April was always my least favorite month… although, it has always been my most emotional. April 17, 1993, I was hospitalized in a tremendous car accident that should have killed me, but I survived after major surgery and extensive wheelchair-ization and de-organisation. April (something) 2003, I left a marriage and found myself alone since I was 17–but a child. Aprils are always disaster months for me. Even if there isn’t a death or a tragedy, I’ve fallen apart in April. I hated Spring for it since that brush with death in 95.
And on the other hand, death is always a new beginning. In April 1995, I did resurface to life. In April, 2003, I saw the most amazing vision outside my window, after leaving my husband, looking at the melted snow with Java by my side, and I wept. I wept because April had always haunted me, and in that one moment, looking at Spring blooms on the trees near my apartment in New Jersey–I saw God. And for the weeks or months that I’d wept, I knew then that It was there–whatever It was. Salvation. Love. Something. Something that made my heart start beating again after I’d felt like I’d gone through the bowels of Hell.
April 3, 2010, Java died. I don’t know how I knew it would happen, but I cried all night, because he seemed ill. He’d been to the vet, gotten an injection of steroids–and yet, I knew, last night, he was dying. He came up and said goodbye, let me pet him, and then moved far away–to the kitchen, where he slept that night. I woke up to find him nowhere and knew he had died–that he had gone far away from humanity to make his last moments–and found him by the sofa in the living room. I walked outside to smoke, completely numb. Completely Numb. And tears were falling, but I was numb. It was him who had accompanied me on all my journeys. It was him that I planned to go to California with. It was him who kept me alive at night when I sobbed with depression or heartbreak or joblessness. It was him who kept me alive.
Today, when I woke up, and I felt his lifeless body, and I smoked, I wept. For him. But mostly, for me. His giant blue eyes looking up at me, constantly wanting to be by my side. In my worst moments of utter distraction or depression, he was at my side, consoling me. At my best, he was being hugged in joy and a thousand kisses would be too few.
I guess he was my husband and my child and my father. And I know–you might say I built too much into that. But he was the little man I loved more than the world. He was the longest relationship I’ve ever kept. He was the confidant who looked over me when I cried.
So now, on April 3rd, we buried him and I said goodbye to the one male companion who’s seen me from girlhood to adulthood and seen every wicked mistake I’ve made and loved me anyway.
I’ve decided to wait until late May to move to California. I need some time to feel a little sorrow and feel it here. April, huh. Well, death and rebirth is the theme. I guess in my life, it’s fitting.
From Big Sur (and partly why I can’t work on it now, even though I’m halfway finished) — (on finding out his cat had died at home while he was gone)
“Of course he can’t know since I didn’t tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification with my dead brother Gerard who’d taught me to love cats and when I was 3 or 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and lap up milk–The death of “little brother” Tyke indeed.”
–Big Sur, By Jack Kerouac
Christina Ross 