My Year of Last Things
This is a book blog, not a personal blog, but I do write about life events here, and sometimes things don’t feel real until I do.
The births of my children are here. Moving into our house, briefly. My sister moving to the States. Then the fire happened, and I wrote about what it’s like to lose all your books, but I didn’t write about what it’s like to lose a pet.
If you follow me on social media, you might know that in the immediate aftermath of the fire, my husband found our cat Perogy in a bad state and got her to an emergency vet, where she remained for three weeks. You might have missed the “Missing Cat” posts about Shirley, though, as they were only up for a day, until my husband found her too. She didn’t make it.
Shirley was three years old, a pandemic pet born in 2020 and adopted by us in 2021. The SPCA named her and we didn’t see any reason to change it. She was loud, lazy, a bit of a glutton, cuddly, soft, playful, a constant companion to anyone sitting on a couch or lying in a bed, and scared of everything. She would have been very scared that day – the noise, the smoke, the heat, people stomping around. The firefighters told me she most likely escaped the house and we’d find her later, that it happens all the time, but I didn’t believe them.
I’ve never lost a pet this way, only older pets who were ready to go and gave us time to prepare. I’ve also never lost a pet in the midst of a crisis – usually losing the pet is the crisis. I have mourned her, but alongside a bunch of other stuff, and seven months later, it can still feel awfully fresh; never more so than when I read the poem “November” in Michael Ondaajte’s new collection A Year of Last Things.
I’ve tried Ondaatje’s poetry before, and found it fairly impenetrable, with literary and cultural references that are beyond me. A lot of the poems in this collection are like that, though I got a hint of something different in this first line of the first poem, “Lock”:
Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
and the telephone numbers
of his children in far cities
I love that line about carrying the telephone numbers of your children in your pocket. Old fashioned but relatable. Later, we are treated to prose poems – mini-essays, really- about the horrors of boarding school and confronting an abuser.
And then there’s “November“:
Where is my dear sixteen-year-old cat
I wish to carry upstairs in my arms
looking up at me and thinking
be careful, dear human
Ondaatje addresses his cat, Jack, and remembers how he was adopted (“I found you as if an urchin in a snowstorm”), how he became a member of the family, (“learned the territories of the house”) and grew old (“Was it too soon or too late/that last summer of your life”). He despairs that he “cannot stand it,” this loss, and imagines meeting Jack again in a place “where language no longer exists”.
This poem has nothing much to say about my particular circumstances. “November” is about an old cat, and an old owner who can imagine meeting him again soon. Shirley was a young cat, and I am a (relatively) young owner who, if I believed in an afterlife, would anticipate waiting a long time for such a reunion. This poem doesn’t have anything particularly new to say about grief, either: it ends in a paraphrase of a 17th century haiku about the timelessness of nature, maybe, or the endless nature of grief?
It’s not a good poem because of what it says, but because of how it says it. It’s good because in ten stanzas (read them all here), it reminded me that my grief is real, and made me write about it here, making it even more real. It’s good because it made me think about my brother, who imagines his cat referring to people as “humans,” usually derogatory, and that made me smile. It’s good because the line near the end, “You no longer wait for us” took my breath away. Cats aren’t loyal and protective like dogs, but they do wait for you. I think about Shirley waiting for me that day. I knew she didn’t leave the house. She waited where she always did when she was scared, under the couch. That couch was just too close to the fire.
This is barely a review but it does remind me, and hopefully you, why it’s a good idea to read poetry: for those lines that takes you back to a place or a feeling, even one you cannot stand going back to.
Shirley, lying on top of someone’s legs as they lounged on the couch, as she was wont to do
Reading in Bed 
Thank you for writing this lovely essaylet. Love to you, and peace for Shirley.
thank you for this post
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What a pretty cat…
Years ago, I cut this poem out of a magazine. I don’t know who it’s by, but it encapsulates for me the mixed emotions we have about mourning our companion animals.
Our cat died.
Because this unbearably
Underlined for us
The transience of happiness, life,
You weeping
Dug his shallow grave;
I weeping
Laid him there.
Warm still.
(By mistake I caught sight of you afterwards.
Head in hands in the greenhouse.)
A stone is over him.
A forget-me-not plant at his head.
Proportion please.
The nations are scarlet with pain.
(Rhodesia, Vietnam, the Berlin Wall).
He was only a cat.
But love anywhere is love.
And we are only human.
Aw, kitty. It’s not the same, but I had to teach “Do not go gentle…” the day after our 10 yo goldfish we thought was immortal died. “And you, my goldfish, there on that sad height…” So on the nose, but thanks, poetry.
I’m so sorry you lost your gorgeous Shirley. It does matter. And poetry does help us to be in the feeling, sometimes.
This is such a sad and beautiful post. My words are inadequate but I’m so sorry that you lost your lovely sweet cat.
Having had to take three sickening cats on a last journey to the vets (a few others just disappeared, as they often seem to do when they know things are up) I know the desperate feeling of bereavement when it hits you that they’re not coming back. But I’ve never had to deal with any pet in such distress that they were treated to emergency care, so I can only sympathise and hope the pain dulls in time.
I’m so sorry to hear about Shirley. That Ondaatje poem is beautiful.
I also turn to poetry when a cat dies, but it’s indeed heartbreaking when one you love dies by accident, rather than old age. Shirley was beautiful.
Oh Laura, this breaks my heart. What a beautiful cat Shirley was. And Ondaatje’s poem is excellent. Interesting that even in the 21st century poetry can still reach the parts that prose can’t.
This is beautiful, Laura. I read it over breakfast on my phone when you first posted but have been forgetting to come back to comment. I’m so sorry about Shirley, yet relieved that you still have Perogy. You mentioned that she is now almost like an older cat because of her injuries, so I can see why the Ondaatje poem particularly resonated with you. It would for me, too — our cat is 16 and ailing, but we and the vet hope we can intervene and give him a new lease on life. I struggled with an earlier collection of Ondaatje’s (Handwriting), but it sounds like this one is a bit more accessible. You’ve probably come across some of Margaret Atwood’s poems about old and departed cats as well. I agree with you that poetry expresses emotions that we can’t in other ways. It’s more subjective and harder to write about for that reason. You’ve done a brilliant job of it here.
What a beautiful post Laura. Thank you for sharing – I had an old cat – 21. I miss her still. Shirley was beautiful ! (This post and your last one is the reason I love blogs and not other social media forms !).
good blog
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This is heartbreaking, Laura. Imagining Shirley waiting for you under the couch. I’m so sorry that happened. xo
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