On Grief.

Louis Shalako

My dad died about four years ago.

The worst of the grief lasted about six months. The first year was pretty rough.

My father was eighty when he passed away.

He had lived a good life.

I knew he had Parkinson’s disease in about 2002, and he passed away, I’m thinking, about September 2012.

I think about him every day, and yet the pain, the loss, the regret is much diminished.

My grandmother, who was 100 and a half years old, died two months later. I don’t know why, but the effect was a lot different.

Maybe it was the two of them leaving so close together. The passing of my grandmother affected me so much less.

I was already numb.

The funny thing is, that my cat was killed by a car. That would be about 2011. The grieving process was exactly the same—the first six months were sheer hell. The first fucking year was pretty bad—and we’re talking a God-damned cat here, not my grandmother…

I had the cat trained.

He would lay flat on his back, sort of under my armpit, laying in bed, his head on my shoulder, purring away and looking up at me with love in his eyes, until I said hey!

You little bastard.

And I that's when I rolled over and went to sleep.

That’s just love or something, and yet I must have loved my grandmother too.

A hundred years is one hell of a long time, and so is eighty years.

But that fucking cat wasn’t even full grown when some poor bastard hit him going down Kathleen St.

It’s all right, Bud.

It can happen to anyone.

END