One Too Many Goodbyes

 

It’s been more than a week since we sent our sweet Alvin back to the Spirit.  It was his time, I know.  And I know we’ll meet again, his spirit and my own…because we’re really just fragments of the same spirit.

But…I miss him SO MUCH.  Probably moreso because he was the last of our three orange boys—the two brothers who came to us as tiny babies in 2004, and the moon-faced foundling who adopted us in 2009.  All gone from us, now, within less than a year of each other.   

I try to express my gratitude to the Universe every morning—for keeping us safe and well and more or less financially solvent during these strange, difficult times.  For blessing me with a good, solid partner. For planting the urgency in us that drove us to downsize in time to meet this crisis. 

 But I can’t help but feel that the loss of our three boys in such a short period of time has been...perhaps, unnecessarily brutal.

Alvin.  The soft, round, roly-poly orange-and-white.  He and his brother were so tiny when we brought them home…barely five weeks old. 

  

 

They bonded with us so completely that we used to joke that they were “hand-tamed parakeets.”  They loved us, they loved everybody.  Guests or family, any hand was good for petting.   Alvin was so happy to be carried around that, when you tried to put him down, you had to make sure his feet were under him and would be the first thing to hit the ground.  He was so sure that you would carry him around forever, he never learned to “lower his landing gear.” If you just carelessly dropped him—like you might with any other cat—he was likely to fall on his butt or his back, then look up at you like, “Why did you do that?”

  

Alvin loved water.  He was the guardian of the water dish—any water dish.  He would climb up in the sinks—bathroom or kitchen—and suckle on the faucets as if they provided golden drops of life's most precious elixir. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was good at consuming things that were not food.  All his life, we had to keep him away from toilet paper and paper towels. He didn't just unroll them and make a mess, he actually ATE the paper.  And ribbon!  One Christmas, he got under the tree and ate every piece of ribbon he could get his teeth into. He ate so much that I thought he might have killed himself.  Luckily, what didn't come back up as technicolor barf made its way out the other end eventually. But from then on, we watched him like a hawk on Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries...an day there might be presents around.

And, Alvin was always good for pitching in on home improvement projects.  

But most of all, I think, Al loved his brother Theo.  They were two halves of a whole for their entire lives.  When Theo died in June, I wondered how much longer we would be able to keep Alvin going.  As it turned, out, it wasn’t very long.

 

Sleep well, my boys!  Then romp among the stars until we’re together again!