Jennifer Stark

Thank you all so much for your kind words about Apollo. It’s been three weeks since we’ve lost him, and while we’re doing better, this baseline sadness will be present for a long time.

We picked up his ashes last Saturday – that was rough. I’ve never had a pet cremated before, and I was dreading this experience. We had picked a beautiful wooden box for him to rest in. What I wasn’t expecting was the other mementos that came home with him – nose prints and paw prints. A bottle of his hair. For two weeks, he had almost been an abstraction – if we didn’t still have his toys and belongings everywhere, it would have felt like he never existed, that he was a figment of our imagination. But now we had tangible reminders of his physical presence. The emergency vet is in a shopping center, so imagine a woman doing a full-on ugly cry in a car while she unpacks the bag containing these precious mementos, all in full view of a McDonald’s drive-thru.

We put the box on a dresser in our bedroom. We placed his collar on top of it and his two favorite treat balls next to it. The grief has been a little less intense now that he’s home – there’s closure in having him here with us, part of our family forever. This week was the first time I could come home and not feel sad while walking into a quiet house. No barking, no frenetic sniffing under the door while he waits for me to open it. But I still wrestle with sadness. When I work from home in the mornings, Mittens still comes under my desk, just like she used to when Brother was alive. But she never lays in his bed – I tried plopping her there a couple of times, and she ran away. But yesterday I looked down and saw this.

And then a couple of minutes later, she went to Brother’s old bed.

It had been three weeks since a pet has cuddled in that bed. I cried as I pet her. She left a couple of minutes later. Mom was making it weird.

Cats.

I bought some bluebonnets from HEB and they’ve started blossoming. I like to think that they’re blossoming for Apollo.

I think encountering grief adds a lot of clarity to things that maybe we were ignoring, or weren’t fully understanding. I’ve definitely experienced that and have made some decisions that had been brewing in me for awhile but I had been avoiding. I’ll write more about that at a later time.

I’ll eventually post about what has been keeping me busy these past couple of months, but until then, I appreciate your honoring Chicky’s memory with me.