It's Imbolc - though, opinions split on whether Imbolc is the first or the second of February - and the new year begins with a transformation.
Eli and I are trading tarot readings at night in a historic Victorian house at the top of Donner Pass. She lays out three cards: past, present, future. The past is a Queen: the present is Death, the future is a knife: the Ace of Knives.
In every tarot deck guidebook, there are strict warnings against interpreting Death as a literal card. Death, the book says, is a transformation. Everything ends, but only so everything can begin again. Beside me, someone begins to explain to me (someone who's read the cards since childhood) that knives are also knowledge and other things. He keeps talking and will not be silent.
Still, staring down at the cards, I get the sense that somehow or another, I am fucked.
And then the knife made out of a railroad spike arrived in the mail.
Five was a terrible cat, and a wonderful cat. He and his sister were abandoned too young by their mother under a dumpster in Oakland. When I first adopted him, he fled under my bed and stayed there at all times unless I left the apartment, when he would then use the litterbox, eat, or drink water. When I went to bed, he would howl, long desolate, unyielding howls for a good hour or two until either he, or I, got tired. And then we would both sleep: him, the tiny grey floof full of terror under the head of the bed, and me, exhausted, above him.
In time, he bonded with CAT-6, the floofy, gregarious tuxedo tomcat I'd adopted a year and a half beforehand out of an apartment shared with two former MUD compatriots. Six would regularly wake me up at seven-thirty in the morning demanding food. One morning, I woke up and had both cats standing on the bed. And for the longest time, that was the only way Five could tolerate being touched or looked at by me without skittering into another room - or in the case of one apartment in Boston, the kitchen wall.
He remained nigh-feral and unseeable for years, until Six died. He cried for nights, and finally wound up demanding pets every night when I went to bed: he slept at my feet. He still bolted if I approached him, or at sudden noises, or for no apparent reason.
When we moved back to Portland, he became less cautious: in the last year, having moved with me into a rental house, he would come to sit on the arm of my chair. In the last two to three months, he would come sit on my chest in bed sometimes, purring. He insisted on sleeping next to me many nights.
That was probably a warning sign that not all was well, but I was just glad he'd adjusted. Then he stopped eating.
South of Portland, at the feet of the coastal mountain range, there is a taxidermist who I've been following for a while on Etsy and other platforms. When I knew that Five was on his way out, I got in touch with her. Timing aligned in such a way that she was available the day after Five's euthanasia.
It was a beautiful day to be on the road, sprinkles giving way to distant, foggy green hills and patchy blue sky through clouds. 22 west of Salem is gorgeous. The land feels good, the road is smooth and well-maintained, and there's a good rolling of Piedmont-adjacent almost hills as one heads west into the countryside.
There is an illusory quality about grief: rolling waves of loss, tinged with other loss. Recently I read somewhere that one doesn't just grieve the one loss: one thinks of other losses. Other funerals, other separations, other leavings. I felt that driving south on Interstate 5: I bit back a lot of tears and concentrated on driving, on music, on the far-off foggy hills and even roadway, on passing trucks.
Dermestidarium's proprietress was sympathetic, but warmly business-like. She took down the information, and took the little cardboard coffin from the vet morgue into her shop. I followed, and was hit by the expected smell of decay: the business operates primarily around a large bed of soil packed with dermestidae beetles, or hide beetles, which serve to clean those items which she's been hired to strip of flesh and sinew. For the next six months, Five's head will be packed into this, where he too will be stripped clean, later to be coated in a metal finish and returned to me for an extremely reasonable fee.
The rest of Five will be cremated along with other remains and scattered into the land. Part of me thinks a better end for him would be to scatter him under a bed, or behind a furnace. But like all living things and all parts of the universe, in the end, such messes are swept up, kept clean.
The grief, and the memories, perhaps thankfully, remain.
Leaving the countryside, heading home, the clouds have not entirely parted, nor have they come together again. The vague sprinkles of rain from the morning have paused: the road reflects back those patches of blue sky which show themselves in between.
Inhale, exhale. Life goes on until it doesn't.