I don’t think I really understood the cash value of my PhD until my mom’s cat died a month before my dissertation defense. The diagnosis — terminal — had come just two weeks prior, delivered under the piss-yellow lights of the West Des Moines vet’s office. The odd, aggressive behavior, sudden penchant for eating cardboard, inexplicable but seemingly pointed campaign of secreting bowel movements around the house — all of which had for the past nine months rendered my mother stressed and unsleeping, hands raw from washing and rewashing shit out of rugs, blankets, clothing — this was not merely the natural degradation of an abrasive feline personality lowered to new levels of spite by age, but, rather, kidney disease. More pointedly, the third stage of organ failure that frequently strikes cats of advanced age.
I was not present for this ordeal. Instead, I was kept abreast of the final months and then weeks that Kitsuni — our sixteen-year-old tuxedo cat with a fearsome temper and meow that sounded like paper being shredded — declined via teary phone calls from my mother. I fielded these erratic calls the best I could while shuttling between the collection of libraries, coffee shops, diners, and bars that served as ersatz offices in my race to complete my PhD dissertation before spring came to New York City and with it, the end of my long-dwindling sources of graduate funding.
For the past six years, I have dedicated my life to the study of tragedy. Six years of reading and rereading the stories of suffering and catastrophe that certain ancient people used to tell each other. Most people are familiar with the names, the hits — Antigone, Oedipus, Agamemnon. For the past six years, I’ve made it my aim to understand why these stories have endured. Why, these tales of horror and trauma — betrayal, intimate violence, moral deadlock — continue, despite their impossible choices and uneasy resolutions, to compel.
My mother is in Iowa, a thousand miles away. She lives there alone, in a townhouse on the edge of the city where I grew up. The neighborhood rests between an urban farm and a Ford dealership whose spotlights you can see through the woods at the back door. This building — oddly skinny, with siding light blue like a robin’s egg and a fake chimney — is the first place my mother has slept that has been her own. The first month she lived there she cried every day. All these rooms, she kept saying. I made a mistake.
I get the news that Kitsuni has died the day after I finish writing my dissertation. “Died” is not quite the right word, of course. She did not actually succumb to the illness burning up her organs. She was instead “put to sleep,” as my mom put it in her text message. I read the news lying in bed, sucking water from the bottle on my nightstand and wondering how it is that this same phrase came to be applied to both pets and children, albeit in very different contexts. I pause for a long moment, the text cursor blinking in time with the dull beating in my head. I run through the words of support I’ve been practicing with my therapist. This was not easy, but it was best. This was not easy, but it was right. This was not easy, but it was kind.
I can’t shake the dryness in my throat, and my body still seems to be lightly vibrating as the previous night’s alcohol struggles to find its way out. But my mind feels clear, sharp, the buzzing registering as something like triumph.
As of yesterday, I have finished writing my dissertation. In three weeks, I will go before a panel of scholars who have been my mentors and tell them my ideas about tragedy. I will argue that tragedy is a genre not of fatalism but of survival. That tragedy may bring meaning into crisis, but it can also illuminate how to endure beyond the destruction of meaning, order, sense. I am relatively confident. Haven’t I, after all, made it this far, without cracking up or dropping out? Haven’t I, after all, survived not only six years and five changes of address, but a plague?
My mom insists on video-calling me to show me Kitsuni’s ashes. It’s Monday and I am in the public library, rereading the secondary sources from my literature review. I bundle my coat and backpack and naked laptop into my arms and find a dim hallway in which to crouch. She holds up a small plastic bag of bones. It’s early evening in Iowa, and she is crying. She took the day off work, she says.
This is surprises me. My mother, manager of a sales team at America’s third-largest insurance provider, rarely takes personal days. There is always much too much to do, a fire to put out or a person to send a carefully worded email or a training to be prepped.
“I just can’t face them all tomorrow.” Her phone camera has portrait mode activated, bringing her face into unnaturally high definition on my screen. “Not when I’m like this.” In the hyper-focused frame, her grief is vivid to the point of obscenity.
As a child, I, too, used to spend a lot of time in my mom’s office. I remember playing under the anemic lighting after school and on the weekends until I was old enough to stay at home by myself in the apartment where I grew up. Sometimes, on very early mornings, I’d sleep under her desk in my school uniform while she finished writing reports. Face pressed against the scratchy industrial carpeting, I’d pretend I was a character in a Greek myth, confined to a cave until a god saw my piety and intervened.
Her eyes have swollen to different sizes from the crying. Everything is too sharp against the blurred background. I know it must have been I who showed her how to use the phone’s portrait mode during our last holiday visit. Now, I want desperately to ask her to turn it off. Such a request is, of course, impossible.
