Shadow. My best boy. This is post two of my paean to my miracle cat. My boon companion for the past fifteen-plus years.
I no longer think about Raven every day, but he is still tucked in a corner of my heart. It was such a shock when he died, I had a hard time accepting it. My sweet and gregarious, playful and high-strung, loving boy with a swagger. He was so full of life–and then he wasn’t.
It was hard on me, but it was much harder on Shadow. I tried to explain what happened, but of course he didn’t understand. His lifelong playmate, brother, and friend (though also sometime competitor when it came to food) was gone in the blink of an eye.
For six grueling months after Raven died, Shadow grieved. He looked around for his brother and couldn’t find him. When I went out back to smoke, Shadow would stretch his front paws up on the sliding glass door and just howl mournfully. The entire time I was outside. He could see me, but couldn’t touch me, which bothered him tremendously. He had lost his brother, and he did not want to lose me as well. When I was inside the house, he stuck close to me. He wanted to be in the same room no matter what, which was not like him at all. I hated seeing him so sad, but there wasn’t much I could do about it other than love him and reassure him that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Six months or so after Raven died, Shadow began to change. He started meowing at me for his breakfast, which he had never done before. He was more outgoing in general, which was not like him. At all. He stayed out of hiding when people came over and while he would not necessarily let them touch him (except my brother and Taiji teacher, and Ian, of course, his favorite human other than me), and he was not nearly as skittish as he’d been in the past.
Side Note: While he had been a nervy cat in general, he has never cared about vacuum cleaners or fireworks like most other cats. His brother hated both. What I realized, however, was that Shadow is like me. He freaks out over little things, but the actual big things? Nah, son. I ain’t got time for that. I’m cool under pressure because of my PTSD, which it seems is the way Shadow works, too. He’ll jump at his own shadow (pun semi-intended), but he won’t even flinch if I vacuum next to him. Sometimes, when he was younger, he would jump up from a deep sleep and race around the room in a panic before settling down again. That was so much like me, it hurt.