Loving Tigger

On love and grief and reinvention, again.

We have a family joke about my youngest daughter’s famous tagline, “Can I talk to you? This just wasn’t what I expected.” During moments of disappointment, fraught anticipation, or uncomfortable dynamics, she would tiptoe up to me, push my hair away from my face, cup my ear, and whisper it to me. “Can I talk to you?” I would grimace, inhale sharply, and brace myself for what came next.

This just wasn’t what I expected.

I will not complain about the weather. I will not whine about how hard life is. I will suppress my ongoing plea to the cosmos of, “When do we coast?” But I will say this: The constant reinvention of self, of “new normals,” of up-leveling and recalibrating and repair and rising from the ashes that has characterized my midlife? It was not what I expected.

We lost Tigger. I think I just have to say it. It happened on Friday, and I am reeling. In the hours leading up to the decision to let him go peacefully, I raged on the phone to my loved ones about metaphorical hits that just kept coming.

I keep getting back up.
Over and over and over.
I keep getting up.
I.
Just.
Keep.
Getting.
Up.

My current favorite song plays in my head on repeat, lyrics from “You’re Losing Me,” a mantra I’ve already referenced in earlier columns this fall that I continue to replay with increasing exhaustion laced with bitterness, “I’m getting tired even for a phoenix.”

I have a home. I have loved ones. I (think I) have my health. I live with (the illusion of) relative safety. And yet the ground continues to shift beneath my feet, and the goddamn cosmic message that I believe I have finally grasped reverberates inside my thrumming nervous system, “The only solid ground I have is myself. I am the only stability I need.” Do you hear me, universe? I get it! I am strong enough! I can handle it! I. Keep. Getting. Up. Please stop knocking me down.

My daughter tells me she doesn’t know how to do this, all this navigating of change and establishing of “new normals,” and I almost laugh. “Are you serious, kid? This is all you know how to do. Think about the last six years of your life: broken arm—> house flood—> global pandemic —> excruciating divorce—>sister moves to college —> dog dying. This is all we know how to do.” So whiny, right? Yes, we are so lucky. Yes, we are so tired. Even for a pair of ash-covered, bejeweled phoenixes. (Phoenixi?)

I understand what she means when she says that the feeling of surreal displacement—that disorienting, untethered sensation of falling that happens before sleep, that sense of lost-ness, the bad dreamness of it all, the “Where am I, who am I, when will I feel right again?”—is almost worse than the sadness. I just want to feel normal. Yes. Me, too.

But I don’t remember normal. Normal is a moving target these days. Normal is the contents of the knapsack we throw over our shoulder and change out every so often depending on the location to which we are hitchhiking.

Normal has cyclically changed for nearly half her life, and the past year-and-a-quarter has been characterized by that ever-shifting ground analogy. We are grappling for security, desperately seeking a sense of stability, forgetting and remembering over and over that it has always and ever only existed within. When the world around us crumbles, we are still strong. When the tapestry of our lives is woven of entirely unstable threads, the only thread that is a constant is our own inner strength and peace.

Goddammit, that is irritating.

***

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this; I wasn’t ready. (I was ready. He was ready.) It was almost like part of me had been preparing for it as his agitation mounted and it became even harder and harder to settle him. Those who knew him knew he was far from easy. His only ease came from loving me, resting with me, being loved on by anyone who entered our home, settling his heavy head onto my body and exhaling the deepest sigh you have ever heard before assuming a noisy rhythm of contentment.

I sensed the change even as my car was running in the garage, packed with my overnight bag and show clothes—I was hosting a comedy show in Nebraska. He wouldn’t get up to follow me to the door. He had thrown up the night before, and I knew he was tired. My dogs throw up all the time; this is not new. He would rehydrate and shake it off. My car was running, and I had to leave.

It unfolded in real time as I hosted a show in real time; I drove; I put on makeup and did my hair; I changed clothes and changed again; red lipstick and more red lipstick and sound checks and the internet is down and my Colorado girl deodorant is not built for this stress and I am on stage and also on the phone and now my neighbors are taking him to the emergency hospital and this show is still not over and I have to be happy and funny and now his x-rays are back and it’s bad and I am bawling in the green room and somebody from the newspaper is here to take our picture and thank god this is the best waterproof mascara ever made, but goddamn do my eyes hate it.

Now I am crying myself to sleep and wondering how likely it is that the obstructions (plural, so many, so very many and nobody knows how many exactly or what they are or how much damage has been done) will clear on their own. Now I am waking up after four hours of sleep and deciding if I can’t fall asleep again after 30 minutes of meditating I will drive home.

