How We Love
The first time I drove by the dead cat on Kawaihae Road, I thought, I will see the person who lost that pet today. The second time, on my way home from town, it felt like I was driving in slow motion. Coming over the Waiaka Bridge, I was already gazing toward where I had seen the cat. A man was kneeling tenderly next to the cat's body. Gently, gently he lifted the stiff carcass, cradling it like a baby, and he walked slowly across the road to where he lived.
I looked into the back seat of my car to see that my six-year-old son had also witnessed the removal of the body. "Was that his cat?" he asked.
"Yes," I answered.
"What was he doing? Was it dead?" he asked.
"Yes," I answered, "I think it was." I waited a long time. My son's look was one of slight worry. Somberness.
"I don't think it was dead," he finally said. "Maybe it was sleeping." By now I had tears in my eyes and a small sense of my own absurdity, crying for a stranger's cat. But it wasn't the cat that made me weep. It was the way we love. The way we give ourselves to each other and even sometimes to our pets. The human propensity to take the greatest of all possible risks, for what could be more dangerous than opening ourselves up to the possibility of loss?
He's not ready to contemplate this, I thought. "Yes, maybe the cat was sleeping," I answered. We rode home in silence.
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway "had a perpetual sense . . . of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." She must have been talking about this. How every day is another moment in which it is possible to lose what is dearest to us and how, while we might be surrounded by a hundred people, we are alone in that one respect. Our grief is our own. Wholly our own.
It's not the roadkill cat that interests me. It's the risk involved in loving, and the way we are willing to take it. I was 18 when my boyfriend was killed in a car crash. When his mother gave me a snapshot of him at five years of age, poised mid-flight and glistening wet over a blue swimming pool, I thought, Never. Never would I open myself up to the kind of hurt it is possible to experience in having and losing a child.
I don't know whether it is some amnesiac quality in the cycle of grieving, or if it is simply the human tendency in the end to hope, but my resolve not to have children did not hold, and eight years later, my first son was born; two and a half years after that, my second. And it is now, now that I am loving and raising them, that I know myself as truly brave. How intrepid one must be to love this deeply. What utter courage is required to be this vulnerable. Sometimes my love for them is so heavy it hurts, and at other times it is light and carries me. "I love you too much," I tell them with kisses, and it is a paradox I have chosen to embrace. It is the paradox I live in loving someone so intensely as a mother loves her children. As a lover her beloved. A twin his other half. And perhaps — for who am I to say? — as a man loves his cat.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE
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