Author: Lisa Marie Blair

Painfully aware. Profoundly afraid. Perpetually falling in and out of love with humanity. She/They.

100 // Reorganization

I managed to rise early this morning, though I felt reluctant to begin the day. A start means there will be an end and an end to Sunday means the beginning of another long work week.

I tried to keep busy. When you don’t want to move, the last thing you should do is stop. I cleaned out the rest of the cat’s old things. I’m trying not to feel like I am erasing her, but without the food bowl, or the litter box, or the toys and treats, it’s as if she never existed. It helps to look at pictures and to remember that she was part of my life longer than most people I’ve known.

There is a sense of reorganization happening in my life now. It started with the season. When the weather finally warms, you long to open up, clear out, and clean up all that clutter and stagnant air.

It’s also my birthday month and I am readying for all the ways aging is going to change me—has already changed me. Every year the truth sinks in deeper. I am a year farther from my birth, from both the old traumas that held me in painful patterns and from all versions of me I could have been.

I’m also a year closer to my eventual death and a year further into the decline that will precede it. My body already isn’t what it used to be, but I know that if I make some changes now, changes I will be grateful for this time next year I am sure, I could reverse or at least halt the damage. I want to, or I want to want to, anyway.

Existential dread aside, I am feeling pretty good about turning a year older. I certainly don’t feel old and I certainly don’t feel like time is running out. Life has only ever gotten better and better, but sometimes better is as terrifying as worse.

099 // One Small Task at a Time

I woke up this morning and remembered. I remembered I needed to check on the cat, feed her and give her her medication, and I remembered I won’t need to do any of that anymore, ever. I remembered I will have to learn how to wake up, live, and go on a little bit differently now.

It’s amazing the impact such a small creature had on my day-to-day existence. It’s awesome to know that even this smallest presence can compound year after year. There is hope for me too.

The sun is bright and warm today and that is keeping me from falling into a proper funk. That doesn’t mean that motivation is coming easy, only that I have been given a fighting chance at productivity.

It helps to take the day one small task at a time. Start the laundry. Go to the home improvement store to pick up the benches we bought yesterday. Come home. Clean up the backyard. Eat lunch. Wash up the dishes. Move the cat’s old carrier and the heating pad. Acknowledge your grief. Write some words. Call your mom. Open a bottle of wine. Cook dinner.

The clouds are rolling in now. Beginning this evening, the warmth of Spring is forecasted to give way to Spring snow by Wednesday. I’m glad I got out in the sun today even if it was only to do yard work. It felt good to move, to sweat, to make something ready for new growth—the Earth, my life, myself.

098 // A Hard Goodbye

My wife and I have decided it is time to humanely euthanize our very sweet, but very old cat. It was a hard decision to make, especially after having her in our lives for nearly 18 years. That’s 90% of our relationship and the entirety of our adulthood!

She’s been the picture of health her whole life, but these past years she has declined so much. She can no longer do her normal cat things and there’s little that seems to bring her joy anymore so, to preserve her dignity and stop her pain, we have decided it is time to say goodbye.

My wife likes to say that getting her is what made us into a family. She was the first thing outside of ourselves that we felt jointly responsible for. I was scared to get her at first. Kittens can be a handful, but she was a good cat from the very start.

Of course, she did the normal kitten things in the beginning, but to a minor extent and for only a small duration. She used to steal my hair ties out of the bathroom drawers while I was at work and push them under the refrigerator. At night she would pounce on my feet or try to sleep on my chest. We had a parakeet that she tried to eat once, and a guinea pig she terrorized often, but that was about it.

Her greatest quality, in my eyes, was her harsh selectivity in what other people or animals she would accept or even acknowledge. She has never been a social cat. She hated every dog we ever owned and could not stand to have another cat in the house. She hid when other people came over, especially from children, and would often hiss or scratch when approached.

There is another side to her, though. Every once in a while, she would pick a random friend or family member of ours to welcome into the fold, typically someone who had no interest in her or any other cat. Whenever she picked someone to love on, I always felt that they must be a good person, and the fact that she was always so loving and affectionate with me made me feel like there was something she sensed in me that was good and worth trusting too.

That is what I will remember most about her: how she made me feel special. I will remember how she loved to sit on my lap or sleep on my chest with her head in my neck. We could lay that way for hours and whatever I was sad or stressed about would seem so far away and small, so very unimportant. I will remember that there is more to love, to living, and to being than we humans have limited ourselves to.

Sophia certainly wasn’t the pet we were looking for when we set out to make our little family, but she was definitely the one we needed and I have always known that she chose us more than the other way around.

There are no words to express how much she will be missed.

Sophia a.k.a. Sophia Bia, Sophia Marie, Cat, Sweet Cat, Ol’ Lady

Week 14: The Best of Me for Me

A full fourth of the year has passed me by and already I have to say, it’s far from what I thought it would be—far more exciting and far more exhausting too. My work schedule has been busier than I would have liked and between obligations there and at home, it’s been hard to make time for myself.

It hasn’t all been unpleasant or unsatisfactory. It’s only that, for a time there, romantic love and fulfilling friendships have taken precedent over personal passions, but I feel something changing.

