What we bear in a small town — #75

Let me carry that for you.

On Friday, we had to pick up Snoots’s ashes. I had a carefully wrapped gift buckled into the seat next to me, and I was going to meet Ben in town so we could drive over together. When Ben got in the truck, he put the gift in his lap. 

“Thanks for doing this,” he said. I thought of Eve Rodsky’s book Fair Play, all about relationship equity, and all the times she said that gifts and Thank You notes typically fell to the more feminine partner. I gave myself a moment to wonder if I cared, but I didn’t — not this time. I wanted to build this gift for them. I wanted it to be a representation of Snoots and our love for him. I didn’t need it to make sense, I didn’t need it to be good, I just needed it to show them how we felt, the sheer weight of our gratitude. The gift weighed more than Snoots ever did.

The gift was a grab bag, because how else do you thank a group of people you don’t know beyond their kind words and their scrubs? How do you say thank you for holding a life? How much is it to buy everyone a 1st class plane ticket to anywhere in the world? Because that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what I wish I had to give. Instead, it was this:

• Two bottles of wine: one of our favorite reds, and a favorite white

• Three small gift certificates to the spa

• A gift card to the local coffee spot

• A 3-month subscription to Bokksu for charming and unexpected snacks

• A gift card for a pet portrait (this one was a very, very kind gesture from a friend to us, but since I’ve painted portraits of Cooper and Finn, I need to be the one to paint Snoots)

• An obscene amount of Churus

• A handwritten thank you card where I took up every white space with my terrible handwriting 

• Five polaroids of Snoots – at his funniest, at his sweetest, at his happiest, with his brothers, and with us

As soon as we walked into the office nestled into the hillside, and Ben said, “we’re here to pick up Snoots’s ashes,” I started to cry. I couldn’t last six seconds. Everyone at the office took turns hugging us as Ben and I stumbled over each other’s words, trying to acknowledge both how grateful we were to them and how hard we knew their jobs were.

I’ve said this to you before, but I said it to them then: 

“It’s especially difficult because you know all these animals from the beginning. Nearly every pet in town starts and ends in this building.” And when they do end, these vets and vet techs see those owners in the grocery store, in the lift line, at the school play. One of the greatest caverns of my grief is that so few of my friends ever met Snoots, that the memory of him is kept in so few hands. But it is kept in theirs. 

“This job,” they said, “is made easier by pet owners like you.” 

When we lived in LA, we cycled through three different vets. I liked the Animal Wellness Center well enough, but the prices were astronomical. They had to pay rent on Lincoln Blvd. When we moved to Topanga, we started going to a vet in Woodland Hills. They tried, but constant turnover meant they also never knew us or our pets. They were so overburdened with clients that their curiosity for tough cases was beaten into the ground, and their ability to trust pet owners similarly diminished. Our last vet we tried was a gentle old man in the Palisades. We loved him. He retired after our second visit and had never taken records of us having existed at all.

Of all my concerns about moving to a small town, one of the most prominent was would I be able to make friends? Living in LA, friends were how I kept my world rich. They were how I found love and support, understanding and belonging — because those feelings were harder to come by anywhere else. It took time and persistence to build bonds in any other context because every person saw so many persons every day, and so many of them sucked. 

I’ve talked about the accountability of a small town before, that it’s difficult to get away with much of anything when everyone knows where you live. In my 20s, I loved the anonymity of the city. I loved being a different person every day, but one of my stand-out memories from living in New York was when I wasn’t anonymous. I came up short at Dunkin Donuts and the cashier said, “girl, I know you. Go on ahead and we’ll clear it up next time.” 

I knew her too. She had great tattoos and always had the most impressive lipstick application I’d ever seen in person. In New York, I always tried to be an efficient and kind customer: no dicking around on my phone in line, always having my order ready and exact change for it, then be polite, smile, and leave. And if someone looked amazing, tell them. I told her all the time. 

“We’ll clear it up next time” tethered me to the community. It knotted me in place with an IOU. When I eventually left New York, I made sure to say goodbye to her, and my last coffee was on the house. We exchanged that soft “thanks for being good” smile and diverged. My life in LA afforded fewer of these moments. Public transit wasn’t available where I lived. The office I worked in was in an industrial area. I rarely saw the same people twice aside from my coworkers. It’s why I spent years of my life documenting vanity plates in LA — it was the only way I saw people twice. K9CHIRO on the PCH, MINNEE parked at the feed bin, TOPDOWN with their top up, TOPAGAN parked wherever they damn well pleased.

I had friends. But I did not have community.

My grief is buoyed occasionally by memories of religion. I lost my religion slowly as a child, and then all at once in my mid-20s, but I find myself practicing reflections of it: dreams as visitations, synchronicities as meaning. Most of the time, I can allow myself to believe it, to feel a spiritual connectivity beyond the obvious circle of life: born, live, die, rot, feed, born. In the deepest parts of my grief, comforting notions like “we’ll meet them over the rainbow bridge” only hurt me, and I sink into a world where Snoots is just a pile of dust in a sealed box and my words to him land nowhere. When I attribute calamity to his chaotic personality purring somewhere beyond this plane, I do it because I have to, because if I don’t, then life is just cruel.