***

I do not go back to sleep. I leave in the dark, carrying my suitcase quietly up the stairs, trying not to slam the gate as I grope inside my purse for my car keys while my travel companions sleep inside the house. I stop only once during the five hours home. I am on the phone for nearly 3/4 of my drive, a testament to those who love me, those who stubbornly remind me that actually, they too can be counted on as stable threads holding the quilt of me together.

**

I walk into the gas station wearing the pajamas I slept in, makeup from the show still streaked all over my unwashed face like a horror movie. I wearily pay for two more double shot espressos to complement the four shots I have already had, dropping my change into a plastic container with a crappy printout taped to it—Donate to Support the Homeless Cats. I support the cats and get back in my car like a zombie.

***

I am standing at the front desk of the animal hospital, heaving with sobs. The woman two counters down glances at me nervously and loudly says, so that the person checking her in can hear, “Do you need help?” I tell the young receptionist with the neck tattoos that I am Tigger’s mom and then I stand alone, hands gripping the cold, marble of the desk, hyperventilating as quietly as I can.

It occurs to me that maybe I am the only person in the world who would see a stranger broken-heartedly sobbing at an animal hospital and go stand with them, hug them if they want, hold their hand or just wait next to them. Nobody comes near me, and I wonder if I am an asshole for judging them, wonder if I should congratulate myself for being kinder than almost anybody, knowing that I would never, ever stand there while somebody cried alone at the hospital check-in.

But I understand. I am the flat-stomached woman weeping in the OB’s office, surrounded by pregnant women. I have been that weeping woman; I have been the pregnant woman also, always alert to the fact that somebody sitting next to me waiting for their appointment may be grieving. At each appointment I scan for those hypothetical grieving women with quiet gratitude, too much innocence already taken from me to don the “please don’t rub off on me” panicky smugness of the third trimester mothers. I wonder if now I will scan for those people at the vet’s office.

People pull their borders around themselves like a talisman to prevent misfortune from spreading. I have already learned this.

There is nobody here to protect me as the rawness of my grief unspools around me while I hold my dog, tuning out the voice of the impassive doctor who doesn’t understand us and says all the wrong things.

But later, help arrives. The best friend who drove him there last night while I was on stage hundreds of miles away is now my partner through the goodbye; she takes the phone when I cannot say the words; she is fierce and firm and protective of me while I am keening.

Some people cannot be there at the end; I can be.

I do not judge those who can’t, and I understand the compulsion to protect oneself from images that cannot be erased. I have witnessed and endured pain and death before and I will do it again, unflinchingly.

The curse of my openness, my receptivity to pain, is that I feel it tremendously; it overtakes me. The gift is that I am equally open and receptive to incomparable love and beauty and joy and peace, and I know the gift of holding a creature and guiding them out of this world with my love. I would not trade that, despite the pain.

I am good at grieving. I let it in. I grieve with my entire body and soul, waking up the next morning with aching ribs and swollen eyes. I give into it like an undertow, but I don’t panic because I remember that I can swim, and I also remember that the waves will tenderly deliver me to the shore when they are done with me.

I will open my eyes with bewilderment. I am on the beach again, there is solid ground beneath me. It is a different shore, I have never been here before. But here I am, and here I will make my home until the next storm.

***

In memory of Tigger. He was eight years old, and we had him for exactly 2 years and eight months. We rescued him after he was a breeding dog for five years. Tigger could not settle into his own system. He did not know how to be a pet in many ways, but I believe he knew how to give and receive unconditional love with a quality I have ever experienced before in any dog. He came into my life when I needed him desperately, and he needed me. I believe in my heart that our work together was finished, but I will miss him forever and always.

I have a very woo-ey astrology planner that I love. Months and months ago, it told me to write a message to myself that pertained to some sort of relevant astrology, then flip to a random page and write that message again. Yesterday I looked at my planner, still stuck on Friday the 4th. It said, “Loving me is a gift.”

Tigger’s love for me was a gift—to him, and to me. My love for him was the same. He was so lucky to be loved by me. And I was lucky to love him.

Thank you so much for your love and compassion right now as I am trying to keep working while grieving. You can check my Events and Shows page to attend performances and upcoming workshops, and your subscriptions to this column are a much appreciated way to support my work.

XOXO,
Steph

• Tickets for Moms Unhinged: I am hosting 10/17 at Fraco’s in Littleton

• Tickets for Comedy Coven on 10/25 at the Dairy Arts Center

• Sign up for Nourish Your Creative Fire, a two-hour mini-retreat for moms with movement, meditation, journaling, and sound on 10/23 at Sunny Isle Yoga

• Tickets for Listen To Your Mother Boulder on 11/20 at the Dairy Arts Center