If you didn’t read the first instalment, it’s here. This one makes sense without it, but it makes more sense if you read it together.
cw: death
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It wasn’t until I was back in Ottawa, almost a year later, that my yeye’s death felt like a reality. I think as much as the pre-mourning allowed me to accept his passing, I still didn’t know what it actually meant. In part, my acceptance of what happened was easy, because he had already been gone for a while (distance-wise, not his being) for so long. When he did pass, I went back to work, lived as much as Covid regulations would let me, and spent a lot of time watching Survivor in my room.
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I know I keep talking about Ottawa (or, kanata) in my entries, but I think the city just serves as a symbol of any frustration, loneliness, anxiety, etc. I have about growing up and aging in general. I’ve probably done this to myself, though, because I’ve somehow created this boundary in my mind: that my emotions can’t be of excess in Montréal. If the womb is where I’m the most comfortable to express myself, then my childhood room is the closest I can get to being the warmest, safest, most secure.
I always wonder if everyone feels this way—a delayed Peter Pan syndrome that’s consequence of a misconceived desire to grow up too young. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to leave Ottawa. I wanted to go and experience the world and be a person in another space. I thought that as long as I was in my parents’ home, I couldn’t develop and be my own person. There’s something immensely romantic about going somewhere new and reinventing yourself.
It seems silly to write about now, though. I can more or less still understand the desire to get out of the suburbs (katia described kanata as a space that ‘has no historical consciousness’, which is immensely apt), but I wish past me had a better understanding that any romanticism of ‘new life’ came from my desire for escapism. I wish I appreciated my parents’ love and care more, basked in it when I could’ve. I wish I appreciated how good I had it, before deciding that it wasn’t for me.
What I’m trying to say, is that I’ve always conceptualized Montréal as a place that wasn’t Ottawa. Sometimes it does feel like a fantasy world, a dream-space almost: where living is inexpensive, people are attractive, and things seem to have a funny way of working out. I almost see it like the casino they go to in Percy Jackson (lmao sorry for this AGED reference), where time isn’t real and people are content just indulging in their hedonism. And you never stop to think about what you’re doing, because it feels like everyone around you is doing it, and they seem happy to do it.
Actually being back in Kanata halted any fantasy I was trying to sustain. I was forced to accept the reality that just because I’m living in my escape land, doesn’t mean that those I left behind stay the same forever, fossilized in their habits and routines. And I know that people aren’t always going to be the way they are, but creating distance allows me to remember them how I want to.
The truth is, nothing about being in Ottawa for those three weeks was romantic. I couldn’t even try to romanticize it.
While I talk about my romanticizations a lot, I think there’s a part of me that’s really rooted in realism. I knew that I was going back to Kanata to take care of my nainai, that this was because my parents were going on vacation and needed a break from providing full-time care. My nainai is over 90 (she never tells us her exact age, and she follows the lunar calendar so more often than not, she forgets her own birthday), blind, partially deaf, and has mobility problems. These were all things I watched happen throughout my own life: as I aged, so did she. And maybe it’s because she’s been around for all of my life, but I felt a strong sense of filial piety in this situation. It seemed like there was no choice for me but to go back to Ottawa; my parents needed a break from their 9 to 5s, my nainai needed someone to provide full-time care, and I needed to grow up.
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My time in Ottawa started on the anniversary of my yeye’s death. I paid my respects to a portrait of him in our living room. My nainai cried and I cried along with her. It was a sadness that came out of hers, something about crying with someone else makes one feel like there’s a sharing of pain, that it doesn’t entirely fall onto one person, that we’re not alone in our sadness.
It wasn’t the first time I cried about my yeye, but it was the first time I cried with a family member. I thought that maybe the expression of sadness would be some final form of closure, that sharing the grief would make me finally feel normal. And I don’t attempt to suggest that I knew what my normal was before, but I knew that since my yeye’s death, something generally felt weird in my life. I wanted to go back to my ‘normal’ life and I hoped something about Ottawa would click it back into place. Spoiler: it didn’t.
