The Art of Losing

The art of losing isn’t difficult to master.
--Elizabeth Bishop "One Art"

This weekend, our cat died.

Here are the facts: She was six years old. She was a tortoise-shell tabby. She was a notorious escape artist that loved to be outside. She was loved. I’m going to write it again, so that I begin to accept it: This weekend our cat died.

Oh, I try to reassure myself with the Circle of Life explanation, that all things go back to whence they came, and I sing to myself that to every purpose there is a season, but these are the stupid facts: She was attacked by a Siberian Husky, off his leash for the first time in his young life it seems, and clearly, he didn’t know how to handle the responsibility.

This weekend our cat died.

A neighbor tried to comfort me with the idea of a “Rainbow Bridge” to another place, where all dead pets go to play until their owners claim them in the afterlife. I should be comforted by that. But these are not the facts. The facts somehow comfort me.

So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost…

Her life was a series of homes lost: the original home she ran away from because she was a notorious escape artist. There was the shelter, from which she didn't run away, but probably wanted to. There were our homes. Moving five times in five years she adapted to her new surroundings, escaping from each and every one, but always returning—sometimes scraped, sometimes tired. This last move was a return to our house with the big yard, and it was this home she liked the best, I believe, because it was the easiest place to get lost. She died in that big yard, in the garden in which she loved to hide and watch me weed and plant, weed and plant. Our secret.

…that their loss is no disaster…The art of losing is no (Write it!) disaster.

The real tragedy here is the telling of these facts to my son, yesterday. I studied each change in his eyes like an actor waiting for my next emotional cue. His eyes looked at me first with amusement because his mom had gotten so uncharacteristically serious, then with disbelief, then with grief. I thought well, here is the moment, that dreaded moment, that I always wanted to protect him from. Here is when he realizes that I’ve been telling him lies all along, about how nothing bad will ever happen to him or to anyone or anything he loves because I, his mother, have always told him that this was so.

As I fumbled through the facts, I knew I would never be a master at the job that had been given to me. But I don’t want this job ever again. Nothing I could say could ever explain that scene in the front garden--no fairy tale, no mythology, no lie was ever going to bring her back to him, his first pet--this cat that he loved and lost.