I’ve heard it a thousand times:
“sometimes I don’t know why, but something hits me, and I literally just start crying. I miss my pup so much.” Or “I don’t know why I’m crying,” or “THIS happened for the first time and it became yet another smack in the face of reality that my cat is gone.”
I’ve heard it, and God knows I get it. Most often I hear it during the “year of firsts.” You know, the first time something happens after a beloved pet dies, and it is that stark hard reminder of today that this precious love is not there anymore. Sometimes, it’s a year, or two, or ten, when yet another grief burst hits and it just feels better to cry. (By the way, always let those tears fall! Whoever they’re for, they deserve them. Give them, and you, the honor and love of remembering, and being reminded “it was real.”)
So, it happened in an unsuspecting place, the grocery store. It happened at an unsuspecting time of day, the middle of the day. There was nothing that triggered it, there was nothing that gave me fair warning it was coming on. It just hit.
A bit of a backstory… Crisco died on October 1, 2019. He was an ornery little cuss. Like, really ornery and sassy! But, we loved him with all of our heart! Even though he made me crazy for the last 10 years of his life by staking out his territory and peeing on things in our house to show Rudy, the male cat, that EVERYTHING was his. EVERYTHING. It all had to get marked time and time and time and time again. And for all of my vet friends that are wondering if he had a urinary tract issue, or something else in that part of his little 8 pound body that was wrong, the answer is NO! He was tested a gazillion times for stuff, and it was finally determined it WAS behavioral and nothing more. GR. Just a big GR!
So, to save our house as much as possible, a part of his daily attire was a Maxi-pad stuffed into a belly band. I can’t tell you how many Maxi-pads we purchased over the years.
Back to the grocery store. Just last week, I was headed down the final aisle to the check out and my memory muscle voluntarily kicked in. I turned down the…. Maxi-pad aisle. As I was almost to the shelves, it dawned on me. We didn’t need Maxi-pads anymore.
Well, I thought to myself, I’m here and I’m already crying so I might as well take a moment to talk to the little guy. So there, in the Maxi-pad aisle, I shed a few tears, I told the little $hit how much I missed him, and how quiet our house was without him. And, that even through his naughtiness of all those years of buying damn Maxi pads, we still loved him with all of our hearts.
I took my cart and headed to the check out. I’m not sure if anyone else was standing there, nor do I care. It felt amazing to have a good cleansing cry right there… in the Maxi-pad aisle.
RIP, Crisco. We miss you.