Mostly handling grief is a matter of surviving it. Just get through the night, I say. Just get through this day, is the next.

H0w one gets through depends on many things I suppose, but they all amount to one of two things. The first is distraction. The second is learning to bear the pain without attaching meaning to it.

For me in this particular case of grief, my distraction has come from Molecular Biology of the Gene.  As it happens the book arrived the day before my cat began her final approach to death. When I came home that night after her heart stopped, I went down into sleep and stayed there until the next day. Shock is exhausting.

Then I woke and wished I hadn’t. I got up did the things that had to be done (stepped around the cat puke on the floor and just left it) and returned to bed as soon as I could. I picked up Molecular Biology and started reading.

Science is about as perfect a world as can exist I think. There are questions. There are answers. Then there are more questions. And more answers. Hours went by without much pain. There’d be a sharp image of my cat struggling to take a breath just a minute or so before she died, but then the difficulties of the catabolite gene activator protein would save me and the horror of that image would fade again and my  mind would grapple with science that is, frankly, beyond my rather shoddy knowledge base.

Funny that I’ve been avoiding all to do with poetry.

Of course there are times when even the distractions don’t work. Those sharp needles of memory will burst through even the geometry of  the λ repressor-operator complex.  The temptation to add suffering to pain at those moments is rather strong. You know .. the why question, which is unanswerable (except in empirical terms) but always good for guilt and other self-destructive feelings. There is no why  of this except age, a failing heart, and those kinds of things. I’m glad we’re allowed to euthanize our pets when they are in extremis.  She would have died that night anyway, but this way I was able to give her some relief from the terror of not being able to breathe: oxygen therapy and then pentobarbitol and rapid cessation of any feeling at all.

What is left is my own pain. She was born into my hands. She died there too. And now all that is left of that relationship is an empty shoulder where she used to ride. But at least she isn’t sick, isn’t in pain, isn’t scared; I’ve been through this before when my son died, so I know I can manage. And I have Watson et al. So in time, I’ll know a bit more molecular biology, and the pain will back away.