Roger Parker has left the building

I didn’t expect my first flutter with Substack to be an exploration of grief, but we lost Roger, our extremely grumpy and totally beloved veteran black cat this week so two insomniac nights later here are my thoughts.

Pets are known to be great for teaching kids about death, but I think the loss of a beloved creature can also be helpful for adults who have experienced, but not properly processed, serious loss.

I didn’t cry when my dad died. I was 26 and he was my favorite person on the planet. I watched him breathe his last and become a waxwork figure. I instantly knew that I had to write him the perfect eulogy. He had given me his love of words and was a brilliant writer and the biggest champion (and critic) of my literary attempts. This was the only  way to honour him and it consumed the first raw days.

Then I had to hold it together at his funeral in order to deliver the speech without cracking.

The mission was accomplished. In a strange way my dad’s funeral was one of the happiest days of my life as I met legendary figures from his time before (he was 47 when I was born and I was his first biological child - although he’d been stepfather to my two brothers for 5 years before that). I felt that I had managed to share the truth about the man I knew.

But afterwards it seemed the pain had been buried a bit too deep and a sort of numbness set in. I felt trapped behind glass for the next year.

I bumbled on and gradually thawed. Sadness came and went as I lived my life - a period of pretty intense hedonism followed and then calmed as I got married, moved to the US and back and had my three babies.

It was Dotty the Bengal cat who finally splintered the seal on my grief. She was hit by a car after a totally wild 18 months with us. We were away when we received the news.

I split apart.

For two weeks I barely stopped crying, and these weren’t soft, dignified tears - I was keening. It was an unbearable outpouring of emotion. My family thought I was insane. This was a cat. It was sad, but still a cat; one that had brought a lot of chaos our way (which is another story!).

I didn’t immediately connect the loss of Dotty with that of my dad who had died 15 years previously. But I was starting to wonder about the visceral reaction I was having and that’s when I investigated the idea of cumulative grief. It made perfect sense to me. Dotty’s shocking demise uncorked me - I was crying for her, but also for my dad and my younger self.

The loss of Roger has been a different experience. He was 18 and at the end of his natural life - and what a life!

He was trapped in a shed for two weeks when very young (we leafleted the neighbourhood until someone checked and he was found) and then broke his pelvis in an accident shortly afterwards.

He moved with us to North Carolina - travelling on the most turbulent flight I’ve ever known - and then lived his best US life. We came home once to find him in a standoff with a raccoon! Another time I received a surprise call from the NC police department to say that he had been seen attacking a protected bird of prey - I never got to the bottom of that one.

He terrorised countless dogs, but was adored by humans and we sometimes opened our front door to find him posing for photos. He also had multiple identities and dalliances with different neighbours and once came back sporting a bright pink collar - but he did always come home to us in the end.

He was like a cantankerous uncle but was adored by the whole family - and we will miss him as we do all those we have loved and lost.

It makes me smile whenever we visit Winchester Cathedral, which is close to our house, and the children ask to light a candle - not that we are in any way religious but they love the ritual - for Dotty and for grandad Mike who they never met. I’m sure there will be one more candle added next time for a very handsome black cat 🐈‍⬛ ❤️