Sorrow Is Part of It

 

How do I write this? I know what has happened, and it is my responsibility to tell the story. To skip this surprising chapter would be dishonest, and to be dishonest is to belittle the truth of The Greening. Still, I don’t know how I will do this. Lacking any purview or plan, I can only get this story out quickly lest cowardice steal it away.

The Greening is not a pre-conceived thing. The Greening is not something to be collared or fenced by a script. At its essence, The Greening is about newness, and discovery, and wonder, and humor, and change, and life itself. Necessarily, sorrow is also part of it.

“All the sweet green trees of Atlanta burst, like little bombs, or little pom-poms, shaken by a careless hand that dries them off and leaves again. Life just kind of empties out…less a deluge than a drought.” (1)

I had to take Mamasita, The Fading Tiger, and Aldo back to the Humane Society. This is just the beginning of this story, but an important beginning.

My hope, a selfish hope perhaps, was to find a human family to adopt each of the foster kittens before their tenure in my garage was through. Such was the genesis of The Greening, looking back those many weeks. As we know, Little Dirty and Panda were adopted and thus went straight from here to their permanent homes.

As for the others, I put elbow grease into finding them homes, too. I spent a number of days strategically scattering colorful flyers about. I posted flyers at Java Café, a few antique stores, a bike shop, The Shoe Barn, Culver’s, The Blue Spoon, a lakeside market, two local taverns, and who remembers where else. I did get some calls from the flyers – interested parties who took directions to my house and then never showed up. I then spent a Saturday sitting with the cats at a Sauk City pet supply store where the kittens got to run around and meet face-to-face with parakeets, rabbits, ferrets, and fish. Patrons of all ages picked them up, ooh’ed and ah’ed at their fur and friendliness, but nobody hinted at adoption. I reached the point where my dreams of heroic success faded and dried out with a humbling thud. I knew I had to get the cats more visibility at a place where people go because they are looking for pets. This was the Humane Society, naturally.

The thought of taking the family back made me uneasy. It wasn’t out of fear of what might befall them, as the Sauk County Humane Society is full of wonderful people, people I’ve met just recently through the fostering program. From the director to the outreach coordinator to the animal staff, I’ve found them very skilled, organized, and big-hearted. They truly do the best they can on a donation-driven operating budget and limited space.

What upset me was that I failed the family. Mamasita’s brood had in many ways become my brood. They were a responsibility I accepted whole-heartedly and enjoyed like a reborn child, complete with faith of a storybook ending. Putting them back into the carrier seemed unnatural, premature. My last opening of the garage door was the first and only time that Mamasita did not jump up to greet me. Instead, she hid. With The Fading Tiger and Aldo mewing in the carrier, I got down on hands and knees in the garage, crawled between desk legs and between boxes, and grabbed a frightened Mamasita. In another first, she twisted and squirmed uncomfortably in my arms.

She knew. I knew. And neither one of us was happy about it.

The Humane Society graciously agreed to put these three in the large, front cage in the reception area. It was there I saw Aldo’s head tilt in his famously inquisitive way, but this time behind a barrier that separated us as never before. As I left, behind me were the kittens I had watched and known and held since the first day of their life. And behind me was the mama who nursed and cared for them all along the way.

“We’re never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy.” (2)

Of course, calculated practicality was not the sole reason behind the trip back to the Humane Society. No way. I would have kept that family how ever long it took to get them into good homes, or even kept them forever myself (testing the limits of how many pets a person can really have). No, there was another reason to take them back, something beyond reason and practicality. Something crazy. There was another litter, one week old, and the Humane Society was desperate to place them in a foster home.

You see, taking Mamasita and company back truly wasn’t ever in my playbook of options. The Humane Society called me and asked, motivated by their need for to place this new litter in an immediate foster home. You see, young kittens can’t safely grow up in a cage breathing air shared by dozens of others. It’s risky. It can expose them to a virus and nasty upper respiratory infection, often followed by pneumonia. In the worst case, it can steal their breath right out of them forever before their immune system is developed.

So the Humane Society called me and asked. And I hemmed and hawed. I stalled for two days. It didn’t feel right to take the first litter back, but it didn’t feel right to leave the others there with no other foster home options. In the end, I guess I reasoned out that the best chance of a quick adoption for the first litter was displaying their cuteness in the front cage at the Humane Society, and the best chance for life of the new litter was in my garage. So, on the fateful day that I brought Mamasita, The Fading Tiger, and Aldo to their cage, I came home with another tiny mom and a new litter of six squirmy kittens. It wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t planned. But it beat having my conscience tugging at me. My conscience tugs very hard.

And besides, the new mom was a gentle and friendly purr-box. How much trouble could this be? I was a seasoned veteran by now.

“So many cities and windows and lives, and through each one there's a soul that strives to survive. So pay no mind, my sorrow's fine. The day is alive, and that's why I cry.” (3)

The Greening is not all budding leaves and playful kittens. It can be cruel, too. And nobody, no creature, is impervious. Just the other day, I found a young Linden tree that I planted in April with its leaves half eaten by Japanese beetles. On one night, earlier in the spring, I heard this awful high pitched screaming from high up in an oak tree. Something small, likely a baby bird or squirrel in a nest, was being eaten alive. The screaming finally stopped and a large silhouette scampered back from the limb to the trunk of the tree. On another night, I swerved too late on the road and hit a lumbering raccoon. I drug the body off the road, cursing myself for not being more attentive. In a system where many living things must strive just to survive, the newness of spring for some is short-lived.