Like I said earlier, just because we leave somewhere, doesn’t mean life stops there. Each time I come home, it seems that my parents have aged. It’s not that I don’t know they’re aging, but it feels more frequent that they talk about health issues, whether for themselves, for my nainai, or for Maria. This impending doom (death) feels so inevitable to me. Perhaps its my own nihilism (or realism, depending on how you see it) that I think death is really the only certainty we have. In a way, I think it’s harder to know you’re dying, than it is to actually just be dead. The worst thing is the knowledge that someone might go at any time, but not knowing when. In this case, it was my family dog, Maria, that became the source of all my concerns when I was home.
Just like everyone else in my retirement home (consisting of my nainai, my laolao who is my maternal grandma, Maria, and Pookie), the little Yorkie I grew up with, filled with love and life and energy, felt like a shadow of her former self. At age 13, she was blind with cataracts, deaf, had arthritis, Cushing syndrome, a chronic skin condition, and was becoming obese because she was in so much pain that she just couldn’t move her body anymore.
And then there was Pookie, with her failing kidney and mild arthritis, but somehow at 16, still seemed incredibly limber and alert. I felt bad for Maria in comparison, maybe even angry at the world that she wasn’t healthy the way Pookie was. I felt that it was all extremely unfair, that everyone was going to be taken from me. What I jokingly called the ‘impending doom’ for so long felt more and more tangible.
I spent that month lingering in this sadness. I had been weaning myself off antidepressants for six months, my plan originally being that I would be off entirely by the end of the month. I contemplated whether or not this was a good idea, if I was really in the right headspace to be off them. Sure, the Zoloft induced a three year long brain fog, but wasn’t that be better than any pain, agony, sadness I would soon receive? I was afraid that I couldn’t live without them anymore: that facing any personal tragedy would lead me into a downward spiral, without anything to fall back on, and that I wouldn’t have the ability to bring myself out of it.
It felt like the world was playing some sick joke on me. I was trying to be better in my own life, to break out of both the antidepressant fog and weed lobotomy that I had somehow willed upon myself during the three years of SSRIs and Covid. Every time I tried to see things as hopeful, though, I would fall back into nihilism. I can joke that it was my ‘retirement home’, but I think it’s the best way to understand the environment; spending that much time with people that much older than you makes you realize that one day, you’ll be in that position too (if ur lucky enough to live that long, i guess). I think the desire to avoid being reminded of how our bodies give out on us led me to really attach myself to Pookie. With everyone else in my retirement home dying slowly, Pookie felt like the antithesis: she still managed to surprise me with her mobility. It was probably wrong of me to see it this way, but I couldn’t help but want to spend all of my time ignoring the unavoidable realities of aging.
As much as I talk about my impulse for escapism, I was also really aware that I couldn’t sustain it forever. So instead, I tried to force myself to accept it. A ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ kind of mindset; I kept reminding myself that death is a part of life, and that I should be thankful for the time I have with people. But no matter how hard I tried to think about it in this way, living it didn’t make me want to accept it. I wanted to be grateful, but more often than not, I was irritated. I was annoyed and angry that I was even thinking about people in my life this way. That I was in my early 20s, supposed to look at life with a gaze full of opportunity, but instead, I seemed unable to bring myself out of the thought spiral that I was surrounded by aging and death. There was no space for philosophizing, intellectualizing me emotions, or even a deeper hope for life in general. It was nothing but the exasperation that everyone I loved was leaving me.
Perhaps this is why I really attached myself to Pookie: it helped me look at life in general more hopefully, allowed me to hold onto some specks of positivity. I told myself that when I got back to Montréal, with Pookie in tow, it wouldn’t go away, but at least I wouldn’t have to spend all my time living in it.
