Callie Mae Meads was my mom’s Catahoula. She was a marvelous dog – brave and silly and clever and kind. She got my nephew over his fear of dogs, and when my mother broke her ankle, Callie Mae was there to take care of her. She kept my step-grandmother company in the last years of her life, too.

Big dogs, as anyone who’s ever had one knows, just don’t live as long as smaller animals. But Callie was bucking the trend. She blew out a knee a few years back, and she’d gained quite a bit of weight, with the reduced mobility. When NovySan and I went to Wyoming last Thanksgiving, though, she’d slimmed down, and she came bounding across Mom’s lawn to greet us. I hadn’t seen her move like that in years.

It didn’t last long, though. In the past few weeks, she’d stopped eating, and then she stopped drinking, too. Today, Mom fed her a last few spoonfuls of whipped cream, and my stepfather, Sam, took her to the vet for the final time. The vet said she was in pretty good shape for a 94-year-old lady, but her organs were shutting down, and it was time.

I’ll miss you, Callie Mae.

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This is my very last picture of Schokie. There were two more, and I think one was better than this – you could see our eyes, at least – but somehow this was the only one that stuck. The other two just vanished.

My ex-husband and I found Schokie at the Animal Shelter – more often called the Pound – in Laramie, not long after we moved in together. We’d gone to look for our roommate’s cat, who’d gone walkabout while she was out of town. We didn’t find him, but while we standing in front of the row of cages, this tiny, obnoxious brown kitten climbed the wire door, snagged her claws in Mark’s pantleg, and screamed at us until we took her home.

She was always pushy. She’d wedge herself between us and shriek when Mark tried to kiss me. The first time she ever met a pizza, she landed in the middle of it, sank her claws into the molten cheese, and hissed when we tried to remove her from it. The first night after I brought Thryym home, she chased him around the apartment and tried to bite his balls off. But all that aside, she was affectionate, she was smart, and she always knew exactly who she was and what she wanted.

That changed a few years ago. “You’re getting senile,” I’ll tell her, when I found her staring at a wall, or watched her sit down suddenly in the middle of a room, lift a leg to scratch herself, and then freeze, with no idea what she’d intended to do next.

Last year, she went blind. High blood pressure, due to high thyroid and kidney failure, had detached her retinas. They give cats human drugs for those things; there are no veterinary drugs for them yet. A week later, she could see again, and the vet was amazed. (She even mentioned it today: “I was so proud of her,” she said, “for coming back from everything like she did.”) She had a urinary tract infection, which we got cleared up, and then she had another, and another. She weighed less than half as much as she did in her prime, and she got crankier, and scrawnier, and more and more vacant. Getting enough food into her was a struggle, and she rapidly rejected every new flavor.

This past weekend, while NovySan and I were at Maker Faire, she hardly ate at all. Or rather, she hardly ate her own food. She was, instead, determined to eat her despised neighbor’s food – Spooky, our housemate’s cat, gets Friskies, and Friskies, for whatever reason, are ever so much better than the Evo that she loved when I first got it for her. She lost weight, and when we came home, she’d hardly get off the bathroom counter. Her abdomen was distended, and under the fur and the dust (she loved to sleep in the bougainvillea litter outside) I could feel a hardening lump where I imagined her liver ought to be.

I wondered whether to take her to the vet. “How much more can we do to you?” I asked her. But she was miserable, I could see it. So, today, I took her in.

It was, as I thought, her liver that I could feel. That, and a mass in her abdomen that wasn’t there three weeks ago. She’d had lab tests that recently, with no sign of liver failure – just the anemia we’d been battling for months. It might have been lymphoma – that moves very quickly.

“We could do a lot of tests,” the vet said, “and do chemo.”

“She’s 18 years old,” I said, “and I don’t want to do that to her.”

I took her to a room with a soft couch and low lighting, and the vet clipped a sign to the door that said, “Euthanasia in progress. Please be considerate.” I spread a towel across my lap and held her. There was a purple bandage around her left right front paw, to hold the catheter in her vein. She went limp before the last of the solution entered her body. A moment later, I felt her heart beat against my fingertips for the very last time.

I don’t have any pictures of Schokie as a kitten, but on my way out with my empty cat carrier, I saw this little creature, who looked so much like her that when I went back to the photos I’d taken this afternoon, I wondered for a moment how a picture of that obnoxious little furball Mark and I brought home from the Pound had made it onto my phone.