I suppose it’s the warming weather and the sense that, despite my personal views, the pandemic is being forced to the edge of our collective consciousness. We’ve been given permission to go against our better judgment and that feels better than it should.

I’m left now with a deepening sense of security and normalcy I haven’t known in two years at least. I’m aware of the delusion, but it’s a hope too tempting to resist. I want things to be more like they were. I want to be more like I was. I suppose I still am, in a way. It’s hard to explain, but I am me, only just changed. What I want to find out now is what this new me could do with those old dreams and aspirations?

In the meantime, this week I will:

Keep a to-do list and with each item, indicate not just the steps needed to complete the task, but how to know when to stop. I’ve been taking on too many open-ended items and found them either too daunting or all-consuming. I either don’t want to start them or I don’t know how to end them.

Spend time with my notebooks. I have already returned my pocket notebook to its place, but my journal, logbook, and commonplace book have been long forgotten in dark and dirty bag pockets. I want to get back to doing what I enjoy: jotting, noting, tracking, and documenting.

Get some fresh air. The dog has been far too cooped up over the winter and she seems to know just as well as I that Spring is here and with it the end of excuses for staying in. It’s time to explore the neighborhood again, revisit her training, and work on my endurance. Bonus: Work out just three days.

Read 224 pages of White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith. I’ve been calculating pages to read by whether I want to finish in one week, 10 days, or a fortnight. White Teeth is rather long, so I’m shooting for 14 days to finish. That means 32 pages a day over lunch breaks and before bed.

Spend time with my cat. This week we are euthanizing our old cat, Sophia. There are no doubts now about whether it is right or whether it is time. Now it’s only a matter of making her last days some of her best. Treats, time outside, and lots of warmth and cuddles—for her as much as for me.

This week I will not let myself get overwhelmed. My work calendar is full, but there’s nothing beyond my capabilities and no shortage of support all along the way. the work will be hard but it’s not all going to be bad and, anyway, there will still be long hours I can make my own if I can meet them with the right attitude and focus.

It’ll take holding back a bit so the day doesn’t end with work. It’ll take giving “good enough” to everyone else and saving the best of me for me.

Photo by Katie Doherty on Unsplash

093 // Time Already Spent

Taking it slow and easy today. I’ve injured my back doing something so mundane it’d be embarrassing to give the details and that has left a lot of my to-do list impossible without further pain. So, the bare minimum and plenty of time on a heating pad are all the Sunday plans I can manage.

I’m spending time with the cat too. We have less than a week left until our appointment to euthanize her…I hated typing that sentence. I’m sad it has to be done, though I know in my heart and am reminded every time I look at her that this is the right thing.

Still, saying it to other people puts a sour taste in my mouth and a small seed of guilt in my chest. I worry that there is a greater moral law I may be breaking. Life and death are not mine to wield, my soul screams, but my human mind says if you can then you must.

I’m trying hard not to make this about me, though. It helps keep the grief at bay if I focus on making her last days peaceful and enjoyable. I let her sleep on her heating pad as much as she wants. I’m giving her treats by the handful. She can lay with me, or on me, as she pleases, and, when she is crying, lost, or in pain, I find her, reassure her, or help her to the bed or couch to rest her bones again.

I’m dreading the coming week. Not just because of the cat situation, but the workload too. I’m also feeling anxious and afraid. I have to drive somewhere new. I have to meet with some very important people. I have to teach in front of a class and take a class to learn to teach another one too. And that isn’t even a full work week!

The foreseeable future is all filled up. The time already spent before the present could arrive. It’s not so bad though. It means next weekend is just a few—large but narrow—tasks away.

055 // Sense the Enormity

I woke to the news of Russia invading Ukraine and have been living in a kind of shock since. I know so little about the “why” and I have even less to offer about the “what now?” but I can sense the enormity of the act. It’s so big, but it’s also so far away and there is so much suffering close by that I can’t see past. How can we do it all, fix it all, save them all?

There are dire predictions and grave warnings floating freely across social media timelines today, leaving me overwhelmed, powerless, and, frankly, disappointed in those who aren’t. I hope, as a country, we will do more than center our fears while homes burn and lives are lost half a world away. I hope we will do the right thing, fight on the right side, and for the right reasons this time.

I read something on Twitter this afternoon about the times we are living in being “very, very precedented“. I have a feeling that we are all trapped together in a terrible cycle. It’s as if these same dreadful events keep happening again and again. Only the date, and the technology available, changes. We keep living and inflicting the same patterns of pain on one another again, and again, and again.

These past years have worn me down. I can hardly watch the news or think about politics without a low and vague sense of panic I cannot name or place gripping me. Every day is the worst day. Every headline signals the end of life as we know it. I won’t live long enough to fix any of it. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing I can do is focus on loving where I can, being kind where I can, changing one mind of billions at a time, but at that rate, I wonder why it matters?

Then again, as I sit here wondering what love can do, there are those who spread hate and never stop to doubt its power. Hate has done so much damage, why wouldn’t love be capable of as much good or more? Of course it is.

Of course it is!