Holiday Time with Grief

Another holiday and another pet has left us.  How to get over the hump.  How to plan and make progress.

Transcript

00:00.48
Christina Scovel
Hello, hello, and welcome back to a pinch of honesty. My guess is this is probably the last podcast before 2025, but ah no guarantees. I have a nice hot cup of tea and my reading glasses on because it seems like I'm constantly ah without them and unable to read anything that I have written down.

00:26.64
Christina Scovel
age, you know, it happens to all of us. It is a blessing to happen to all of us. With that being said, we had to put down our cat yesterday. It was a year to the day of putting down our previous cat, Jack, and be it, yeah well putting Dobay down. So for those of you that don't know, we had three cats, Dobay, Jack, and Kona.

00:56.40
Christina Scovel
They were siblings. And we only wanted one cat when we ended up getting all three of these kitties. We were looking for a cat to be a companion for an elderly cat we had. We were looking for a kitten. And when we went to go look at them, they were siblings. And I had asked my husband, you know, which one of these do we pick? And he was like, you know, we take all three. So we ended up with all three of them. And last year on the day after Christmas, we had to put down Jack, which was devastating.

01:25.77
Christina Scovel
This year on the Monday before Christmas, um, Dobay has been, I should say past tense had been drooling a ton and we thought maybe she had like a tooth that was bugging her or something. So we took her into the vet clinic and they said, no, she had a massive cancerous growth underneath her tongue, which, um,

01:55.04
Christina Scovel
was huge and it was like bleeding and they said it was inoperable. And even if they did did it do like an operation, they weren't sure, you know. that she would even really survive it because cats use their tongues for everything, right? They groom themselves. And she was miserable, right? So she was only coming out and having like a lick or two of wet food. She really wasn't drinking much. um So we had them pump her full of fluids and a whole bunch of stuff to make her feel okay. Some pain meds through Christmas, we wanted to see how she would do. and

02:30.87
Christina Scovel
it was only getting worse. So with that, you know, um Christmas day, I just spent six hours watching horrible television and cuddling her and letting her sleep on her new Christmas blanket. And then we put her down yesterday, which was horrible. It was just horrible. It's still horrible.

02:58.81
Christina Scovel
and One of the things that I hadn't really realized, well, I guess I did realize, but I didn't know the impact of it, was that I should have known she was crazy sick when she stopped doing yoga with me. So this past weekend, you know she wouldn't even come in to do yoga every morning, every morning for the past year. you know I get up and I do yoga first thing in the morning. And she has joined me every single morning for a year straight.

03:29.68
Christina Scovel
And the weekend before Christmas, she just stopped coming to do yoga. And I tried to forcibly get her to come in and hang out with me on the Monday before we took her up for her vet appointment. And she wanted nothing to do with, you know, our favorite activity, which really, I think is an indicator that, that she was feeling so poorly. Right. Um, but now.

03:58.33
Christina Scovel
I am sitting in my sanctum, but I don't want to do yoga because I don't have her. And it feels wrong if that makes any sense. And so it's like another piece, I think, of grief when routines change and things change. How do you overcome that? And I am currently feeling overwhelmed with choices to the point where I'm having like, and there I'm sure there's some term for it where you physically can't make a decision because there's just too much, too many choices. So I have loads and loads of things that need to get done around the house. And because I have spent basically the past five days or six days doing nothing but cuddling a sick cat,

04:56.84
Christina Scovel
And now grieving the absence of my sick cat, so we're down to one cat, and she is clearly off as well, right? Both of her siblings are gone now. Then I'm just having a hard time deciding to do anything where, you know,

05:17.43
Christina Scovel
before I thought, oh, Christmas break, holiday break, I'll have like weeks where I can edit my book and I can get this needle point done and I can get my Christmas quilt. Like you have this list of things where you're in your mind going through them being like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And instead, um I did a crossword puzzle and cuddled a cat. you know i I just actively avoided doing any of these things. And so now I'm, I'm trying to figure out how to get over this hump. So I'm definitely up against this hump. How do I move forward in such a way that I feel okay doing it? And currently I don't feel okay. So part of why I wanted to record this podcast is because I think we all go through grief of all kinds of things, right? So it's not just,

06:10.28
Christina Scovel
losing a pet or losing a loved one, there's you know loss of a job, there's um other things that we grieve when when they are gone. And as I've said before, I don't think we as as a nation, and I'm speaking in the US, we don't allow grief to be ugly sometimes, right? And I think we often judge it, right?

06:39.30
Christina Scovel
So yes, if it's a spouse, yes, if it's a kid, you can grieve, you can grieve hard, sure. But what if it's a dream that dies, right? Why can't I grieve that dream and let it be ugly, you know?

06:59.12
Christina Scovel
um Other pet owners out there will understand how hard it is to lose a pet. Other folks might not, right? And they might think the grief of a pet is overrated.

