Catching the Echoes - An observation About Love, Loss and Memory

I have owned Burmese cats for years, starting in 1980.  They are a lively, affectionate, intuitive and very smart breed.  Burmese originated in and around Thailand and Myanmar, and spent centuries hanging around people - generally in temples.

Merlin and Morgan

My first two Burmese cats were a pair of brothers named Merlin and Morgan. They were supposed to live to their mid-twenties. Or so I thought. I did wake up when they were fifteen and realized that they were old, but they were with me, they were fairly healthy, though the one boy's kidneys were iffy, and we would all continue as we were, unchanging. Or so I thought.  The first one died in my arms of a heart attack on August 28, 1996.  I was stunned.  His brother died one month later to the day of kidney failure secondary to a severe hantavirus that his old body survived, but which threw him into a decline. I hadn't wanted him to go, but I had realized that I was fighting against his best good, and I told him that I wouldn't insist on his living and would let him go if that was what he wanted.  It was.

Merlin

There is no 'back to the drawing board' when love has touched you.  Whether you believe in forever or not, the very fact that your life has intersected and run together with another's has changed you. You are not the person you were before you came to love the one who has departed. You have an altered perspective, you have a part of you that grew in response to that other one. You have a way you would respond to the other's voice, jokes, antics, love. You can't go back to what you were before you loved the other.

But life does go on, and grief must be dealt with and resolved in one way or another. I didn't expect to 'replace' my boys, but I needed to have pets in their places, so Boomer and BJ came to me. Boomer is a Burmese. BJ's father was a Burmese (a particularly nice one!), so though he's a Bombay and black, he looks, through the face, like my first Burmese. That is when I encountered the echoes. 

Dad

I started catching hints, sometimes faint, sometimes very strong, of my old boys.  A way one of the kittens reacted to being stroked. A way of tilting the head.  Finding one curled up on a pillow and raising its head to blink at me in a familiar way.  The sound of a voice.  It was not as though the lost ones had come back as those two kittens, but as though, somehow, I was given back the part of me that had loved them. As though I had been given a chance to re-live their kittenhood, to revisit memories I had forgotten in the rush of the years, to have the hurts, the sad memories somehow smoothed away, and the memories of the young, strong, lively ones returned to me, fresh and clear, unspoiled.

I have experienced this with all lost loves, memories that touch my shoulder and remind me that love still exists in me.  I recently opened a book and found a folded slip of paper with a note from my father saying that he believed in me, and enclosing a check to 'keep the wolves from the door'.  Driving through Vermont one autumn afternoon, seeing a hillside with a familiar slant behind a yellow house...  My grandparents' old house, which they sold decades ago, now repainted.  Landmarks had changed, but I remembered.

Those memories, touching our experiences, are a part of us, a reminder.   Something to be embraced.