Zen has passed.

My house feels so empty, my heart feels like it’s loaded with weights.

C.W.Morton

May 14, 2024

My house feels so empty, my heart feels like it’s loaded with weights.

I am kind of messed up right now. One of my furbabies has passed. A very special one.

I had a bond with Zen that is hard to explain.

It was so strong that I could almost swear she could speak english. She had the verbal understanding of a very smart dog, which seems rare for cats.

(Or maybe some are just so independent that they can’t be bothered with trivial human conversation)

She always knew what I was saying, even seemingly complex things.

I could talk to her the way a person does to a dog, and she would respond like she had an active vocabulary of words more than just the usual name, “food” “treats” “outside?” kind of words.

When I was syringe feeding her science diet wet food in her last weeks and she was resisting, I could tell her to lick the syringe, and she would.

When she was weak, I asked her to lift her head and try to walk to me, and she tried, immediately. And failed. And I knew it was time……

And every single time I’ve ever had an upset, a funk, suffering grief for loss of friends and family, this cat would smother me and it was noticable. She would literally lick my tears off.

I cannot express how sad I am loosing her.

I love cats, but there will never be any kind of replacing her.

I’ve had 6 cats in my life, but only 3 of them I really truly bonded with. Bubba, Nuggetman, and Zen.

Some cats are aloof, but you love them anyway, some cats are cantankerous and hyper-independent, and some just don’t bond the same way a dog will.

Maybe it was because I was there when she was born and when she opened her eyes the first time.

Zen on the far left, looking at me while nursing

She was the runt in the litter that was had by a girlfriend’s cat in 2015.

She chose me without a doubt. She always came to me, always wanted to be near me. When my girlfriends kids would try to get her to come, she would always jump in my lap instead. And so when adoption time came, I had no choice — nope, this one is my baby.

I adopted her and one of her sisters.

I know what this grief is, and why it’s harder than other deaths I have experienced recently.

It’s knowing that she was only 9, and could have had another 9+ years or more.

It’s not just her loss — it’s the contrast of how hard this is hitting me, to the recent deaths of my Aunt, my Grandmother, and my cat Nuggetman.

At first I felt really guilty that I am feeling so much more in this moment than I did with my Grandmother, my Aunt, or Nuggetman.

When my Aunt passed in 2023, it was after 2 years of battling strokes and severe dementia. Watching her go through that experience was the most pain I’ve ever felt for a family member yet. I don’t wish dementia on my worst enemy.

When she died, the grief was padded. Not because I didn’t love her immensely or feel the immediate emptiness of her no longer being around, but because I had already been grieving for over a year.

With dementia, grieving starts when you loose the person that was. Little by little. When you realize that while physically there, they somehow aren’t. And you start feeling that loss while they are still alive, but you try not to show it around them. She would forget that her mother (my grandmother) had passed in 2015, ask where she was, and we eventually stopped reminding her that she was gone and just said “shes out having fun”, and her memory would kick in and she would remember Memaw died, and then she would be sad, over and over. That nearly killed me.

When she died, I knew that the suffering she was enduring was over. And no matter how much I missed her, that made it somehow easier, instead of an unbearable heavy feeling, everything felt somehow lighter.

With my grandmother passed in 2015 — she was 93, and also had started a little ways down the dementia hallway, but not nearly as much. She needed a lot of assistance and when she fell out of her bed one night and broke her hip, her physical suffering compounded her mental suffering.

Jane Orr, my Grandmother, circa 2001–80th Birthday

Two weeks before she passed, I hugged her goodnight and she said to me “I just want this to be over”. When I left her room I started crying like a faucet. My grief started right at that moment.

And when she did go to the hospital the final time, she wasn’t even conscious, and was more or less taken from us by the morphine drip — I knew that she died with as little pain as possible, she had lived a great life, impacted many people, and left nothing but love in this world along the path she walked. Grief was made easier by knowing that her suffering was over, and she had lived long wonderful life with many photo albums to testify to that which I still keep.

My cat Nuggetman — the last two years of his life were hell for him. He had something going on, and 3 vets could not figure out what it was.

They eventually labeled it IBS, but I think it was more serious than that. We changed his diet 6 or 7 times, he would respond positively for a while, he would put weight back on, then eventually go back to getting skinnier and skinnier. I started giving him bottled water thinking maybe something was bad in the tap.

The tests didn’t show any cancer. It wasn’t thyroid. It wasn’t FeLV. It wasn’t FIP.

They concluded that somehow his IBS was worse and more progressive than any other case they had seen. They were completely baffled. But in the end, when I finally said goodbye, I knew there was nothing else we could do for him and that his suffering was over.

It hurt, but he was 16, and was suffering, so letting go was made a little easier.

With Zen, this feels every bit as painful and loosing a dear friend when I was 21.

This hits is so heavy, and so deep.

It’s the bond, AND the untimeliness of it.

The sense of memories that will never be made, a future that could have been, but now will not be.

Zen was only 9. It feels like a lot of good years were missed, and a little friend that will never jump on my shoulders again when I least expect it.

It also reminds me of all the deaths of people I loved who died a long time before we accept death to be almost inevitable.

Those are the deaths that hurt the most, because it’s not just death we mourn, it’s the loss of what could have been.

Zen, choosing me on the day people came to adopt her litter.

I feel like laying around not doing jack for a few days.

So I will do just that.

I’ve been AWOL for about 6 weeks, not making videos or content, just taking care of Zen and staying home.

When I crawl out of this funk it will be time to hit the trail and find some fishing holes, and let nature give wings to my grief, and I’ll start writing / posting / making videos again.