When I worked at Headspace, maybe two years in, I had to stop meditating. Meditation made me a nihilist. If sadness was just a feeling, then so was joy, so was love, no feeling more lasting or worthy or special than the last. Everything was just a chemical reaction in an organ that eventually turned on itself before expiring and rotting into the ground. I knew this thinking was dangerous to me then, and I recognize it as dangerous to me now. Like a lethal allergy, I know what to stay away from to prevent the darkest corners of my mind from molding. 

While vacillating between belief structures, I googled how to grieve without religion. I came across an article in Vice by Jamie Valentino, sharing stories of people losing their religion amidst grief. It reminded me of a moment with my best friend in high school. We’d just become friends, and a friend of hers I didn’t know had either just died or died recently. I asked her what she thought happened after death.

“I think your body rots in the ground, and that’s it,” she said. We were 16.

“So, to you, he’s just gone?” I asked.

“Yeah.” 

I, a girl who had already made a shrine to her first cat, was stunned. How could she carry that burden? How could she weather such a tragedy? Even then, my own thoughts alluded to what I was already beginning to suspect of religion: amusement parks were built so people could have fun, and religions were built so people could deal with death.

I’m not here to diminish or disrespect anyone’s religion, but to express my envy that you have it. In Valentino’s article, I gaped at his turning point in the narrative where he says, “As proprietary as grief feels, it's humanity's burden to share.” 

There are moments when I feel utterly alone grieving Snoots. There are moments when I feel embarrassed, silly, childish, scared, petty, stricken —  I am feeling the worst one on every page of the thesaurus. Even as Ben and Finn grieve beside me, grief does indeed feel proprietary. But it isn’t.

Yesterday, Ben came home from meeting someone new, and said that when they’d asked him how he was, he said good, despite having been crying most of the morning. 

“I felt like a liar,” he confessed, “but what was I supposed to say? Oh, just crying over my dead cat, nice to meet you too.” 

I laughed, but this has never been my problem. I saw a TikTok the other day that said being your most authentic self from the beginning, even when it borders on socially taboo, is a method to prevent being rejected later. I don’t think this is true for me — I know it is. It was a tactic I started using after being sexually assaulted. When guys would ask me out, for years after, I would immediately tell them I was the victim of aggravated sexual assault and I had PTSD triggered by being touched – did they still wanna go out to dinner? 

When you pass through the world with your best attempt to be a good and light person, it shows when you’re not, but only if someone has seen that person before. In a small town, your personal weather system is easily noted by everyone else. Your reputation precedes you even when shadows consume you. The postman saying, “I hope whatever’s going on gets better.” The librarian’s soft sigh when you say your book is about a girl struggling with grief. Your favorite cashier saying “everything OK?” when your usual groceries have turned into M&Ms, ice cream, frozen pizza, and ranch. The director of the humane society being a companion through it all.

Grief is humanity’s burden to bear because we are each other’s burden to bear. We make our lives easier by being easy on each other. When I saw one of the vets earlier this week outside the pet supply store taking a phone call, his eyes softened when he saw me, smiling gently. I felt it, like for a moment someone had scooped up one of the grocery bags I was too proud to put in a cart. There were tourists and there were busy locals I didn’t know but there was him in a moment I was drowning. Maybe I’m romanticizing small town life, but what I’m trying to romanticize is community. I was so afraid of not having friends that I didn’t realize I might gain something else. 

I’m not a particularly prominent figure around these parts. It’s only been a year and a half, maybe a little more. But I’m known by enough people to know that being known feels a little like being held. Automation, convenience, delivery, online ordering, all of these things and more compound into a world where we have our people, but no other people. Where we have lovers, but little love for others. 

Here, when someone asks me how I am, I can tell them. It’s not a burden, and it’s not a taboo, it’s just taking care of each other. They carry my burden knowing one day I will carry theirs — not because they’re my friends, but because that’s what people do.

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A special thank you to this community. It has always been easier for me to feel known online than it has in person. From the Tumblr days to now, thank you.

Also, there are three things I wanted to share this week from others — normally these kinds of links are shared in the paid subscription, but I wanted to share them here this week.

1. This poem. I would buy a poster of this poem. I would even consider tattooing this on my body.

2. This podcast by Wild Letters, which is free this month! I loved how this felt like hanging out with friends. I’d really like to do a monthly podcast for Shangrilogs, but the right idea for how hasn’t come to me — yet. (I am, as ever, open to ideas.)

3. This article by Shangrilogger Lewann Babler is such a beautiful look at loving, grieving, and living through it.