The new foster family turned out to be quite sick. The kittens got congested, and then appeared to be drowning in their own lungs. On Friday, four days after they arrived, the first kitten died in my hand. She took her last labored breath and fell limp. Before 2 a.m. that night, two more had passed. I buried them in a clearing in the woods and placed rocks as headstones. Burying them kept me busy, distracted from despondency. For a while, at least.

I stayed up with the rest that night, trying to squeeze drops of water and kitten formula in their drying mouths. I wondered if and when the others would finally turn it around and snap back to how they seemed when they first came to me, but subconsciously I was sinking. On Sunday, I woke up to find another one gone. On Monday, another. Each one I tried to hold in my hands through the final phase of their much labored, desperate breathing. This is a job I wish never to repeat as long as I live. To see innocence expire like that…so helpless and small, a little being that never made a bad decision, never said anything mean or did anything cruel, never lied, never hurt, never stole or cheated, never did anything other than have the wrong molecules float into the nose and lungs…to see this and feel this in your hand is unsettling.

When I was very young, I remember watching my dad bury one of our pets. I believe it was our beagle Fandy. I remember the stone arrangement he placed on the grave. The Nelms family grew up with many dogs and cats, and over the years this stone collection grew larger. My brothers and sisters would sometimes wander back into the woods and point at the stones and call out the name of the dog or cat buried there. We moved once during our childhood, and when I was many years older I buried our beloved dog Tennessee Cotton in a different wooded area, down a hill and above a dry creek bed. My dad was there again, but this time I did the shovel work and heavy lifting. 21 years later, we still talk about that dog Tennessee Cotton. She was a dog I’d known my whole childhood. Come to think of it, we talk about them all still and, though no longer pointing at the stones, we call them by name.

Five tiny graves now lined the clearing in my new woods. The kittens buried here did not have names, so I could not call them out. I could only smooth the dirt and find suitable, respectable stones.

“Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked? When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.” (4)

Some strange, perhaps irrational, hope burned inside me though. One of the kittens, a broad-faced little brown munchkin with round eyes and a striped forehead, was actually faring very well. He seemed immune to whatever had taken his brothers and sisters. He ate heartily. He breathed easily. He started to wobble around early, surefooted and big-bellied. He was warm and robust. At some point in this whole drama his life became to me the life of all the kittens. If he survived, he’d represent them with every pounce, purr, and piss of his good long life.

My hopes collapsed last night when I first saw him breathing through his mouth. This was the telltale sign of the others’ trouble. Pneumonia. Drowning on dry land. I refused to believe it. I even rolled up a mat to sleep in the garage, so desperate was I to have things go differently for this one. He was the one I had gotten to know. On him rested my hope that this would be a story of one miraculous life rather than five sad deaths.

Despite his vigor 24 hours earlier, he faded fast. Unable to bear the thought of not trying everything, I took him to a wonderful vet in Sauk City for inspection this afternoon. The vet, Sherri, had been talking me through my situation since I noticed the first kitten fading. She was realistic, but understood fully why I wanted to do anything possible for this last one. She leveled with me, though, as is her job.

And so it was. We sat under a tree on this warm July day, under the shade of a small tree. She took a needle to his chest, he cried out desperately and I winced. A second later it was over.

A sixth stone was added to the woods, another stone with no name.

“(There’s) nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be. It's easy. All you need is love.” (5)

Tonight I sat on the south beach of Devil ’s Lake and caught the sunset. I had gone for a swim, the long way across and back, hoping to assuage my raw emotions in the cool clean glacier waters. I swam well – strong and fluid – and could have gone forever, probably because I just didn’t want to leave those waters and join back to dry land and the real world. The lake was especially calm tonight, soft waters holding me up by my own unfailing lungs. I was amazed at this stillness of the water, as still as I’ve ever seen.

I finished the swim, comfortably chilled and a little calmed, and sat on a picnic table on the south shore. Sunset happens about 30 minutes early at Devil’s Lake given the elevation of the west ridge. As the sun went down and scattered orange and red off the clouds, the light caught those still waters and revealed a moment of truth. I saw, in just that very instant of reflection, that those still waters were not so still after all. Here, at this perfect angle and perfect hue, an infinite amount of tiny, shimmering waves were caught in the light like an ovation. And I understood at once that those waters had always been moving, just invisible to my five senses. Only in that brief and blessed moment did the light reveal the motion, that tireless motion of the waters.

There are tragedies every day, for many people. No matter how frustrated or angry we get, or how unjust things seem, we might take pause to consider the moving waters and to heed John Lennon’s famous lyrics: “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be. It’s easy…all you need is love.” My new foster kittens that had all died might be a tragedy that pails in comparison to others, but I did love them and the sorrow was real. That has to count for something, or perhaps it counts for everything. I ask you to consider this: What if six little innocent ones – because somebody held them and fretted over them and prayed for them like they were the only thing in the world – are now welcomed as royal souls somewhere in the deep mystery? What if – because somebody tried hard to help and failed but tried nonetheless – that pain they knew in life is now as far away from them as the east is from the west? What if their new breath, in some new form deep and easy, now joins in what moves the waters of the heavens? What if now, finally, they have their names?

You may find this fanciful thinking. You may accuse me of self-medicating my sorrow with tall tales and make believe. But to me, the sorrow that is part of it all is also proof of it all. After all, sorrow cannot exist without love, and love is that unexplainable, illogical thing. It reflects the light just right, and for a moment we see the waters and remember that they are ever-moving.

-bn

Six stones.

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