There's also always denial.
'most everyone has probably read at least one of my posts about Weasie (1992-2012), but only in some of them have I mentioned her brother. My surprise early Christmas present in '92 was
two cat-olescents. Because of good-natured arguing over whether I should be adopted by a dog or a cat, when felines showed up I announced a compromise. I named the larger, male, kitten Puppy.
Long story short: The following March, Puppy went outside not long before a blizzard hit. He didn't respond to my calls as I walked the neighborhood looking for him. Flyers, and calls around to shelters and animal-control offices, were to no avail. Puppy never came home again.
With "animal instincts" that will never not be eerie to me, Weasie knew after no more than two days that her brother was gone for good. She went from high anxiety to deep grieving. For close to three weeks she nibbled at food, sulked, and cried before visibly "snapping out of it" and returning to her usual ways.
When the end of Weasie's nineteen years "and change" in this life was near, I talked to her about Puppy as she lay across my lap and the pre-euthanasia sedative took hold. "Do you see him? He's been waiting for you," etc.
The mind plays tricks in strange ways sometimes. Puppy was properly mourned by his sister. But to this day I feel like I never did him justice. Since he was never found there's that kernel of denial that says he's out there somewhere doing fine and never died. From a selfish point of view I'm in a weird way positive about this. I was spared the details of how his life was taken and never saw the aftermath. His vanishing was easier to handle than watching Weasie stay her feisty spunky self in the face of cancer, before eventually not being able to withstand how it was destroying her and begging for relief. My belief is that they're now both, in fact, "out there somewhere doing fine and never died." But after nearly 2 1/2 years I still think about Weasie with those happy/sad feelings called nostalgia every day. Puppy, on the other hand? Memories of him are there, too, but with denial in seemingly permanent effect the feelings aren't the same in a way not easily explained.
Hope's springing eternal is not a bad thing! Blaliko regularly puts me into "hoping mode" with her jaunts away from home that have lasted for up to eight days.
She may have trained me by late 2012 that her disappearing acts are no cause for alarm. That still doesn't make it any less worrisome for her cat-dad, though her daughter seems to pull through just fine every time.
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