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I didn’t talk to my friends very much while I was in Ottawa (tbh, i rarely talk to anyone except my sister when im home). I didn’t want all my exhausting feelings to overwhelm their lives as well; it would be unfair of me to force people to care about what I cared about. Calls and Facetimes were usually short check ins or about random pop culture/news tidbits. I still wanted to present myself as fun and aloof, the version of myself that existed in my fantasy land.
I was on call with Gemma when Pookie’s old owner (who we will call N) first contacted me. I had three days left in Kanata and I was immensely relieved that I had done my duty, gotten through the three weeks without getting too nihilistic, and that I would have some distance again. I can’t remember what we were even talking about now, but I remember that while I was on call, I got some random photo and I was convinced that someone was about to murder me.
I sat in confusion, Gemma on the line, waiting to see if this unknown sender would say anything (or, if they just wanted to send a random photo to a random person). The message that followed was something that I always wondered about (who her old owners were), but never thought would actually happen.
N introduced herself to me as Pookie’s old owner. Pookie was the kitten of her mom’s cat, and N had her for the first 14 years of her life. She explained that when they decided to put Pookie up for adoption, she was going through a divorce and had to give up the house. Now, two years later, she had gotten the house back and tried to contact the adoption agency about getting Pookie back, but there was only so much space in foster care and she found out that Pookie had already been adopted. The agency wouldn’t give her any more information about who adopted Pookie and she had more or less accepted that this was the consequence of her decision. It wasn’t until months later, when she had seen a missing poster of Pookie, that she finally got my number to contact.
She then asked if there was any way that they could have Pookie again. She knew that it was an unreasonable ask, but she and her kids missed the cat dearly, and Pookie had always lived in that house, with a big backyard for her to explore.
Looking back on it now, I can recognize that she did play at my heartstrings and I was in an extremely vulnerable position, but I instantly felt that I needed to return this cat. It wasn’t that I didn’t see myself as Pookie’s owner, but it felt like there was something bigger than me at play here, that I didn’t really have a choice in this situation. Gemma was still on the line, as shocked as I was that this would even happen, but I don’t think I would’ve wanted anyone else to talk to in this situation. When I agreed to give Pookie back, she understood. Instead of encouraging any sadness, we talked about how happy it was that I was able to do this for someone else. In a way, we both tried to soften the blow: giving Pookie back was obviously sad, but maybe I needed to be in a place where I could think about myself, what I wanted to do with my own life, instead of resigning into my own lack of agency about everyone around me dying. It wasn’t that I was giving up on her, but doing something that was ultimately an act of faith in myself. I just couldn’t handle another death in my life, or honestly, even the thought of one.
At that point, I was already feeling insanely exasperated, intrinsically tied to a general sentiment that I had no agency in my life. And maybe it was this hopelessness that made me rash and impulsive in agreeing to return Pookie. In my mind, keeping Pookie meant months, or years, of worrying about when I would have to start grieving her death. Or maybe, it wasn’t a need to feel in control. Perhaps it was complacency, or the fact that I’ve never been someone who felt really in control of my own life. I gave Pookie back, because someone else expected that from me and I’m often too eager to please. Either way, it didn’t matter where the impulse to return Pookie came from. The reality was that I felt completely useless in my own life, that there was some pre-destined fate that I would never be able to overcome. That all these impending things were so big that nothing I could even fathom doing would change anything.
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A few months earlier that summer, before N called me, Pookie had jumped out a window in our apartment, three times. The first two times I could lure her back in with a can of tuna, but the third, she was nowhere to be found. I spent that night sitting on Gemma’s balcony, hoping that I would at least catch a glimpse of her in the alley, just to know that she was still alive. I didn’t know what else to do.
In contrast to my own uncertainty, Gemma was pragmatic (and thank god she was), suggesting we go to the print shop and make posters. It felt good for me to do anything other than wallow in self-pity, and it worked. People called me about maybe seeing her in the alleyway, even going so far as to search for her with me while it was pouring rain outside. If anything, the posters felt like I was trying, or that I had some ability to find Pookie again. The searches, though, brought no luck—I figured this time, she was gone for good.