In less than three weeks’ time, I will have to explain what I have learned, during the past six years, about how to survive the shattering of the world. I am preparing to speak my arguments, to channel the voices of the artists, philosophers, and scholars who have confronted the tragic over the past two millennia. I have spent the past six years immersed in the art of suffering, learning the language of grief and loss. I am relatively confident in my ideas.
I stay on the phone until the sun goes down. By the end, my mother’s face on the screen is almost entirely hidden by shadows, backlit by the bruised purple of the Midwestern sky. I tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.
***
That the cat was sixteen, and thus old for her kind, had never occurred to me. We’d acquired her over a decade prior in the way that one often does kittens — a “gift” from my mom’s friend whose own cat had recently birthed a litter. I came home from seventh grade to find a black mop-end pouncing and rolling around our small apartment. She was an odd and abrasive being, a long-haired mutt of the American feline variety. Candy-green eyes, the embarrassment of black fur broken only by the white spots on the tips of her paws, chest, and nose. A tuxedo cat, they call them. Gorgeous, temperamental, and exceedingly vocal, she was our capricious diva in black tie, the terror of all who visited the home and came within striking distance. For her high cheekbones and canny personality, we called her Kitsuni (a corruption of the Japanese word for fox, chosen by me, aged twelve and in the throes of an anime fixation).
The day after our video call in the library hallway, my mother telephones me again before I can fulfill my promise. Audio only, this time. She’s surprised when I pick up. Must have been a butt dial. I was in my apartment in Brooklyn, scrolling through social media in an abortive break from reviewing scholarly monographs. It’s afternoon, the time when she’d normally be at work. Now that we’re on the phone, though, she can’t stop herself.
The illness had made a hostage of them both. Managing the wanton eating and shitting alone meant my mother couldn’t spend more than five or six hours outside of the home without losing an hour to hunting down and cleaning feces and bodily fluid out of any given surface across the three levels of the narrow townhouse. For months, she’d refused to cage the cat, declaring it cruel to leave her yowling for hours. And so: plans were canceled, invitations declined. She stopped going to the yoga classes that were her sole form of recreation. The monthly trips to Chicago to see her mother — who herself lived alone in an “independent living” facility that always smelled of warmed-over soup — ceased. Initially, my mother had suspected that the behavior of the past nine months was a kind of punishment. A campaign of malice born from the indignities of the recent move from the apartment where we’d spent the bulk of our lives. Or backlash for my mother’s resumption of in-office responsibilities after the year of pandemic-sanctioned remote work. The walk-in veterinarian who volunteered at PetCo on Saturdays (our cats’ only and most regular GP) had championed this hypothesis. At his recommendation, my mom had procured a light sedative. This sort of liquid dope, specifically designed for cats, would mellow out the pangs of orneriness that he blamed on age and the new environment. In practice, the medication appeared to do little beyond making Kitsuni salivate profusely, adding puddles of drool to the shit around the house. Out of desperation and no small amount of magical thinking, I’d encouraged my mother to keep dosing her. You deserve to live better, I’d insist. Just keep trying. It might take time. Even if it helps a little bit, it’s worth it.
“Where are you?” I ask. I flip open my laptop and toggle between the open PDFs of the articles I’d been reviewing, clicking back and forth in a mindless rhythm. Home, still. Downstairs in the makeshift office we’d set up in the basement. Working remotely for the week.
“I can’t be there with everyone watching me when I’m crying,” she says, voice wobbling. “I cry every day. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. No one gets it. They think it’s weird. It’s just a cat, I know they’re thinking. And they’re right. I don’t know why I’m reacting like this.”
Not long after Kitsuni’s death, I stumbled on an essay written by a pop culture critic who had recently lost her dog. Reading her account of the intensity of the loss, I considered sending the piece to my mother as a gesture of solidarity. But then I reached a paragraph that included a quote from a psychotherapist who proclaimed that the reason pet grief was particularly painful was that the love we have for our pets is “completely uncomplicated.” Without the thorniness and complications of an interpersonal relationship, she continued, the connection between human and animal companion is one of the rare ones that allow us to express care without inhibitions, love without self-consciousness. I closed the window.
Now, over the phone, my mother begins to recount for me once again the detailed story of Kitsuni’s last day of existence. It takes almost an hour, slowed by periodic bouts of tears. I am silent, having heard this already once before. As I listen, the diagnoses invite themselves with ease.
Guilt for the belated recognition of the illness and her past frustrations with the cat.
Projection: the cat’s suffering as proxy for her ailing mother, whom she’s unable to be present to care for.
