6:26am April 8, 2015

I hate my internal jukebox sometimes.

It either plays back songs that have lyrics that reflect how I’m feeling (often I’ve “listened” to half the song, or even the whole one repeated over and over five or six times, before I realize how it pertains to what I’m feeling right then). Or else completely original, very complex, instrumental cello music for some reason.

Really long post dealing with death (my father’s actual death, and fear of my cat dying, mostly, with fear of human friends and relatives dying thrown in for good measure), under the cut.

Right now it’s playing one of the few Madonna songs that can actually affect me emotionally.  Which sucks because I’ve barely slept in the last few days, and I need to sleep, and I can’t sleep because I’m crying.  And it’s not just my feelings that are making me cry, it’s the song reflecting them back in my face like that.

Okay so most people here know my dad died this year, and some people here know that I was hospitalized recently and lost a lot of memories in the process – pretty much everything from December until just before my second hospital stay (I went home for a couple days in between, I think, but not my home, a friend’s home, because I was totally out of it and couldn’t be safely left alone).  I’ve got more and more idea of what’s happened during that time, but very few actual sensory memories that I’d call a memory.

Anyway, Fey has been sick, that’s one thing I remember.  And she’s old, so that’s really worrisome.  She’s 16.  Or turning 16 in a month or a month ago, I’m still not sure quite when I am time-wise, but she’s roughly 16 and she’s a cat so that’s definite old lady territory.

And I know I didn’t tell anyone except maybe Anne, that when I was in the hospital I lost all of my emergency money, someone stole it out of my purse. And I also dropped my power supply while they were wheeling my bed around the hospital so I had to pay money to get a new one, in addition to losing my emergency money.  Hospitals are serious when they say not to bring valuables.  If you have any way of getting your money/valuables/etc. home when you’re going to be hospitalized, do so or you could regret it.

Anyway, this fricking song is getting to me because Fey spent all day today watching over me, trying to protect and comfort me, while I had a raging migraine from not sleeping in two days.  And yet she’s the one who’s probably far sicker than I was, and I can’t do anything about it.  So of course, this has to go through my head:

Little girl, never forget her face, laughing away your tears when she was the one who felt all the pain

and

I fought to be so strong, I guess you knew I was afraid you’d go away too

and

Keep your head held high, ride like the wind, never look behind, life isn’t fair, that’s what she said so I try not to care

I just hope Fey understands she doesn’t have to hang around for my sake.  That’s something I tried really hard to make sure my dad knew, that he could leave whenever he felt like it was time – and he did, according to my mom.   I obviously want Fey to get better and live a long time, but this is the first illness she’s had where I really am not sure she’s going to get better, or that we’ll even figure out what went wrong.  I’m obviously going to take her to the vet somehow, one way or another.  She’s getting way too thin, even though we’ve switched her entirely over to dry food for the extra calories.  And she throws up way too often no matter what she eats, or whether she eats at all.  And she sits around crouching looking like she’s in pain or queasy or both.  And she still thinks she’s the one who has to protect me, no matter what I say to her.

(We have a weird relationship.  I’m pretty certain she thinks of me as a very large, very troublesome, very stupid kitten who has to be perpetually looked after because I don’t know whether to come in out of the rain.  I get really irritated when people call me her mother.  I’m not her mother, I’ve never had a maternal relationship with her, she’s the one who thinks she’s the mother if anything.  And anyone who knows anything about mother cats would then understand why I have scars all over my right leg from her biting it repeatedly and often.  The people at the hospital were afraid I was being abused.  I had to explain over and over again that they were cat bites, and one nurse started telling everyone I had a tiger at home, not a cat.)

The one thing I fear more than Fey dying, is her hanging around too long, before or after death (I don’t know if after is possible, but I know just from the shape of how things work, that if it is possible, it would be a really dumb idea on her part to even try that – don’t know if she knows that, though, I don’t know what cats know and don’t know about death, and I don’t know what she in particular knows either), because she thinks she has to for my sake.  I’ve told her this in as many ways as I know how, but I don’t know how much gets across the species barrier.

