All About Endings and New Beginnings
“ There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
“ There’s no shame in surrender when it’s time to stop fighting.”
Plenty happened in the month of July. Let’s start with the good: I finished a rough draft of my novel, and after over a month of rest, I’m currently taking the time to read it, make notes on it, and eventually edit the crap out of it. It’s sitting on my writing desk as I speak which isn’t where I do most of my writing these days. Lately, it’s been upstairs in our living room on a recliner I bought. And if you look at the Progress Updates page, you will see I’ve started writing another novel. 36 days in, I’m at the cusp of 25,000 words out of my 100,000 goal. Will it be shorter? Will it be longer? Who knows, but the important thing is to keep writing.
I’m still figuring out what processes work best for me, but lots of highlighters, notes, and binder clips at the moment including 355 pages of manuscript.
This is especially important considering everything else that happened in July. Not our engagement party. That was actually a blast, especially in hindsight. But our cat, Mama Cat, that I knew since I was just graduating from high school and went to college crossed the rainbow bridge. It’s hard losing a member of the family, and if you don’t consider pets part of your family, then you can stop reading.
For everyone else, thank you for understanding. It’s the type of unrequited love or relationship that’s hard to describe, but losing her was in a way like losing my late brother again. She was there to keep me company while I was grieving, changing jobs, and just dealing with life in general. She would lean into forehead kisses. If that shows trust and love, especially from her who hated being picked up for any reason, I don’t know what would.
She knew when I would feel sad, and we knew our time was running short. Even she knew as odd that might seem or contrary to what you may have heard about pets and their perception of time and death. She was calm, and she tried to stay strong for us, but at the end of her 16-17 years of life (hard to know since she came to us as a stray), we knew it was time to say goodbye. Cancer sucks, and there wasn’t anything we could do but give her a chance and all the pets, treats, and love she could handle. It was difficult and soon impossible for her to drink or eat, and she became winded from traveling even short distances.
We said goodbye at the vet and let her go before the pain that took one of her daughters before her hit. It’s coming on a month not having her watch us fall asleep or to wake us up for her breakfast or paw at us for pets and what Jess liked to call “chair time” which involved pets while they shared the recliner in her office. But saying goodbye isn’t forever. I feel like life goes on, even in the afterlife. We’ve heard the floor creak like someone was walking on it, only no one was there, the air wasn’t on, and it’s hard to describe, but we feel her around us. And the other night, I dreamed she came to get pets one last time in the most vivid, lucid dream I had. She put up with me crying, holding her chest and petting her. I still remember how her fur smelled like the hot earth after a warm rain.
Anyway, that explains the absence of blog post last month, but here’s a late one with a lesson I learned: writing for me is an escape. When you are seeing someone passing, even before they are gone, and crying for what is coming for us all at some point, writing provided an outlet, an escape, and stability I can’t find at my day job, with wedding planning, or anything else. I leaned hard into writing, and feeling like I had some control in something, well, it helped put things into perspective.
I also learned another thing: grace is important. On those hard days, where even writing felt like too much, I just said to myself, “Just do 15 minutes, and let it be that.” I went on with my day feeling better and on a day where I only had 200 some words, I told myself, “That’s 200 more than I would have had.”
Family is important, and your energy and feelings are important too. We’re all just processing each day after the next together. I think the most important thing is to learn and strive forward to your dreams.
One day while writing my morning pages, on one of her last days in this physical realm, on a day where I doubted she would get up and see us, she came to see me in my recliner. She insisted on pets, and of course I gave her all the attention she could handle before she went up to see my fiancee.
I took it as a sign from a cat who was wise beyond her years that she wants me to be happy but also to take time to be with those I love. I’m happy to do both. And the end is never the end really. I’ll see her again in some way, shape, or form. It’s the law of matter and energy that things are never destroyed, only changed. I feel like what makes us, us also applies. And as far as this rough draft goes, it’s going to undergo some major revisions, and other various changes, but I feel the premise and the strength of what it represents will stay the same even if it undergoes a change in between now and the time it’s in its beta phase and beyond.
Anyway, we’ll always have the memories of a one-of-a-kind cat. This one is for her. And I’m going to do my best to honor her by living my best life, keeping her close to me in spirit, and leading by example by making time for what matters.
