Poetry, Life, Death

Remembering Emerson

Grief is a dagger in the heart

I folded laundry for the first time without you yesterday. And I’m going to make the bed today and put your little blanket in the corner, by my feet, where you slept so deeply for almost eight years.

You’re not here to batter down the door to the bathroom in the morning, or to ask for your “holding” before I could even brush my teeth.

But you used to let me brush yours. That was new, because I wanted you to live to be old, without tarter. You liked the chicken-flavored toothpaste.

I thought I heard you singing in the wee hours last night, when I couldn’t sleep — because my heart is so broken. But it was your sister. She’s sleeping in your spot now, trying to heal me with her love.

Grief is a dagger to the heart. It never stops stabbing.

When I pulled into the driveway yesterday, I looked up at your chair on the balcony, just automatically, thinking that you would be there, blinking and smiling and eager to greet me at the top of the laundry room stairs to tell me about all of the birds you saw. But then, I looked away, knowing you’d never sleep there again.

When you were a tiny kitten, with a black dot on your heel, a little narcoleptic and obsessed with my hair, I made you a promise that I’d never put you down from our holding in the blue chair until you were ready. I was late for my own yoga classes — countless times, that happened — because you were still nuzzling, your heart throbbing against mine and I just loved you so very much.

Little Freyja helped me with the laundry yesterday. And Uma has claimed the role of alpha. Bisou didn’t want to be alpha anyway. He’s just a little spark of sunshine who’s taken to sleeping in your cup beside my desk, rather than in the rainbow in the entryway in the afternoon.

They miss you. Maybe Freyja the most. Remember how you used to pin her down to clean her until she squeaked? Or how you chased each other all over the house, up and down the stairs at three in the morning, before you came back to bed with me?

I don’t know what to do now when your Daddy’s getting ready. You’re supposed to be in my arms, watching him shave, or stretched out on the bed for “spa time,” waiting for him to come put on his socks. You always liked to help with that.

And at night, I can still see you patrolling all the windows on the look-out for the critters you knew were out there.

I sat in the garden yesterday, amidst the baby tears under the orange tree — your favorite spot — and watched the sun shine through the fuzz on the wisteria pods. I think you must have seen that too. And I listened to the bees buzzing in the borage and to Big Red chasing all of the other hummingbirds away. I tried to see the world through your eyes, my baby, and to hold you in my heart.

The transition, in my mind, from “is” to “was” has been the hardest. I haven’t been functioning very well. I ache for you. I want to kiss the satiny top of your head. And my arms long to feel your weight. I want to hear you playing with your chirpy cricket toy or to wake and find it in the bed, where you carried it up in the night. I thought that we had a lifetime of that.

And I suppose we did. But eight years — well almost — was not long enough. Too fast…. It went by too fast.

Grief is a dagger to the heart. It just never stops stabbing.

I made a promise to you, long ago, to never put you down from my arms until you were ready. And I feel like we’ve been clinging to each other from across the realms, our hearts still pressed together, your little face still nuzzled in my hair, the throb of your purrs still in my ears, resonating through every fiber of my being.

But I sense that you’re beginning to tell me that it’s time. That I have to let you go. That I have to let go of the grief and to let you move on. But, this time, it’s me who isn’t ready yet. Your mommy isn’t ready yet to let you go — not ready yet for you to transition from an “is” to a “was.”

Please know that I will love you forever, my Emerson, and that my grief for the loss of you is a stabbing pain in my chest and it leaves me breathless.

I don’t know how to endure it sometimes. I’m so grateful for your presence in my life and I know that the pain is proportional to the love that we shared.

And so, I take a step forward. I shake the treat can. I brush Freyja where she has taken to sitting on the spot where you peed on the rug. Who would have ever thought that was how you would be remembered? And I gave Bisou an extra little piece of halibut since you’re not here to eat it. I snuggle with Uma at night, and I feel her knead my chest. We do yoga alone now. But I can still see you laying on my mat.

It’s all that I can do, my baby. Grief is a dagger to the heart.

Too soon. You’re just gone too soon.

In memory of Emerson. We loved you so very much….

This poem, for Emerson, was written through tears of immense grief and loss. I loved my little boy so much and my heart is utterly broken. My knees, literally, buckled when I came home from Alaska and learned that he was gone, and had been gone for a couple of days already.

His death was the result of a series of grossly negligent acts by our cat sitter, who had been my best friend. I’m not sure that I will ever know all of the details of what happened. But I know that his sister, Uma, has a badly sprained shoulder and that she had it (my gardener noticed it) a full day ahead of when the cat-sitter told me that she saw it. The cause is yet-to-be-explained because the explanation she gave me is obviously false because of the timing. Tomas told me that the doors were open at 8:30 a.m. (way too early for kitties to be out) and Uma was limping around outside. Uma was never taken to the vet, even though she could barely walk. The cat-sitter then left them outside, by her own admission, while she went to the gym.

Emerson was likely eaten by a bobcat. He was locked out of the house at 2:30 in the afternoon (although it is possible that this happened the night before when the cat sitter had people over to our home — I am not getting full truths about the matter and only found out about the people at our house when a neighbor told me about it) and never looked for, inside or out, even though he did not come for treats or dinner. She says she assumed he was in. Why? I will never comprehend it. I had even given her diagrams of where to look for each kitty to be sure that they were in.

His cat sitter left the house to teach two evening yoga classes and did not make the effort to make sure that he was inside during the “danger hour” when the critters come out. It is her habit to get stoned and take a nap in the afternoon, so I am presuming that this is what happened, which makes no difference to me as long as she has the cats inside. But she did not. She found his fur in the garden the next morning and we found bobcat scat in the yard a few days later. We found desperate claw marks on the outside of the screen door, presumably from Emerson trying to get in. The horror of him being killed in his own garden, unable to get into the house will haunt me forever.

For the twenty-five years we have lived here, we have always given the babies a few mid-day, supervised, hours in our fenced-in garden. But we know that the bobcat is probably watching us now. I’ve created a new “garden in the sky” on a balcony for them and am having kitty and critter fencing installed on the railings. I’m also putting in cameras so that I can keep my eye on things when we are gone. I put a fountain on the balcony and have made it as lush as I could for them, with catnip and all sorts of plants to attract butterflies and bees, which they love to watch. The garden in the sky is dedicated to the memory of Emerson.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

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Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.