Because… basically as far as I can tell, there are right and wrong ways to go about protecting your loved ones after you’ve died, and trying to keep your ego  (if that’s the right word?) around is the wrong way, and even the best-case scenarios if you try and resist what’s supposed to happen, are pretty bad for everyone involved.  Sometimes you have to go away, and accept that you’re going away, in order to come back in any form that would be useful to anyone you love.  Resist that, and the only thing anyone will get out of it is trouble.

I don’t claim to know what, precisely, happens if you try to hang around too long.  I just know that whatever it is, I don’t want it to happen to Fey, nor do I want to have to deal with the results of her pig-headedness if she chooses to try that route.  And I am pretty sure that the only way to be of any use, love, protection, comfort, whatever, to your loved ones after you die, starts with accepting your own death, not resisting it.  

I mean most people probably resist it to some extent, but there’s resisting it to some extent, and there’s resisting it to the point that you don’t get absorbed into love because you’re too afraid that love will destroy you.  And if you don’t get absorbed into love, nothing you try to do purportedly in the name of love, for people you love, will be able to have love’s influence on it – and that’s why nothing good can come of that.  

Fortunately I think in the end, most people, even with a fairly big fear of death, aren’t so terrified that they screw things up that badly for themselves or their loved ones.  But I do get afraid Fey just might get confused enough to try.

Why am I on tumblr at 6 in the morning, without having slept even a little, trying to explain my views on death and cats and eighties Madonna songs?

Well part of it’s got to be a medication error that I can’t do anything but wait out (and that really, really sucks), but the rest of it is probably because my dad died and I have two close sick relatives, a sick friend (who herself is more of a third parental figure than an ordinary friend), and a sick cat and I’m afraid of everyone dying at once or something.  

And I had to learn all over again that my dad died because the delirium wiped out that memory for awhile too – fortunately I got all that back, which gives me some hope that maybe at some point I’ll get the last few months back too.  But I’m actually shocked that I still have his beard necklace even, because when I was in the hospital I kept taking it off and putting it on again because I didn’t know what it was, or who I was, or really much of anything.  I didn’t even know my name – past or current.  Or where I lived.  Or who I was.  Or who anyone else was.  Or anything really at all.  

And I know close to nothing from the first hospital stay because I hallucinated so much (and also i think switching between my regular meds and meds through my IV port thing, which often causes seizures that nobody ever detects unless they know me well because my seizures mostly take the form of time going in repetitive loops so tangled that I get completely disoriented even without delirium on top of it, and only people who know me well seem to be able to tell the difference between me being disoriented and me not being disoriented) that I can’t trust any of my memories of it, except when someone else was around that I can ask.  

And I think the migraine from yesterday is coming back due to not sleeping, so I have to get off the computer and hope like hell that I can sleep a couple hours before someone comes and wakes me up again.  Or at least lie here with my eyes closed and rest, sometimes that helps a little even if I don’t sleep.  

Meanwhile I don’t really want to deal with anyone else I know dying, not that I have much choice in the matter, nobody gets that, so I feel kind of stupid even acting like I should.  It also seems weird that I can accept my own death but not always other people’s.  But then life is weird, so death probably is too.  

I really don’t like being around the hospital precisely because of the amount of death that goes on there though, it makes the whole place feel charged with the wrong kind of intensity to deal with when you’re delirious.  But again, that’s kind of what hospitals are for – sick and dying people, so that means delirium and death are both going to happen there a lot.  But my friend told me that the reason my hallucinations were all about death this time was because of my dad (without realizing that I didn’t know, at the time, that my dad was dead; fortunately I wasn’t too shocked by the news) and fears about everyone else in my life who’s been sick lately (mother, “second mother”, grandmother, and cat, all at once, all with things that look potentially serious).

Now I really need to get off the computer and quit typing or this migraine will be even worse than yesterday’s, and this will all spiral off to hell in a handbasket.  May already be too late to change anything, but I’m gong to try to sleep.

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