How weird is grief? Is it normal that grief is weird and leads to unusual thoughts or reactions or behavior? I looked it up and quickly concluded in the affirmative. It is normal and weird. Unusual thoughts, reactions, behaviors can and often do happen while grieving. Which is weird. If the definition of weird is strange/unusual/notnormal, then how can it be strange/unusual/notnormal that grief leads to strange/unusual/notnormal when it’s been established that unusual thoughts, reactions, behaviors can and often do happen while grieving? If that’s normal, then how is it weird?

Anyway, I stepped inside our enclosed back porch after feeding the backyard birds and, as usual, side-stepped where Lulu normally would be standing. Except she wasn’t there, of course, having died three days earlier. 

Lulu, our longtime feline friend. 

I sit here missing her terribly. She was my oldest friend that I still hung out with every day. Unless you include my wife in the list of friends I’ve known for more than fifteen years that I still hang out with every day, which she is and which I do. The rest of those friends from fifteen or more years ago are either off doing their thing or entirely lost to time. More recent friends are as important to me as friends from fifteen or more years ago. However, while certainly I would grieve for them if we made the decision to sedate them and then inject them with sodium pentobarbital while stroking their fur and whispering phrases both heartfelt and platitudinal, our briefer history would, I believe, perhaps incorrectly, inflict a less stabbing pain upon our history’s end. 

And right now, glancing toward the red hassock where Lulu would normally perch while I write and finding only empty air, the stabbing pain is intense.