we need each other

My family had two cats.

The first one, Stella, is the softest kitty you ever saw, with the sweetest, tiniest meow you ever heard -- but her personality is anything but soft and sweet. She's cranky and standoffish, and if you're lucky you can pet her once before she strikes with claws and teeth. She became part of the family the day after my first "date" with J; when asked about the beginning of our relationship, he always brings up the photo I sent him when I came home from work to find her there after picking her out at the shelter. She was about 6 months old, one of the youngest (and most vocal) cats in the social cat cage.

The second one, Furrgus, came to us as a tiny black ball of fur, his eyes barely open. He was found in a gutter and lived in our guest bedroom for 6 weeks in quarantine until he could safely come out and meet Stella. He was goofy and rambunctious from Day One, always sneaking out between our feet, climbing our pant legs, and tripping over himself. He's also fearless; while Stella would shoot off at the slightest noise or disturbance, Furrg chased the vacuum cleaner, the ceiling fan and the buzz saw.

Later we came to the conclusion that he was also deaf, because have you ever met a cat you could sneak up on?! We kept him inside for a long time, knowing that he wouldn't blink at a passing car or the other gigantic cats on the block (with whom Stella gets into regular altercations) or the neighborhood's crew of bored teenagers. But eventually his cabin fever was getting everyone down, so we let him out.

And he was so happy! He and Stella started getting along better; he cuddled more, slept more, cried less. He would just sit, for hours, watching us work outside, or having staring contests with Stella's arch-enemy cat from next door. His reflexes got sharper, and he mellowed out, became more affectionate.

And then on Saturday, my dad called to tell me he'd been hit by a car and died.

***

I can't say we didn't all see it coming. We knew he was too full of life to be the kind of cat who lived to a ripe old age of 20, when he would quietly fade away with 8 lives still intact. At two, he'd already burned through his backup lives, and it wasn't slowing him down a bit!

But I didn't see it coming this particular Saturday; I hadn't planned for it. And I didn't expect to mourn so deeply and immediately. My hurt usually soaks in slowly, over time, so I can deal with it when the time of action is over. Besides that, I'm used to being the Leaver, not the Left-Behind. We've had pets before, but we always moved (to a different country) before we had to make any tough decisions -- and have been miraculously spared a sad event like this one 'til now.

Furrgus was the kind of pet that teaches you how to be comfortable in your own skin, reminds you not to take yourself too seriously, encourages you to stay curious. He schooled us in living on the regular.

And, in a sense, he schooled us in death too. He went quickly, sleeping. And then he gathered us together -- even Stella.

Sharing grief is a powerful thing. It's critical: the element of touch; the way different people in the group trade off the caretaker role; the sharing of stories, that laughing-with-tears-streaming-down-your-face -- you can't do that by yourself so well. And two cups of tea, shared, taste so much better than one.

***

What I am left with is this: We Need Each Other.

We all need a Furrgus... or a few Furrguses. (My other "Furrguses" include my friend Chris Lund, my Grammi, Morrie Schwartz...) And we all need people to be around when tough times strike.

There is a lot to cry about in our world: layoffs and breakups and failed tests and pitch after pitch that falls flat.
Delaware (and the rest of the nation) is mourning our well-loved former AG, Beau Biden. The collective pain is palpable here in Wilmington.
People in cities across the country mourn the violence that named Wilmington Murder Capital of the USA last year, and has recently brought Baltimore to a 40-year high in shooting deaths, and strikes almost every city and town in its own way.
There are sunken boats and plane crashes and bombings and wars and extreme weather events.
And although the hype has subsided, the world has been mourning the 9,000+ dead in Nepal's series of earthquakes last month, and the many others affected still by the stricken infrastructure and loss of family, community, and home.

We have our personal tragedies, and our shared tragedies. Our mourning filters through every aspect of our lives, and adds a gritty complexity and weight to our days. And it intensifies our humanity, which seeks company and community. We teach each other and catch each other and do our best to salve the pain of others and to keep on. It's why we Walk for the Cure and donate or volunteer for relief efforts and community services and clean-up crews. It's why we go to wakes and hold each other while we cry and inevitably stumble over words that we know can never really take the pain away -- because we are human and that's beautiful and we need each other to remind us of what's important and why we even bother slogging through the shit at all. And to remind us to make the most of it, and to do what we can to make the world better, even in very small ways.

game night

Monday night, after dinner at my parents' house, they busted out their birthday present from my sister: Blokus. If you haven't played this game, you should. It's a strategy game with four players and pieces that look like tetris blocks. Basically, you lay down your colored blocks corner-to-corner across the playing board, working around the other three colors, blocking them out sometimes and laying claim to sections of the board. The object is to use up all your pieces, or be left with the fewest squares when there are no moves left.