She wasn’t my first cat, and she’s not the first I’ve lost. But she’s the first one I had for so long, and it’s the first time I’ve lost an animal without another one waiting at home. I’ve cleaned out her catbox already, and thrown out her medication, but NovySan just told me we should keep her bowls, and I will. They’ll be there whenever we need them.

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On April 16, near the end of the work day, NovySan told me that Frank A. Lauro was dead. Frank was Novy’s best friend in high school. They drifted apart in college, as friends sometimes do, but they’d been back in touch recently. The words didn’t make sense to me – less sense, even, than John’s call to tell me that Shawn was dead.

At Frank’s wake, on the 21st, a lot of people got up to tell stories. Frank’s family… his friends… his coworkers… And when NovySan got up to tell his stories (and out himself as the person one of Frank’s favorite stories was about), he said that Frank, more than anything, was a storyteller, and he asked everyone to keep their stories about Frank alive. Tell them to other people. Pass them around. Make sure that Frank isn’t forgotten.

I don’t have a lot of Frank stories. I only met him a few times – I doubt I spent a total of 10 hours in his presence. But he was a part of NovySan, and that makes him a part of me. I thought of him as a friend, and I always thought there’d be time enough to know him.

If Shawn’s death taught me anything, it should have been that there’s never enough time.

On the 17th, though, as NovySan was finalizing plans for our trip to Chicago for Frank’s wake, and I was sitting at this very table, trying to wrap up as much work as I could before we went, staring at a computer screen blurred through the tears (just as it is now), I did what I do when I feel frustrated and helpless – I went chasing stories.

There are a lot of stories about Frank online. The first one I found, courtesy of Comic Book Resources, might have been the most important. Several years ago, another member of a comic book forum to which Frank belonged died suddenly (and, like Frank, far too young). Frank, who lived near the funeral home, offered to take the board’s condolences to the family. Afterward, he submitted a full report. I won’t quote from it here, because the situation led to Frank being banned from the board in question (and I really have no desire to involve myself in whatever politics led to that decision), but if you follow the links, you’ll get a good sense not only of the controversy, but also of who Frank was.

That article at Comic Book Resources also led me to Imwan, which was Frank joined on Christmas Day 2006, and which became his undisputed online home. Imwan is where I found not only stories about Frank, but also stories by Frank. In The Writers’ Block, I found a story he’d written in grad school. I’d known Frank was a writer, but it was the first time I’d been able read something he’d written. And it’s good. It’s damned good. The formatting is important, as Frank noted. “It works perfectly in Word,” he said. It works perfectly in OpenOffice Writer, too – and I hope his family doesn’t mind, but I’ve uploaded a PDF version to prove it.

It’s been more than a month, and it still doesn’t make sense to me that Frank is dead. I’m grateful, though, that so much of him still lives online. His last post on Imwan, dated April 13, was a single word – Graphology. As last words go, that one’s not bad.

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It’s been a strange, sad, joyful year for me, and while some things, I hope never to repeat, other things (one thing in particular) made it one of the best years of my life.

In March, NovySan and I went to London and Stratford-Upon-Avon, where we visited old friends, met new friends, saw F. Murray Abraham in The Merchant of Venice and Ian McKellen in King Lear, drank at the Dirty Duck, ate at Lee Ho Fook’s, wandered Hyde Park, visited the Tower, Tower Bridge and the Temple, and picked up a signed copy of Donald Rumbelow’s Jack the Ripper book at the end of his Jack the Ripper tour. I could go on for days about this trip. Definitely one of the high points.

And then, in April, I got sick. High fever, sore throat, hacking cough… Your basic horrible plague. And I stayed sick for about six weeks, through three rounds of antibiotics, chest x-rays, prescription inhalers… I think it’s the sickest I’ve ever been, and I very much hope that it’s the sickest I ever am.

July, though! Oh, July made the entire year worth it. On July 7, NovySan and I got married. I knew the day I met him that I wanted him in my life. It didn’t take me much longer to know I wanted him in my life for the rest of my life. I love you, baby.

