Amber: Death Anniversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of the death of my beloved and much-missed cat Amber. I don’t plan on talking about this at great length every year, but as this is the first year anniversary, I feel like I should at least say a few things that have been on my mind for awhile now and would like to get off my chest, and I’ll try not to rehash too many details I covered last year. 

I suppose it’s human nature to second guess one’s choices, when looking back at things in retrospect. In hindsight, I will say now that I wish I hadn’t gone to work that day, that I had spent more of the last day by Amber’s side (of course, at the time, I had no way of knowing it would be the last day). It’s something that I know is silly to feel guilty about, as when she was alive no one spent more time with her than I did, but sometimes guilt transcends logic. And it wasn’t even as if I was gone all that long: I left at 4 PM, got to work around 5, got the call to come back home sometime after 6:30, made it back home by 7:10, was with her the last ten minutes before she died (really, it almost seemed as if she were holding off her own death while waiting for me to arrive). In the days afterwards, I would sometimes get panic attacks thinking about all the things that could have gone wrong that night... what if I had been stopped by a cop, or I had hit traffic, or my car had broken down? I know it’s silly to freak out about bad things that DIDN’T happen, but no one said the human mind is always rational. 

One thing about that night that I remember is that when I got home my mom asked me if I wanted to have Amber put in my lap (at the time, she was in my mom’s lap). I said no, partly because she looked so fragile that I was afraid to move her, and also because I wasn’t sure if I were comfortable with the idea of her dying in my own lap. Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice, and I’ve gone back and forth over this quite a bit. Amber spent so much of her life in my lap, that perhaps it would have been fitting for her to die on it. But after awhile I came to look at it from a different angle. It was my mother who made the choice to adopt Amber all those years ago. She was ultimately the person who brought Amber into our lives. So was it not proper symmetry that Amber died on her lap, at the end? What matters to me at least was that I WAS there for it, and though in all honesty Amber may have been too out of it to even be aware of that fact, perhaps on some level my very presence there and the sound of my voice registered with her and gave her some solace: or that after her death, when perhaps her soul exited her body, she saw me there, and knew that I hadn’t abandoned her in her last moments.

But maybe it’s pointless to self-torture the mind with questions that can’t be answered (in the mortal realm, that is). As I wrote last year, “So at least I got to say I was by her side when she died, that I got to see her breathe her last breath, that I was the first to notice she had died, and that she died at home, surrounded by her loved ones, in a warm place. So yes, my prayers were answered: it was indeed a good death, or as good as such a sad thing can possibly be.” And I still feel that way.

I won’t lie: she could often be ill-tempered, quick to anger, needy, a witch, a diva, and at times totally lived up to one of her nicknames (that I forgot to mention in my list of nicknames last year): Crabapple. She was also a beautiful cat with a complicated personality and a lot of attitude and I loved her with all my heart... and as demanding she could be at times, whenever she would curl up onto my lap and gaze up at me with a look of adoration and contentment in her face, all her foibles were forgotten. Even though she remains a part of me, and even though every now and then I’ll see her fleetingly in my dreams, I still miss her terribly. When she died, a little piece of me died as well.

“Grief is the price we pay for love.”

—Queen Elizabeth II