Shame at the intensity of her attachment to her pet, at being seen as an eccentric cat woman.
Disavowed aggression toward the late cat for making a loss of the wealth of time and money put into her treatment.
Repressed anger: At me (?), who left her alone in the strange new house with the cats to inhabit a city of itinerant dilettantes and earn no money, studying to become an expert in a morbid topic for which there is no job security.
When you spend six years immersed in tragedy, in the art whose raw materials are grief and loss, you come to understand: Mourning is not a given. It is a form of labor. Die Trauerarbeit, Freud called it. The work of mourning, like the work of art, or the work of producing one’s livelihood. Its gait is arrhythmic, unpredictable. There is no guarantee that it will reach its destination.
Neither my mother nor I, truthfully, has experienced much loss directly — an odd, if fortunate phenomena, given that my mother is one of nine children. Since my mother’s father, my grandfather, passed a decade ago, the family has registered few deaths. Our siblings and cousins, respectively, are healthy and annoyingly fertile; my maternal grandmother is ninety-three but surprisingly healthy, even after seven years in a nursing home. We seem, as a family, remarkably fortunate to be so unpracticed in the ways of grief.
As the conversation ends and we say our goodbyes, I tell my mother I’ll call her the next day. Tomorrow, I have resolved, I will teach her to mourn.
***
“You know,” I start, “I’ve read that mourning is like a sort of work. Like, emotional labor, yeah?”
My mom doesn’t really like to talk about my PhD research. She doesn’t understand why a person would want to spend six years reading and rereading about some of the most horrible things that can happen to people and still be called literature. “You were such a happy child,” she often says.
“When we lose someone we care about, we feel pain because we’ve been wounded, psychologically speaking. The place that a loved one occupied in our psyche, there’s a hole now. An absence.”
She’s quiet, listening.
I try to distill some of the more helpful points from Freud that I reviewed last night. I explain that mourning takes time. I describe the complex, oscillating process of reality testing, the painful and extended cycle of recollection, internalization, and decathexis that forms the bulk of mourning’s mechanical substance. I explain that mourning is painful because it involves, no, demands a reorganization of the psyche, the internal object world and the relationships that constitute it.
“The pain that we feel when we mourn is part of the process of healing. That’s the purpose of mourning — to repair the psyche. To help us survive.” I am careful, translating technical concepts into colloquial terms. I do not mention Freud. I do not say “libidinal.” I try to make my language into a bridge and not a wall.
“You know what’s really important, though? You have to feel all your feelings, whatever they are — good, bad, confusing. Allow them to take up space, time. If you don’t, then you won’t be able to heal properly.
“And you know what happens if it doesn’t work? If mourning is interrupted or pushed to the side?”
I pause, trying to emphasize the gravity of the situation.
“When these feelings can’t be processed, then they take root, sinking deep into you. You can’t heal. You’re stuck in a cycle of grief and pain. This is called melancholia. It hurts like mourning, but it never ends. It drains the life out of you. It makes you think that because the one you loved is no longer living, you can’t live anymore, either. And that’s not true.”
“That’s not true,” she says quietly after me.
I have been gentle, careful. Interpersonally, if not theoretically. Never mind that the essay of Freud’s I’d here cribbed was an early, speculative venture on the subject of loss. Never mind that these concepts would be debated and revised numerous times over the next century. Never mind that later thinkers, including Freud himself, would end up challenging the assumption that the line between mourning and melancholia was so distinct at all.
I have made my language into a bridge, and not a wall. I imagine building a scaffolding of terms: my words thin, strong ropes that loop around my mother’s experience, guiding the flexible posts into a framework that can hold the weight of us both.
The first time I ever realized that my mother was embarrassed by me came after my first few months in graduate school. I’d flown home to Iowa from New York for Christmas, and she picked me up from the airport. That night, we’d planned to have dinner with the man she was dating at the time. His name was Steve, and he had four daughters under age sixteen. They’d met at a music festival.
“Can you,” she said, hands placed firmly at ten and two, “please, when Steve is here, try to not talk in the way that you usually do?”
I feigned incomprehension.
“Sometimes, the way you talk. The words you use. It confuses people. They think you think you’re better than them. It’s intimidating.”
She was gentle about it. I was at once furious and gratified. That night, when my mom left the dinner table to go to the bathroom, I took a sip of wine and said, “So, Steve, what do you think about the Electoral College?”
