#rest is an essential part of existing 🤍 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

barmadumet · 2 months

Text

CW: Pet Death

It’s been a year today. I didn’t tell many people at the time because it was so hard to talk about. It still is. There’s many people irl who still don’t know. Between my grandparents, parents, and unborn babies, I’ve faced all types of grief in the last handful of years, but this? A new definition of emotional pain. His was a presence with me for more than half my life. He was there every day, an essential part of my comfort space. Every night, he was in my bed. I still feel very incomplete.

It was raining when I found him in 2004. I was at work – my first job. I heard a customer say they’d seen a kitten dart under a running truck. It was actually out of character for me to abandon my post and flee to the parking lot. I stopped the driver just as he was about to leave. I kneeled in the puddles of gravel-filled, muddy water and looked under the back wheel well, and there he was.

Love at first sight is real. When I met the blue eyes of the yelping, tiny, snowball-white kitten, I knew he was mine.

He was perched up on the center of the undercarriage of the truck. I smashed my face against the side panel, reaching my arm as far as it could go. I didn’t care about the exhaust fumes I was breathing in from the tailpipe. I didn’t care that I was getting soaked. I didn’t care about work. I reached for him – until the tips of my fingers touched him for the first time, and I was able to coax him to me. When I had him in my arms, I pulled him to my chest, and since then, he has always been close to my heart.

It was one of the hardest moments of my life when I put him in the ground. I knelt in the damp mud around the fresh grave. He was snug in his bed when my husband and I lowered him down. When he was secure in his resting place, we covered him in a blanket. And before we covered him in earth, I reached for him. And again, I didn’t care about the mud, and I didn’t care about the mess of my falling tears and running nose. I bent over as far as my body would allow, and stretched my arm until my fingertips slipped under the blanket and grazed the soft fur for the last time.

It hit me in that instant that he’d come into my life and left it in a similar manner, and it’s hard to describe the flood of emotions that came over me then. The poetry of it captivated and soothed me, but the finality of it tore me apart.

I think of him every day. There isn’t a relationship in existence that can compare.

Evan, Ev, Rudes, Rudy. . . Until we meet again 🤍

#content warning #pet death #cw pet death #Evan rude #coping #maybe I should have done this a year ago

18 notes · View notes