We lost Harry on March 29th.
He was sixteen years old and he was ours. But if I'm being honest, he was really my daughter's.
He chose her when she was nine years old. That's how it works with cats sometimes. They decide. And Harry decided on my daughter, and he never changed his mind. Not once. Not through any of it.
He was there when her dad left. He was there when we were robbed and she didn't feel safe in her own home. He was there when we lived next to an abusive neighbor and the walls of our little world felt thin and frightening. He was there through the years we spent taking care of my mom, through her decline, through her death. When my mother passed, Harry was the one who stayed close to my daughter and helped her carry it. He was her support animal before we even had a word for what he was. He was her constant. The one being in this world she could always count on to be exactly where she needed him.
He was with her for sixteen years. And watching her grieve him is one of the hardest things I've ever done as her mother. Because I can't fix this one. I can't make it smaller or faster or easier. I can only sit with her in it. And sometimes that's all love can do.
Letting him go didn't happen all at once either. It came in stages, one after another, each one asking a little more. It started with a seizure on March 2nd. He was our little old man, so we knew. You always know, even when you're not ready to say it out loud. Two weeks later, another seizure. This time he lost sight in one eye, then a few days later the other eye and now he became cuddly. Like he knew and wanted to give us all the love he could in his last days. Then over the last 24-48 hours, he could barely walk.
On Monday the 29th, we knew it was time. We brought him to the vet to say goodbye forever. And then we came home without him.
Grief is funny that way. It doesn't ask for your schedule. It doesn't care that you have things to do and people depending on you and a life that keeps moving whether you're ready or not. It just arrives. And the only way through it is to let it be there for a while.
I've been thinking a lot about what moving forward actually means. I've spent the last several months writing worksheets and devotionals for a series called Keep Moving Forward. I started them because I needed them. Life handed me a season of hard things, one after another, and I had to figure out how to keep going when my nervous system was exhausted and my heart was full and my to-do list didn't care about any of it.
Writing those pages helped me more than I expected. Not just emotionally. Spiritually too. Putting words to the hard things has a way of making them smaller. Not gone. Just smaller. Something the page can hold instead of just your chest.
But here's what I keep coming back to, especially right now, in this quiet week without Harry: staying still is still moving forward.
Grief is not the absence of progress. Grief is the process. Letting yourself cry is forward motion. Sitting on the couch with your daughter and not saying a word is forward motion. Washing your face on the second day, even when you don't feel like it, is forward motion. Going back to work when you're not ready, because you have to and you're not at your very best, that counts too.
You don't have to rush it. You don't have to apologize for it. You don't owe anyone an explanation for why you're still sad, or why something small set you off in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. Grief doesn't follow a schedule, and healing doesn't either. There is no right way to do this. There is no wrong way. What matters is that you're patient with yourself, and patient with the people grieving beside you. No apologies necessary. No explanations required.
I think of grief like waves in the ocean.
Some days they're soft. Gentle. You can breathe through them and barely feel the pull. Some days they crash into you when you didn't see them coming. Some days they're relentless, one after another, and you're barely keeping your head above water. And then, slowly, one day the waves push you toward shore instead of under it. You find your footing. You breathe again.
That day comes. I promise it comes.
Harry was loved well. My daughter loved him well. And I think that's the best thing you can say about anyone you've lost.
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If you're going through something hard right now, something that's making it difficult to keep moving forward, I want you to know about a free resource I've been quietly building. The Keep Moving Forward series is a collection of worksheets and devotionals I've been writing through real life. Hard months. Heavy seasons. The kind of things that make you wonder how you're going to get through the next hour, let alone the next week.
They go out once a month. One worksheet, one devotional companion, delivered to your inbox. No charge. No catch. Just honest words and a little bit of scripture for the days when you need both.
You can find out more and subscribe here: Keep Moving Forward
You don't have to have it together to begin. These were written for the hard places.