So runs the round of life from hour to hour

(photo taken August 2007)

Sorry I haven't been blogging recently. I've been stuck -- I've been trying to write about our visit to Tucson, Arizona over the last weekend of June, to our Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan's 60th wedding anniversary. Joan has vascular dementia, and is fading, like a kerosene lamp running dry, burning only the fuel left absorbed in the wick. The visit, reconnecting with cousins we see once a decade if that often, was so brief, and so intense, both emotionally and physically, that I've had troubles sorting out what to say and how.

And then this past weekend, an aunt on the opposite side of the family died unexpectedly and abruptly, so now there's another three-day, intense visit to a distant place (Houston, Texas) with unfamiliar cousins to try to write about, too.

And then, when I was in Houston, one of our cats died -- sweet Abbie. She has been ill for a long time with cancer -- last summer we nearly lost her, but prednizone the miracle drug has kept her alive and relatively healthy for an additional 11 months.

Abbie was a sweet cat to humans -- very easy-going and friendly. She was only 12 years old, which is young for a cat to die of natural causes, and she had lived with the family for 10 years, the result of a soft-hearted Christmas splurge at a Rescue Shelter. She had allowed the children to maul her when they were babies; even last week she uncomplainingly allowed Girl-Child to carry her like a sack, which must have put dire pressure on her cancer-ridden intestines. She was always quick to jump into a newly formed lap, purring contentedly while you read a book or watched television (she objected a little to sharing with a laptop, but was willing to accommodate). Every morning, Abbie would greet me as I rose from the basement, wrapping herself dangerously through and around my legs as I tried to climb the stairs without tripping.

Loving as she was to humans, Abbie hated other cats. She ruled the house ruthlessly, attacking Harry and Tasha on sight if they were on her turf (i.e., out of the basement, and these last few weeks, when she spent many hours a day in the cool of my room, she'd growl and hiss at them even in their allotted space). Her self-appointed queenship over Floyd was less actively defended, but relations were never cozy.

It is much easier to write about the death of a cat than about the funeral of an aunt, or the portents of the loss of another aunt, or the bittersweet flavor of the vivacity of my father's last surviving brother, so like Dad, and yet so not-Dad. I will miss the cat more than the distant aunts, at least in the short term -- the absence of her is much more present in my daily life. I find myself hesitating at the top of the stairs, listening for the thump when she jumps from her guardpost in the high window in the foyer, in order to run to greet me in the morning. Last night I looked for her pill box, preparatory to force feeding her the dreaded medicine. This morning, I cleaned out a bowl for her food before remembering she doesn't need to eat any more.