end in, a familiar pattern of behavior.” Moving and Grief: How to Prepare Your Heart for a Move — The Grief Recovery Method. And so I mentally resisted the move–the loss of my first home as I call it–just as I had earlier resisted the loss of Suzy the day we relinquished her. When grief is viewed in such a light–the loss of familiarity and the comfort it brings–it makes more than perfect sense that we grieve hard after losing a beloved pet. So even though we only had Suzy for a few months, she had left an imprint on my early life.

But I was not aware of any of this when I was 5 or 9. In fact, it took decades after suffering the losses of my second and third cats, not to mention those of a few friends, mentors, and parents, and moving several times between the East coast, Midwest, and England, for me to gradually learn the workings of grief and to fully realize that it is simply wrong to trivialize its expression or manifestation. As I’ve said in my first post of this series, “It’s only a cat”: Grieving the loss of a cat | by Frances A. Chiu | May, 2023 | Medium, “we are humans and sentient beings. We love. We love our cats, each and every one that we’ve shared our lives with.”

It is time for us to acknowledge that as humans, we form bonds with the world around us. We grieve when we lose something, someone, or some place that we’ve grown accustomed to and that has in turn become a part of us. So I grieved when I lost Suzy, even though I feared her as a child. And when I finally found myself moving from Chicago–which I never cared for (sorry, Chicagoans!)–to Connecticut, I found myself feeling more melancholy than I expected. I was never overly fond of that “toddlin’ town” and certainly didn’t feel the attachment that I had to the Bronx when we left years earlier, but I nonetheless felt compelled to visit all of my familiar sights and haunts in those days before my departure. One last view from the roof of my condo where I could still see the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. One last stroll on Michigan Avenue and Oak Street. One last view of the magnificent Chicago Public Library. And one last Chicago-style pizza. There was even a slight twinge of regret when I asked myself if I truly wanted to leave.

So, not surprisingly, it goes without saying the more devoted we are to a person, pet, or a place, the more our grief intensifies. If I don’t recall grieving the loss of Suzy for very long, I do recall grieving the loss of my second and third cats for months–and the loss of my mother for years. There were days when the pain felt excruciating, especially when I felt already stressed or depressed for unrelated reasons. These were all beings with whom I developed long, and in the case of my mother, sometimes complex relationships. As I will explore in future posts, grief does not operate evenly or steadily; it might be compared to walking or swimming in a large body of water where the depths are uncertain. It makes perfect sense, then, that we miss our cats when they pass away–and that sometimes we never entirely get over the losses.

But as I will say again and again: grief is the price of love. It is the price of the care we give and the comfort, appreciation, and familiarity that we get in return. The more we love, the more we grieve. And there is no exception for pets.

© Frances A. Chiu, May 27, 2023