The Purgatory of Mourning

The Strange and Beautiful Location of Uutiil in Glitch

Today I went to Uutiil, a location in Glitch.  The gravity is thick and you can float for quite a while before falling.  The colors are twilights leading into darkness and the music is sad and wistful. It seems that all the portal doors come through here. It is, at this point, the newest location discovered in Ur. In all likelihood, it will also be the last new location.

The white squares under my glitch's feet are notes people are leaving.  I have found many of them in different places, but Uutiil is full of them. The notes read like eulogies. People talk about how much they love the game, how much they are going to miss it. People reach out to the unknown souls who also play, thanking them for making the game fun, wishing them well. It's hard to be in Uutiil, with all of it's loveliness and sorrow. But I suspect I will go back there every day . . . until the end.

When I went back to Facebook, I read that my brother and his family have made arrangements to have their dog put to sleep tomorrow. This crushed me because I dearly love that dog.  His name is Whiskers and he's been in the family since he was a puppy some 16 or so years ago. I will miss him so much, though I know this will be easier for him.  He's constantly in pain now. As I've written before, one of the major responsibilities of being a pet owner is knowing when you have to do the right thing for your pet, even if it breaks your heart.

I don't know how my SIL and my brother are managing this. Having an animal put down is hard enough when you go to the vet and have it done right then. To make an appointment and know you have to look at this pet and talk to them and hold them, all the while understanding that in the morning you will be putting them down . . . no, I couldn't do it. I would back out. I would scream over the phone that a mistake had been made.

It's not that I think they are doing the wrong thing. They're not. It's just the hours that would drive me crazy.  The hours and hours of mourning before the fact of it happening. Those hours of knowing you're heading into a horrible, painful reality and there is nothing you can do to stop it. This kind of situation, this purgatory of mourning . . . it is one of the worst things in the world. Even when you know it is the right thing, even when you know there is nothing you can do to stop it . . . it is still rough, so painfully rough.

I guess for me it will always be the illustrated in the different ways my mother and my grandmother died. As I have written before, my mother's death was sudden, shocking, and without warning. No grief happened until after the death. In that way, it is a clean memory of pain. It is pure.  When my grandmother was diagnosed with a cancer that couldn't be cured, we had a year left with her. In some ways, that year was a blessing.

In other ways, in how she got increasingly worst and more disabled, how she lost so much in terms of her mind and body control and dignity, in how each morning I had to wake up and know we were closer and closer and closer . . . it was so much worse. We mourned for her even before she died, because we knew her death was near. The memory of the pain is complicated and dark and almost maddening.

Tonight my thoughts will remain with my brother's family and with Whiskers.  I will think about how he would do a happy little dance when I would come over and loved sitting on my lap. I will think about how soft his fur is, how lovely it's color, and about how he is a good dog and had a good life with my family. I hope when he passes, he will know he is a good dog, that he is loved, and that he enriched so many lives by just being his sweet little self. Goodbye, Whiskers. Safe  journey.