This week I must beg your forgiveness here at the top. I’m putting this together somewhat at the last minute, as I’ve been struggling all week to find inspiration for the lengthy narrative or pedagogical preamble which I use to frame my reviews. I also fear that my normal mirthful tone may not materialize as I write this. I had a rough week. So I’m dispensing with a Review this week. They’ll be back next week. I’ve got a couple queued up, I just need to get back into a good headspace for that kind of writing.
My post last week on Star Wars Day for Kalikori’s Deathstar rosin was actually finished and posted from a cute little coffee shop in Albany, New York, where I found myself in the early morning following a concert that my wife and I had attended. We were then heading south a bit to our college alma mater, just to touch the grass, hug a tree (literally), bask in some nostalgia, and then get an absurd amount of takeout from THE Chinese place nearby to bring home to share with our kids.
But we returned home to find that the health of my number one cat – Bellatrix, or Trixie for short – had suddenly declined quite drastically. She was getting old, and actually had a vet appointment scheduled for that Monday morning, but my family basically spent Sunday fairly convinced that she might not even make it to that appointment, and even if she did, well, that might be it for her. I won’t elaborate, but to make that part of the story short, she made it to the appointment, but the vet and I agreed that the right thing to do was to have her put to sleep.
I won’t lie, I was – shit, I still am – fairly devastated. She was somewhere north of 15 years old, and I’d had her for over 14 of those years. She was a monster for most of those. She hated the kids until very recently, and only tolerated my wife for most of that time as well. But she loved me. She was my familiar, my daemon, the black cat to my witch. With the brief exception of when I was just out of college and moving around a bunch trying to figure out where I wanted to be, I’ve always had cats. But Trixie was my cat in a way no other cat that’s lived with me ever has been, and I have not been taking her death as well as I would have liked.
But why am I unloading about this here? Well, the last time we lost a cat was long enough ago that the kids remember it happening, but were young enough that it was still pretty abstract for them. Now that they’re all in the low double digits, I wanted to make sure that they were given the opportunity to participate in or at least express their grief in whatever ways they needed. I wanted to create for our family a kind of open-ended funerary practice that they could be a part of in whatever way would help them deal with how they were feeling. Even though Trixie was not the kindest of creatures to them until recently, they are still incredibly empathetic and caring kids, and even the loss of the pet they had the least connection with personally was still pretty difficult. For what it’s worth as well, they were so sweet with me, as they could see that I was struggling pretty hard with it.
The kids have been exposed to uses of herbs in both pagan-style and mainstream religious practices before. We’ve put protective herbs in pouches in the dark corners of their rooms to ward off scary things in the night, and we do Passover with family friends each year. I’m some sort of agnosto-Buddhist hedge-witch (despite being raised Protestant), and while I don’t want to have to boil down my wife’s beliefs to a brief summation here, she brings a variety of atheistic esoteric practices as well as Jewish heritage to the family. So we have pretty open minds about allowing the kids the space they need to construct their own means of finding comfort in rituals.
I decided that we would burn herbs important to anyone who wanted to contribute, and that we would spread those ashes over Trixie’s grave. For Trixie herself, well, she was usually a very dignified and cold beastie, but when we put catnip down, she would debase herself. After a few nibbles, she would go headfirst into the bowl, rolling around on the floor in the mess she made, covering herself in nip, sometimes putting the small bowl over her head like an oversized sun hat. It was always a treat to watch. So Trixie’s personal herb was catnip.
I contributed some cannabis, specifically Golden Tiger and Princess Magic Girl, which was broadly agreed to be perfect based on names alone (my kids don’t yet know exactly what I do professionally, but they know I work with plants with funny names). I would have used this as an excuse to review either of those, if I hadn’t already.
Once the kids added their herbs the definition of “herb” got a little broad. One contributed some grated ginger, one added furikake, and the third did smoked paprika. These were perfect choices for them to make. I wonder though if this means that when eventually our cat named Creamcheese dies if one or more of the kids will want to contribute Everything Bagel Seasoning. Hey look, my jovial tone snuck in. Anyway, these alternative herbs opened the door for my wife to add some of the pink flower petals that are currently blanketing our yard and are from a tree very close to where Trixie was being laid to rest. The kids also thought we should bury Trixie with some fresh catnip as well (my son is currently studying ancient Egypt, so burying the dead with something they can use in the afterlife may have inspired some of this thinking). Like I said, they are sweet and thoughtful little humans. And I certainly don’t want to forget my wife too, who has been so incredibly supportive. She’s upset about Trixie’s death as well, but understanding how it was impacting me, and that I was still on the hook for going to work, and digging the grave, and so forth, she provided me the perfect balance of space and time to process and offered comfort and support when I needed it. She tends to read the blog in irregular bursts, so I’m not sure when she’ll actually read this, but thank you. I love you.
I don’t have a clean ending for this. I’m still grieving the loss of my favorite non-human creature ever, but I am comforted by the fact that my kids handled all of this so well. They were open in expressing their own sorrow, they gave me the space to be the one in the family who was visibly hurting the most, and they were engaged in the ways that seemed right for honoring Trixie’s memory. I’m still confronting the day-to-day little changes that remind me of her and draw into focus her missing presence, like when I had to figure out which cat was going to eat at which spot for dinner, because I could now move the one who had to eat in the kitchen instead of the dining room actually into the dining room with the others. Would they all just shuffle down a spot, putting the youngest in the “first” spot, or would the now-oldest (the aforementioned Creamcheese, whose full name is Mr. Creamcheese Cupcake) leapfrog the youngest into that first spot? Due to being a wobbly cat, the one moving from the kitchen to the dining room shouldn’t move to the first spot because he would make a mess eating that close to the water, so he should just move to where Creamcheese had been eating…so… yeah. Trixie’s presence is missed in a lot of ways. But I’ve had a week to process, and I hope you all don’t mind that I let some of that processing spill out into this blog. There was a small mention of cannabis up in the middle part!
Thank you all for reading, not just this, but my blog in general. The fact that I’m now reaching readers whom I do not know is really inspiring, and I hope this doesn’t turn any of you off of the blog. I promise, back to regular cannabis content next Monday. I’ve got a couple great strains (one new, one modern classic) that I’ve reviewed, but like I said, I just needed a little more time to clear my head and find some inspiration for the stories that will accompany them. Have a lovely week, everyone. Hug those kids or pets or loved ones or whatever brings you comfort and happiness. Maybe it’s weed?
Stoned Coast 
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