It was during that same visit when, one evening, I reached out to stroke Kitsuni’s soft head and she slashed at me with such force that her claw punctured the nail of my pinky finger, ripping a gash from cuticle through the nail bed. It was Christmas Day, and Kitsuni, as though moved by the holiday, had been relatively peaceful, almost affectionate. An hour before the attack, she’d come up to me, sitting alone on the couch, and crawled into my lap, allowing me to scratch under her chin where I knew she enjoyed it.
At the sight of my nail bloodied and soft, fleshy pink face exposed like a raw clam, I was engulfed in a child’s panic, gasping and teary at the horrific intimacy of the wound. This, from the creature I used to bathe, naked, in the shower. It was the only way to get her in water, her shrunken limbs trembling as she grasped my bare shoulders with claws hooked just enough to keep hold but not to draw blood. Eyes huge in her shrunken block head, but silent. I was the only one she’d allow to do this, and I was immensely proud of it.
That Christmas was the last time I’d touch her.
***
Once, a long time ago, there was a family that couldn’t stop killing one another.
It started with the daughter. Her father, the king of Argos, wanted to go to war. But he’d angered a goddess, and she used her power to trap his troops on an island, refusing to let them sail to war until he’d paid for his offense. So the king called for his young daughter, and he slaughtered her as a sacrifice to the deity. The goddess’s anger abates, and the men go to war. Ten years pass —
On the night that I finished writing what I believed to be the final sentence of my dissertation I went immediately from the library to a low-ceilinged bar where my boyfriend was waiting. We sat in a dark corner and drank sweet, fruity cocktails to spite the February chill, making up stories about our drinking companions. I’m going to be a doctor, I told everyone. Around nine o’clock, I was in the bathroom when I felt a trembling in my pocket. A call from my mom. I paused, suddenly cold, gazing at her face in the contact photo, jaundiced under the overhead light. Then, I thumbed the button to still the shivering phone and went back out to order another drink.
—and the war has been won. The king returned home, victorious. That night, his wife, the queen, took an axe to her husband while he was in the bath. Made bold by rage and grief, she proclaimed the bloody deed an act of divine justice. More years went by—
When I finally returned my mother’s call, nearly twenty hours had passed. It was evening, and I was drinking again. Two plastic flutes of cheap Prosecco down, a third in my hand. She was in the car, sitting in the parking lot of the vet’s office. We didn’t greet each other. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. She was evasive. I couldn’t bring myself to ask where Kitsuni was, about what happens now.
—until the young prince, who fled the palace after his father’s death, returned to the city of his birth in disguise. He obtained entrance to the palace with help from his remaining sister. There, he killed, first, his mother’s lover and then his mother. Before she died, the queen begged for her life, tearing open her dress to expose the pale, sagging breasts with which she had nursed him as a child. The prince hesitated (who wouldn’t?). But this was beyond him. A god had told the prince that a debt—his father’s stolen life—hung over his head. There was no choosing. This was justice. The blow fell. The deed was done—
Several weeks go by, and my mother forces herself to return to the vet’s office on behalf of the surviving cat. She learns that the kidneys of the other, slightly younger feline are leaking vital chemicals but not yet failing. Still slow enough for rehabilitation. We are fortified by this news for different reasons. Kitsuni died so her sister could live, she says. I view this as an immensely reparative statement.
—but the matter wasn’t. The prince had bad dreams; they followed him into the daytime. Monstrous, red-eyed women chased him, shrieking accusations. Defiler, brat, pervert, matricide. The only end to the torment, the only thing that can discharge his crime against all that was natural and right, they say, is his death. This, they say, this is justice.
It’s there, at the clinic, that my mother learns that she’d been slowly and unwittingly poisoning Kitsuni. The sedatives she’d acquired to manage the incontinence contained a chemical known to put particular stress on the feline kidney. Nothing fatal under normal circumstances, for a cat otherwise in good health. But for a creature whose organs were already in a state of decline, it was like pouring gin into the cirrhotic.
My mother had, in effect, been torturing the dying, rageful cat for the last three months of her life—urging her on to the very end she was trying to forestall.
When the news arrives, I am again not there to answer the call. I am in a cold, grey room in a small town surrounded by fields. There are mountains here, but when the sun sets in the winter the sky purples, like a bruise. In the late winter, twilight sneaks up on you in the same way that it does on the prairie. There is no darkness, just the slow disappearance of contrast as the world grows flatter, monochrome, a mess of torn papers.
When my mother was a child, she used to weep at the sound of classical music. Her parents would sometimes amuse visitors this way: calling the toddler into the living room, putting on a record, and watching as the tears came. She didn’t cry out of pique or displeasure, they insisted, but from sheer intensity of feeling. Even then, age three, my mother knew a truth that can only be seen from a dark room looking out: there is no love worth having that is absent complications.