In August, Lindsay Holichek died, of undiagnosed, and apparently asymptomatic, ovarian cancer. I always thought of Lindsay as my parents’ friend, but she was mine, too. She called herself my surrogate mother – I was more her surrogate daughter. Just a few weeks before she died, I was looking at one of the (many) books she’d given me and thinking that I should write to her. I didn’t, and of course it’s too late now. It wasn’t until after she died that I realized how strongly she’d influenced me. She was my mentor before I understood what that meant. She gave me my first copy of Tatterhood and Other Tales, which nurtured my love of fantastic literature and helped spark my feminism. (There’s a reason it’s the first book I ever gave Novy’s daughter.) She loved food and music and she had a beautiful mind and an amazing talent for gift-giving. She always chose just the right thing. It’s something I’ve tried to emulate (with, I flatter myself, some small degree of success). I’ll miss her, but as my mother (ever wise) said, Lindsay enjoyed her life, and she died quickly, painlessly, and doing something she loved. It’s a sad thing, but not a tragedy.

The end of August brought Burning Man. Our third year, and the first we’ve camped with other people. It was a good year. The early Burn didn’t affect us – I called the event post-Paul Addis “Christmas in Whoville.” I loved the wind and the dust. Something about that harsh environment speaks to me, at least one week out of the year. (Of course, I know that without Novy’s engineering skills, I’d be a miserable huddled wreck underneath someone’s car, instead of laughing at the storms from the safety of our shade structure). The Temple Burn was magical for me – life-changing, I think. There are things I could complain about, but I won’t. I think the beauty of the event is that almost everyone can find an experience there that’s right for them, and I don’t choose to have an experience in which the crowds and the bad behavior overwhelm the generosity, artistic expression and communal feeling I’m there for. I don’t know that I’ll want to keep going every year, but I cherish the years I have been.

On November 30, my friend Shawn died. I’ve written about this before. Novy and I went to Portland in December for his memorial – met his friend Linda and his partner John. I’m glad we went. Meeting them, and talking to them, helped answer some questions for me, though it raised new ones, as well. There’s so much about his death that I still don’t understand, and of course he’s not here for me to ask. This was one of the low points. Shawn suffered terribly – not just at the end, but his entire life. So many people loved him, but it wasn’t enough. He’d been so damaged, I don’t know what any of us could have done to save him.

And that brings us, roughly, to the turn of the year, which Novy and I spent with Amara and friends. I’ve got more to say about 2008, but I’ll leave it now with a wish, a hope, a prayer – I’m almost afraid to call it a certainty – that this is going to be a very good year.

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He called again at 2:59 to confirm — liver failure, kidney failure… While he was still conscious, he said he didn’t want life support, but he’d let John decide. John made the same decision I would have — he had them remove the breathing tube.

I decided I was flying up there, and called NovySan to tell him. He suggested I wait until I knew whether there was anything I could do — whether there’d be a memorial — whether the family was coming. (The family… John had already called one sister, and left a message. She hasn’t called back. I asked if he’d called Shawn’s brother. He didn’t recognize the name. So I found the number and left a message with Scott’s wife. She hasn’t called, either.) I called John at 3:37 and said I was going to wait. He said it didn’t look like I’d be able to get there before Shawn passed; I said I thought as much, so anything I could do up there, I’d be doing for him. Then he put the phone to Shawn’s ear, so I could tell him I loved him. I hope he could hear me.

At 4:21, I called my mother. I had to tell someone who knew him.

John called again at 6:02. He said, “He’s gone.”

At 6:06, Mom called. “I had a feeling,” she said.

She was right.

I hadn’t talked to him in more than four months. I hadn’t even told him that Lindsay, my parents’ friend, my mentor, someone he knew too, died before Burning Man. I keep asking myself why I didn’t call — and whether I would have known how sick he was if I had called. I wonder why I didn’t realize… And I feel even worse for John and his friends in Portland, who were there and still didn’t know.

I feel hollow. When I say, “Shawn’s dead,” I start to cry. But then it drifts away, because it’s real yet.

And I’m angry, too. With him, for apparently drinking himself to death at the age of 36. With myself, for not figuring out that that’s what he was doing.

Really, though, he joins my grandmother on my list of people who’ve died of depression. She treated hers with pills. He treated his with booze.

(And I hesitate to say for sure it’s the alcohol that killed him — but when I asked John, he said that was it.)

I don’t know how to say goodbye to him yet.

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