boo
So, yes, we did put Boo to sleep today. I feel as awful as you might imagine, even if (as I keep reassuring myself) we Made the Right Choice.
To my baby, Boo (1991-2009): Sweet dreams, pretty boy. See you soon.
loss
Sorry for the absence everyone. Most of my readers are also on Facebook with me, so it’s too easy at times to forget to maintain the blog when I can use FB for quick status updates or letting people know how cool meerkats are. Tonight I’m taking the rare step of using the blog to address two kind of personal issues rather than reflecting on scholarship questions. The blog is a medium, not a genre, but I try to avoid admitting I have a personal side whenever possible, although long-time readers of the blog know I don’t always keep up that distinction very well.
As the subject line suggests, I am concerned with loss tonight. I won’t go into too many details, but it looks like there’s a very real possibility that either tomorrow or Tuesday we might be putting my cat to sleep. Please note the distinction here: not “one of my cats” (since most of you know I have several), but “my cat.” I love all of my feline friends, of course, but Boo (his full name his Schnickelfritz Abraham McGinnis, usually aka Nick, Nicky, or Nicky-Boo) is mine. And not mine because I chose him, either; we adopted him when from a litter born to a cat owned by a workmate of my mother, but after a few years it was evident that he’d adopted me as his favorite human member of the family.
He’s had a recurring kidney condition for a few years, and now it seems as though the episodes of his illness are coming closer together. There are treatment options, but they basically amount to little more than keeping him from being in complete misery; there aren’t any options that make recovery possible. At that juncture, it becomes a question of a) quality of life for Boo, and b) the expense of maintaining his current condition for us. So I think that unless he makes a turn for the better in the next day or so, it is likely that while he might be taken to the vet this week, he might not be coming home.
Boo with Your Humble Narrator
Loss is also on my mind because I am confronting the very possibility that I have lost one of my very best friends, perhaps for good. Not that she’s died, or anything, but my own self-absorption and bad behavior led her some months ago to cut me off as her friend. While I had thought that maybe that decision would be a temporary one, I’ve sent her a number of e-mails asking for forgiveness the last few months and tried to explain how much I’ve been missing her. Neither of those amount to being grounds for forgiveness, I know that, but I guess I didn’t realize how deeply I had hurt her. I sent her a long e-mail this weekend, again asking for reconciliation and forgiveness, but as yet, no reply. I don’t even know whether she reads the e-mails I send her or not. I suspect that they either get deleted right away or she has her filters send them to Trash automatically.
(Some of you, I know, will recognize who I’m talking about here, but I will keep her a nonny mouse all the same.)
But anyway, in my most recent e-mail, I tried to describe to her how losing her friendship has felt to me. I want to put up a small section of it here, not because I have any interest in airing private business publicly (except to claim my own responsibility, as I’ve done here, for hurting her in ways deeper than I knew) but simply in the vain hope that even if she doesn’t read my e-mail she might, on a whim, decide to visit the blog and see this small portion of a much (much!) longer e-mail and give a second thought to reconciling our differences with one another:
We are both of us now within two years’ time (or just slightly more) of being finished with our studies. I am being wholly honest with you when I tell you that I would not have made it past my first semester, much less my first year, of graduate school without you. Nor, even more definitely, would I ever have found my way into rhetoric and composition without your passion for the field to guide me. There is so much of who I am now that is owed to you that losing your friendship was like being amputated from the better part of myself. I have tried, as much as possible, to present my appeal to you here as an appeal to reason and decorum rather than to emotion and pathos. My past appeals to you for forgiveness have failed, perhaps because they relied too much on pathos and too little on reason–hence the shift in tone here. The fact remains though that this is for me an emotional issue, despite what claims I may make for the reasonableness of beginning a process of reconciliation. The metaphor of amputation is a useful one for describing my distress: not only have I lost part of myself, but I still feel your presence in my life like a phantom limb every time I find a book, or idea, or conference paper, or question, or song or whatever that I wish I could share with my friend and I find myself overcome by an aching sense of her absence. I can not … can not … believe that the [Nonny Mouse] with whom I used to share so much is gone forever. And if she is not, then, please … please … let her read this. Let her respond.
So: I suppose this is a public admission of my guilt for hurting you, Nonny Mouse, as well as a public apology for so doing. If you read this, which you probably won’t, please–reconsider.