Family Game Night has been a solid institution throughout my life, and with Family Movie Night and our family dinners they have made up the core of our Family Togetherness Mission.

I know this all sounds a little bit like a TV commercial for the All-American Family circa 1972, but there is an element to our dinners and Togetherness Events that goes a little against the all-American grain, at least in my mind.

Here it is: we are hardcore collectivists. On Movie Nights, the film selection process was usually more of a production than the actual watching of the movie. We very rarely took a vote; typically, we didn't hit play until we had all expressed some level of assent to the same title. A friend of my dad once commented that he had never seen any other family completely stop everything to solve one member's crisis.

And our gaming strategy always had a lot more to do with making the other players laugh than winning.

I realized this just this past Monday night, when two out of four players grew up in other households. My dad and I spent extra time looking for moves that opened up new areas of the board for our own pieces, without cutting off anyone else. And when we realized what was taking so long, we all had a laugh. "Yeah... At my house," J. said, "we would have probably been beating each other up and yelling trying to get our pieces on the board."

It occurred to me briefly that it's easy to "win" against people who are not playing for themselves. Flashback to the last few months of Mr. McKnight's sixth grade social studies class, spent on a capstone group project called (if I'm remembering right) The World Game. We were split up into teams of four, and each team had to create a country, a name and a map and a government, and identify the key resources of this country, and for every element we created we got points. And then we went to war.

The World Game took over our relationships, inside and outside of class. I spent some time making deals with a friend from another "country," that if it came down to our two great nations, that we would call it a draw and rule together.

And in the last week of school, it did indeed come down to our two great nations. My country (Claustinora) was faced with the decision to attack, and we had enough points that we could have taken them cleanly. We could opt to pass on attacking, and if we did, then they would have the option to accept and end the game with peace, or to take us over and win the game.

We spent a long time in deliberations. It took all my persuasive power and the better part of one class period for me to convince my team to pass, that I had made a reliable deal with the enemy to end the game in peace. But they eventually took my word for it.

And my friend was overruled, and we were defeated, and I will never forget the look on Mr. McKnight's face. Disappointment. I was a star; how could I let victory slip away?! We had it in the bag.

To this day I do feel a little bad for letting my fellow Claustinorans down. My friendship with the girl from our conquering country took a bit of a beating; we got over it, but it wasn't looking too good for awhile there. Silly or not, the trust had been broken.

My innocence took a hit that day, too. It was the first time I remember understanding, with clarity, the inequality of persuasion. I remember, once she had convinced me that she was overruled and could not persuade her teammates otherwise, the sudden comprehension that I had done something she couldn't do, and that this was an important difference between us. It was bigger than The World Game. This was middle school, and high school, and the corruption of the world beyond.

But you know what? On principle, I don't regret my decision. I do not regret successfully convincing my countrymen and women not to attack. I'm proud of that. Even at the ripe age of 10 I think I had my priorities in the right order. What I would have won by letting my team attack, by breaking my agreement with my friend, was in no way worth getting the highest grade on the project, and being responsible for breaking a friendship.

Family Togetherness Activities used to be a lot simpler, back when only some of us could talk. Now things are a lot more complicated. We all have different interests and it doesn't go quite as smoothly. But we still operate the same way.

The point of playing the game is not competition, and our choice in games has changed a little because of that. We play Scattergories and Bananagrams and creative strategy games that give us something to think about, or games that just make us laugh. That's the point. Laughing together.

The world is a lot more complicated now, too. It's a lot more complicated than waging war for grades with a point system (which also, in retrospect, is more flawed than I realized at the time). Most people don't operate from a collectivist standpoint; I think if we did, if that was our modus operandi, the world would be better. But I understand. It's hard to wrap our minds around being a collective with millions and billions of people. It's hard to wrap our minds around being a collective with so many different kinds of people, who have different kinds of experiences and want different things.

But we have lost sight of the fact that what affects others affects us, and vice versa. There is some game theory, some butterfly effect, some totally random universe-at-work business involved here. When we categorically ignore what is good for people who are different from us, even if we ignore what they say is good for them, if we have a different idea of "good," we are doing ourselves a disservice. We are doing our collectives, however we define them, whether we believe in them or not -- we are doing a disservice to our communities and to the world we live in.

Give it some thought. What do we win, really, that's important, when we "win" this game? What do we win by letting this one go?

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