This post is not numbered.

It is no longer the mother-story.

It is no longer the husband-story.

It’s MY story.

Maybe I should number it 1. First. The new Beginning.

Yes, I know, it has been two months since the last post. The gaps have been filled by stuff. Weird stuff. Elections (I’m not going there), feeling stuck, too much on the to-do list, too many holidays, learning how to navigate life my way.

A year after someone passes there is an “unveiling” of the headstone. I think It’s kind of a smack upside the head to let you know that a year of your own life has gone by and you had better start living; but it was complicated. There were some miscommunications between the (landmark) cemetery, the “package deal” from the funeral home, the stone cutter. There is no stone. Yet. I have decided that since Robert and I will be sharing a place that I would forgo the previously thought of footstones and go with a small headstone and have some fun with it. That’s for another time. And I’d rather unveil the stone on a warm, sunny day.

In addition, I never put an obit in The New York Times; he would have wanted that. Everyday he read the paper cover to cover and never missed an obit. In fact, he collected those that he thought were interesting. I recently recycled stuffed folders of them. He and his father would make it a point to check the obituaries: they wanted to make sure they weren’t dead.

The one year anniversary is coming up. It will be an obit-memorial. The only rule I have is getting things done right, as perfect or as close to perfect as possible in my own way.

Speaking of obits, this morning, an obit on the first page of The New York Times jumped out at me. Here is the link: Carole Wilbourn, Who Put Cats on the Couch, Dies at 84.  It began:

“When cats bite or scratch, they’re trying to tell you something. Ms. Wilbourn, a cat therapist, was a pioneer in the art of listening to them.”

This lady was considered to be a cat whisperer.”

I met Carole in the late 1980s.

Soon after my first marriage in 1967, my husband and I decided to get a cat, something I had always wanted. We bought Muffin, a seal- point Siamese, from a pet store on Fordham Road in The Bronx. I had never had a cat of my own and this sweet tiny thing would hide under the bed until we got home  from work or school. Nine months later we decided to get another kitty to keep Muffin company. There was an ad in a local paper for “purebred blue-point Siamese kittens, for sale, $25.” They were raised in a lady’s house in the Parkchester section of The Bronx. (She was probably breeding them for an income). My pick, Biscuit made a bee-line to my umbrella and crawled in. I took him home ,next to my heart, covered by my coat. He was the most playful, healthy-looking kitty in the litter. He had original Siamese characteristics: slightly cross-eyed with a kink near the top of his tail. Now the two kitties wouldn’t be alone. And, oh, those Siamese-blue eyes.

Muffin and Biscuit lived with us in two apartments in the Bronx, they occasionally stayed at my parents’ apartment in Manhattan, and they moved with us to our Queens apartment. They each lived nineteen years between 1968 and 1987.

In case you don’t know, Siamese cats are known for their vocalizing. They can carry on and when the mood hits, they howl, yodel, ululate. Sometimes they even sounded like humans talking.

I remarried. One night Robert was awakened by a loud noise and sat straight up in bed: Biscuit had let out a yowl.
Robert said, “I thought I heard an old lady screaming fire. In Yiddish.”

So you see what I mean.

When my son was a baby, Muffin was the first of the cats to reach nineteen years. Unlike a child who was going off to college to whom I’d have to let go of, for intermittent periods, she was an old cat. She had kidney failure. It was awful, I can’t even describe. We took her to the vet to end her suffering. She was the first pet I had (aside from several turtles from Woolworth’s who lived in kidney shaped bowls with a plastic palm tree.) Believe me when I say: cats are nothing like turtles.

We all cried, including Biscuit, who looked for her all over, wailing. The loss was great and the sadness didn’t abate. I know sadness well: I’ve suffered many losses. Sometimes, for a minute, you can forget sadness and grief, but, eventually it pops back up and you think, “oh, right, I’m sad, I wasn’t for ten minutes but here it is again.”

It’s also known as grieving.

I didn’t know what to do, the constant wailing was making me ill, miserable. I had a human baby, who rarely cried, but I lost a cat-child and her companion, Biscuit, never stopped crying.  A veritable feline widower, who was also old.

I don’t know from where I got her number but I called the lady whose obit is above. Carole Wilbourne, the cat behaviorist. I was desperate.

So, in 1987 or probably 1988, Carole Wilbourne arrived at my door with a big satchel, early, on a Sunday morning. She came on the Long Island Railroad from Manhattan: the fare was part of my bill along with several hundred dollars in fees.

Carole was a small woman and the bag was almost her size, she was one of those people whose age I couldn’t determine, kind of age-less but her skin was beginning to wrinkle and that was almost forty years ago.

Now remember, I was desperate. I was grieving a loss, so was my kitty, and I was awaiting the cure.

Biscuit, I believe was on the couch. I don’t recall holding him. He was quiet. Carole began to pull stuff out from her bag: My eyes must have popped out of my head, and I had to stifle my hysterical disbelief. This couldn’t be happening and costing me several hundred dollars (at that time).

She told Biscuit THIS was his day. He looked at her. I looked at her. We both looked at her as she put on a party hat, lit a candle over the yellow, wool, Maurice Villency couch. She sing-songed her words. She rang a little gong. I don’t remember how long this went on. A half hour? A whole hour? All kinds of toys came and went. Incantations. Then she told me what I had to do. For the life of me now I can’t remember what she said.

And then she was gone.

But not Biscuit’s yowling.

After all, he was nineteen, that’s old for a cat. His kidneys were beginning to fail, like Muffin’s, I knew the time had come for him  to cross the rainbow bridge. A vet helped him get there.

Looking back, Bisk, as we called him, had probably been suffering from dementia and confusion in addition to grief. Maybe like Robert, who started out a talker, had become a looker, then became a stare-er, then a listener: He had no more words. But Biscuit had plenty of cat words and they didn’t stop coming.

I get what loss means and what it does to you. You just want to yowl at the moon in sorrow.

I really should go now, I have to work on that obit/memorial, at least. The one year anniversary of that physical loss is coming soon. I had, however, lost Robert way before that while he was in the nursing home for thirty-eight months; and even before that.

Somehow the sentences I write are too long, or too list-like, or too short or don’t say enough or say too much.

I think I need a Carole to tell me it’s my day, to ring a little bell, to light a little candle, to make me stop yowling or to make me stop thinking about yowling. But she’s gone, too.

And the bottom line is: we all end up in the same place.

We all end up knocking on heaven’s door.

The Cerebral Jukebox is playing
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
-Bob Dylan

Dedicated to the officers who lost their lives or were wounded, physically and mentally during the Insurrection
of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door