Saying "Thank You"

In early 2005, Wil Wheaton wrote a series of posts on his blog about losing two of their cats, Felix and Sketch. At almost the same time, Gwen and I lost our cat Eliot to congestive heart failure. I remember sitting in the waiting room at the emergency vet the first night Eliot started having trouble breathing and thinking "This is like exactly what Wil was writing about last month." It was remarkably surreal, and yet it was strangely comforting. As the weeks went by, I knew that I wasn't the only person who felt like I did. I was all twisted up inside, but somehow reading what Wil had gone through helped me deal with, helped me take it in, and helped me cope.

Eliot's death was the beginning of bad stretch for me that lasted almost two years.  It wasn't just about Eliot, but that event was the trigger for whole series of things that went badly for me. Even after things turned around, I carried the weight of his death  with me. Two years before he died, our vet thought he'd noticed something irregular with Eliot's heartbeat, and he had wanted to run more tests. For some reason, we'd never had those tests run. And when we lost Eliot, I knew it was my fault.

Last fall, when we played Seth Ben-Ezra's A Flower For Mara at the Nerdly Beach Party, I finally realized how much I could still feel that burden hanging around my neck. It hadn't occured to me that because I still blamed myself, the idea of being a parent scared the crap out of me. Even though Eliot's brother (who has a milder form of the same condition)  stayed healthy because of the treatments we'd gotten him and even though we adopted two more little fuzzballs who had brought us a ton of joy, I doubted my ability to really be responsible for another living thing. Julia Cameron talks about the focusing power of pain, how we seem to pay so much attention to the world when we're hurting. The pain of Eliot's death and the guilt I felt about it had seared itself into my mind.

Yesterday at OrcCon, I spotted Wil Wheaton in the dealer's hall. After he finished up at the Indie Press Revolution booth, I stopped him for just a moment and thanked him for sharing his pain with the world. He'd helped me immensely, and I was profoundly grateful. I'd been hoping to run into him for the last several years to tell him that, but it seems appropriate that it didn't happen until now. It's only in the last few months that I've really come to terms with what happened and allowed myself to move on.

So, thank you, Wil and Seth, for helping me through your writings. I'm a happier, healthier person because of it.