I'm a stranger (been reading your tumblr since Winter Soldier days), butâyou were posting about your cat dying just a few days ahead of my own cat dying. She was already sick and declining, and I could tell that might be our future too. It felt like, I don't know. Seeing candles lit a few steps ahead along a path through the darkness. Like companionship, even though you didn't know we existed. (I wasn't posting about it then, but a post brought it to mind today and I thought I'd let you know.)
big hugs to you and ghost kisses to her <333 i didn't know about her, but of course you've been a mainstay in my notes for the better part of a decade, so i guess it's one of those odd tumblr distance-acquaintanceships where we haven't really talked but the friendly recognition and the occasional spooky synchronicity are there. losing a pet is a rough fucking time--even more so with all the stress, close calls, and grief-borrowing of a long slow decline--but i guess i'm glad, for whatever it's worth, that being able to see it coming also came with being able to preview someone else going through the same process.
(and sorry for taking a while to answer, it's... been kind of a rough month. also ftr i would've followed back ages ago if my brain were remotely compatible with a dashboard that operates on "hey, it's them, they seem cool!", rather than "i am a wizened gremlin with a multi-decade case of Livejournal Disease whose head will explode like a dropped pumpkin if i can't habitually read all the way back to the point where i left off." which limits my follows to way fewer people than i'd prefer.)
don't know if i recced her at the time (or if you're already familiar with her work), but Caitlin "Ask a Mortician" Doughty was a huge influence on some of the sendoff-ceremony stuff i was posting, and a huge help with, like... treating the inevitable with honor and compassion, but not the awkward solemnity that's just pained avoidance in fancy dress. i'd previously read Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in one sitting, keeping bedside watch/company in the final stretch of a very emotionally complicated death in the family, and that book was so Exactly What Was Needed for the moment that when Ziggy was getting worse, i made sure to keep a couple of her videos about pet death in my back pocket for when the time came.
anyway, to end on a bittersweet note, if your kitty died within a few days of Ziggy that means they both shuffled off this mortal coil around All Hallows / Day of the Dead, which is just... such amazingly Cat Behavior. nosing around the seams between the worlds until the veil is thin and then proceeding to walk the wrong fucking way through it. i hope they met each other, both headed upstream against traffic, on the road to... well, wherever it is they were going.
