Yep Boris. Boris is still with me. He tempted the fates then pushed them back. I am not sure that I am sitting hospice any more. I know that I am the one who named it hospice. I am the one who was sure that the end, the state so prominent in the definition, was within hours or days. Armed with needles, syringes, medicines, tuna laced water, I tended and grieved and exhausted myself. I lived the definition of hospice. Boris, not quite. At least not in the time line I had assumed. 

I have heard that the definition of hospice does not imply an end. It implies the beginning of another state. It has no time line, no time limit. It circles, it holds still. I know this. I knew this before, but this time, I was so sure. 

Although the grieving has lifted with his spirits and his ability to eat and drink and walk and sleep in his bed on the radiator in front of the picture window, all of this defining goes back to the issue of how labeling something can subtly or drastically change how we live in the moment.  

Through the past few weeks, I tried my damnedest to live in the moment. I will never know how much the labeling of hospice brought up the stories and traumas that have taken place over the last 20 years. How maybe working through my past trauma may have been the perfect activity for the moment. How this moment of clarity and this morning of sleeping in may be perfect.

I am trying to live in the moment. At the same time, I cannot help myself from noticing what will be missing when sitting hospice is over. Boris is feeling well tonight. He climbed up on my bed and went to sleep on my pillow an hour before I decided to go to bed. What has been common, automatic, and unconscious all these years, I am now noticing just because it is there. I notice it is there because it was not there on Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday night. I am noticing it is there because his past and future absence feels close enough to create an aura and color the experience. It is not wrong. It is not right. It just is. It is just different from last week, last month, last year. Where I have always let him wander and do whatever he wants. I now notice his every move. I also notice when I stop noticing his every move, when the absence moves.

I figure that if I was a totally enlightened being, I could truly live in the moment. My guess is that I would be able to experience every moment of his and my life without the aura of past and future bleeding over into the experience or interpretation. Ah well, I just haven’t gotten that far yet.

For both of us, all of the attention of which we are capable has consumed us here. I have more ability to pay attention that he does. Relationships are paying attention. Living together is regular and sustained paying attention. Paying attention is meditation. We have been paying attention for over 19 years.  I notice when we are attached. We move to detached. The detachment allows us to focus out do our work, pay attention to ourselves, pay attention to others outside us.

I need to focus out and pay more attention to myself. I need to start eating again. I have no one here to remind me.  Those of us who are single have less of the benefit of being someone else’s meditation, of someone else knowing the little pieces without much talking. With a beautiful being like Boris in the house, we get the warmth of appreciation for what we do, but we don’t get the tiny pieces of paying attention to another. Often being around others results in endless catching up instead of being there together.

Meditation is about the details. Catching up is not. I am getting lonely, but I am not up for catching up. Instead I am paying attention to what is quiet. The quiet outside reflects the quiet inside. I don’t want to talk. It seems that noise from inside creates resonances that are harder to stop than noise from the outside. The radio seems to be OK. The visual sensations from the TV are too much. I am evaluating every habit based on the volume of its resonance.

Boris in his winter basket with his wool sweater and kitty heater

The crisis has averted, and I am sitting hospice for my dear, sweet kitty companion of almost 20 years. Boris has been the only constant in my immediate space for those years. The house has changed, the state in which the house resided has changed, a marriage went, the couch is a different couch, the bed is a different bed. Only a few books, five treasured antique wine glasses, and an old workbench stored in the spare room are pre-Boris. Boris was rescued from a kitty mill in Nebraska. He was taken to a pet store in Tucson, Arizona. My then husband and I had just moved to Arizona with no money and a few possessions tucked into a tiny trailer. I picked Boris out of the lot of milling kittens. He was quiet and stoic and made me feel wise and safe when I held him. The pet store paid for a visit to the vet. The vet did not think he would live. He was four months old and only half the size he was supposed to be. He was diagnosed with a tape worm, treated, and doubled in weight in a month. He grew to his full weight of seven pounds and held the safety of the world in his tiny body. Despite an empathic fear of needles that borders on nausea and swooning, I have learned to use a hanging bag and needle to give him subcutaneous fluids once a day. He is alert, mobile, and not in pain. If he was eating and did not insist on lying in the safe cave of the litter box for hours, I would think he was fine. But he is not fine, at least in the long run he is not fine. But in this moment he and I are both fine, and quiet, and calm, and the air outside in not too hot, so I can open the windows and hear the birds in the 100-year old black walnut tree whose arc covers most of the back yard.

But this time, four days later, I keep noticing that something has changed. Something deep has changed. There are fears that have been been working at the center and edges of many decisions and interactions that are gone. Just simply gone. It is like some well is finally dry. A well that should be dry. 

We all have our own personal baggage and bugaboos. Some of mine are several people who I have had difficulty being around in the past few years. In each case I was involved in a series of situations where I felt unheard, unbelieved about something that I felt was important. As a result I felt unsafe. Today, with the well dry, the residual difficulties seem to be gone.

In a smaller arena, I have a story that may be so personal that it may not translate. I have a history of being afraid of the machines at the gym. I have been afraid that I didn’t belong in that section, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that everyone else knew what they were doing, that I didn’t want to embarrass myself, that others didn’t want me there. Tonight, I walked over, read the directions on the side of four different machines, and used them. I know it sounds stupid, but it is huge. Of course no one else ever had or voiced any of those thoughts. They were only in my head. Others never heard the voices, now I don’t hear those voices either. Amazing.