07:13.33
Christina Scovel
But it's not. It's hard. I told my husband I'm not sure I want to any more cats after this. It's just so hard. So when they were putting her down, I squatted down.

07:34.66
Christina Scovel
And I just looked her in the eyes and I kept telling her she was a good girl and how much we were going to miss her. And that we loved her. And I could feel when her heart stopped, but the kitty didn't struggle. She just relaxed into my hand. It's like she had faith in me.

08:03.31
Christina Scovel
that I was doing the right thing for her. It's like so devastating. Cause you feel, I feel always horrible putting down an animal. Even if I know it's absolutely the right thing to do. it's it For her it was beyond the right thing to do. It had to be done. She was suffering so much. You know, she couldn't clean herself cause her mouth was so swollen.

08:30.70
Christina Scovel
Um, they had a very hard time even getting the IV in because a lot of her veins were collapsing because she was so dehydrated. It was absolutely necessary, but it doesn't make it feel any easier. It feels fucking rough. So we've decided in our house, um,

08:55.03
Christina Scovel
Fuck the day after Christmas, right? This is two pets the day after Christmas. Fuck the day after Christmas. um It's just, it's it's it's too it's too hard on all this. So, deep breath.

09:16.18
Christina Scovel
I'm gonna sit down. I'm going to go through what I want to accomplish over break. And more than anything, I'm probably going to sit down and I'm actually going to start thinking about 2025. And what are some of my goals for 2025 when it comes to things that are lingering? so um you know With Halloween, I went through and came up with my plan for this year. But there are things like, for example, a lot of my um annual things roll over on January 1st, right? So like my reading rolls over on January 1st. How many books do I want to read in a year? Those types of things. So um I will sit down and I'll probably chug through some of those.

10:00.05
Christina Scovel
um I will also probably begin to schedule in slot in, um, just some one-on-one time with my kiddo, because I think she is actually having a very rough time with the loss of our cat. And she's trying to put on a brave face because we're all so upset. Um, which I think is actually not good for her to do. I i want her to understand that she can live

10:34.15
Christina Scovel
She can be in grief, right? Sit in grief with us and it's okay. right it's there's There's nothing wrong with that. And then currently I feel like she thinks she needs to kind of be strong since we're so upset, which is crazy, right? She's 12. She should cry with us as well. so There you go. I don't know. Maybe I'll get to a ah podcast on January 1st. Maybe I'll, I'll come back on to check in with all of you guys. Um, this year for a pinch of honesty, just, you know, you know, it sends out stats. It sends out reminders about everything.

11:06.49
Christina Scovel
Um, I got just some magnificent updates on, um, kind of, you know, where the podcast is and, um, what's going well for the podcast. Um, as always, right? The number one, listen to, um, podcasts out there. but he's good by things, it's still good by things. um It's making me think that I really need to get it back at it, get on it, clean out again. um According to the hosting agent that I use for this podcast, it's grown by 37% this year, so thank you for all of my listeners. um It also ah tells me where my podcast is the most popular and

11:55.89
Christina Scovel
I think something that's absolutely crazy is helsinki Helsinki. I don't know what's going on in Helsinki, but you guys are there for me. You are one of my top downloaders, which is absolutely insane. I i love the fact that Helsinki is number one.

12:12.83
Christina Scovel
um Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee are on that list as well as Los Angeles, California, which all of those places to me, um the fact that I resonate there with you. ah Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. um When it comes to countries that listen to this podcast, it's United States, Finland, the UK, Singapore, and India is the order. and The fact that it is broad reaching and it it clearly has folks in other countries where it touches them and they feel like they need a little bit of honesty in their lives as well. That ah makes me feel like I am true and honest out there that other people hear what I'm saying and and see it as um maybe useful in their own lives to see that they're not alone, right? That we're all kind of in this together. So with all of that,

13:08.64
Christina Scovel
I want to wrap up with something that a girlfriend gave me, which is that um there is something which is called the Yule Cat. You know, speaking of cats, um it's considered a monster. I cannot pronounce the name correctly. It is a jolokotur,

13:26.89
Christina Scovel
or a Christmas cat. It is a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic Christmas folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during Christmas season and eat people who do not receive new clothes before Christmas Eve. um In other versions of this story, the cat just eats the food of people without new clothes. um It is associated with other figures in Icelandic folklore.

13:54.95
Christina Scovel
And um it if you go Google this, there's all kinds of images of of cat beasts, Icelandic cat beasts that are out there.

14:07.59
Christina Scovel
I think the fact that there is a monstrous cat that um eats people who don't get new clothes um really speaks to my inner dark self that just needs something to laugh at. And I think that this Yule cat is out for me this season. so With that, I hope that everyone had a merry Christmas, Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa, whatever holiday you celebrate. And if I don't catch you before the new year, happy new year. And I definitely have a new plan for casting for this next year, which I will probably cover in my first podcast of the new year. But with that, thank you for tuning in and I'll catch you on the flip side.