But, as fate would have it, just as I was preparing myself to come to terms with Pookie leaving me, she came back herself. Gemma had been leaving her balcony door open in case this would happen, and it did. Pookie sauntered right in, meowed at me loudly, as if she hadn’t just caused me all that stress. I gave her a big kiss, a billion treats to remind her that home was better than anything out in the alley, and went to bed thanking the world.
Maybe that’s where my exasperation comes from, though. That I think when good things happen to me, it’s the world smiling upon me, and when bad things happen, it’s that the world doesn’t want me to be happy. I don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say ‘the world’, but I maybe I’ve always seen myself as partial to some greater force in the world. It’s comforting to believe that there’s something bigger than oneself.
Any notion of the proverbial world (or whatever forces dictate what happens to us) were solidified when I called N a few days after I got the original texts. She told me the story of how she even got my number: she was randomly at Rumi in the Mile End on her birthday and saw a missing cat poster (i hadn’t taken any down, mainly because im lazy but also, i figured that i could just give a quick ‘she’s been found’ text to anyone who contacted me about it). Upon closer examination, she realized it was the cat she had been looking for, for the past six months, her cat. Over the phone, she recounted how she debated on texting or calling me for a month, realizing that I had probably grown to love this cat. But at the end, she told me, she decided that she needed to at least try. She needed to do it for her kids, but also herself. Whatever I decided was out of her control, but she knew she would regret it if she didn’t at least reach out.
In a weird way, I appreciated her audacity. I had resigned myself to my own lack of agency (whether self-imposed or not), so it felt nice to see someone who was trying to take control of their life, to build things back together in the best way they could.
And in a way, I think it lessened my exasperation. I reasoned it to be something of fate, that I was somehow fated to be a side character in a much more important story: one about returning home or strange coincidence or choosing whom one loves. In my moment of helplessness, I wanted to at least be of help to someone else. I insisted that I would bring Pookie to them, instead of N coming to retrieve her. I already felt like I had no control in the situation, so at least bringing her back myself would mean I was doing it on my own terms.
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I was in Montréal for a week, before the fated day of Pookie’s return home. I took an Uber into TMR and met N at the door. She had just picked up her kids from school, so we all stood in the entryway as I opened Pookie’s carrier. She walked out dubiously, but instantly noticed the backyard. The kids looked in astonishment, disbelief that their cat was home. Pookie started to run, maybe to explore, maybe to hide, and the kids followed her up the stairs. That was the last time I saw her.
N was extremely gracious, she thanked me profusely and gave me a gift card to the liquor store. She couldn’t stop talking about how strange it was, how crazy it is the way things work out sometimes. I smiled and nodded and agreed with whatever she said—I didn’t want to ruin a happy reunion. I reminded myself that this was bigger than me, that it was the right thing to do, anything that would help me smile in this situation.
I figured I shouldn’t loiter more than I needed to, that she probably had to start preparing dinner, so I put my shoes on. She gave me a big hug before I left and asked if I needed a ride home. I declined. I felt that I was about to start crying and I didn’t want her to see it.
And I guess I know myself well, because as soon as I began walking to the bus stop, I started crying. I hated it. It felt ridiculous and I kept having to remind myself, I had chosen to return Pookie, I was doing something good. Just like my yeye’s death, I had accepted Pookie was leaving me.
It felt unreasonable to cry at all: I could’ve kept Pookie. I made the decision to give her up. As the bus came, I decided not to get on. I didn’t need people on the STM to see me cry. I sat in an empty park for a while, then I called an Uber. By the time I got home, finally in a place that was my own, I was too tired cry anymore. I put down the empty cat carrier, and made myself dinner. That night, I took my Zoloft and went to sleep.
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acceptance / exasperation / karma / depression / joy