celexa (or, the history of death and science)

Someday in January, it will have been 9 years since Hobbes died... Actually, let me go back further than that...



The Beginning
When we were very young, my sister found a kitten eating tomatos in my grandparent's garden. She named her Miranda. Though all of us except my dad pronounced it Merinda. I thought it just his severe southern accent, but that was actually her name. I thought it was pronounced and spelled Merinda. So that's what I'm still spelling and calling her. Anyway, we didn't get her spayed originally. I guess back then people still debated on whether or not that was an okay thing to do. We just let her have litters of kittens and we'd keep them until other people adopted them. Though usually one or two per litter would die of various causes. I only specifically remember one. I think he was a black cat. My mom accidentally backed over him in her car. I remember a bit later after one of them died I tried to dig it up with the intention of trying to hook him up to a battery and frankenstein him, but I dug where he was supposed to be and couldn't find him. Either my digging skills were too poor, or my parents just dumped him in the garbage and told us they buried him. Either way it's good because I probably would've been pretty disturbed by the decomposed kitten corpse.



Sometime when I was a kid, (first or second grade maybe?), my granddad died. I don't remember him very well now, but at the time he was one of my favorite people in the world. I cried a lot for a long time. It was very weird to me that something alive could just stop being alive. I remember a fairly long time after that my sister and I saw a shooting star and as we were walking inside I told her that I wished our granddad would come back to life. She freaked out a little and told me that if it worked he would come back as a zombie and eat our brains or something.



Sometime in sixth grade one of my classmates died. I didn't know him at all, but he went to my church so our Sunday School teacher took us out of school to go to his funeral. I cried hard. Not really about him specifically, just from seeing someone who I had seen alive who wasn't in there anymore. It reminded me about my grandad and that it was going to happen to everyone else I cared about sooner or later.



Protection Fault
In the last litter of kittens Merinda had before we got her spayed was a cat we named Lumpy. He had some kind of lumpy deformity on his belly so nobody wanted to adopt him, so we kept him and he grew up with us. There were some dogs in the neigborhood we lived in that would chase me whenever they saw me. One time I was holding Lumpy and walking around our yard and the dogs took off after me. The next day Lumpy's tail was gone and the stub was bleeding. I'm not actually sure I had been holding Lumpy when the dogs took off after me the day before, or if it had actually been the day before. Or if I had dropped him in panic when it happened. But the story in my mind is that I forgot I had him and dropped him when they came after me and they had caught him and bit off his tail. I think it's about 50/50 that that's what happened. I didn't tell anyone this until much later because it was embarassing. My parents took Lump to the vet and he was put to sleep. They said that he had to be put to sleep, he wouldn't have lived anyway. But I've seen plenty of tailless cats so I think that's crap. He was put to sleep because there was an excuse to and he was high maintenance because of his lump and they didn't want more than one cat. Maybe if I had told them before they took him to the vet they wouldn't have done it so I wouldn't feel responsible for the rest of my life. After that I didn't run from the dogs anymore. When they thought ran at me I ran towards them and they turned around and ran away from me. After I got my dog, Daniel, they were always trying to attack him. I would chase them and kick them and throw soccer balls at them to keep them away from him. Of course this led to Daniel deciding to charge them like they did him if he saw them and I was around to have his back.



Relapse
Sometime when I was living in Starkville for college my paternal grandmother died. When I learned she died, I decided right then that I wouldn't let it get to me. I liked her, and I was sad. But I vowed I would not cry. I drove from Starkville to where the funeral was and went through the funeral and everything without ever crying. Though I had to fight very hard to do so a few times. But I pulled it off. So I thought I was over the whole death thing. It sucked but it was manageable.

In the last spring semester I was in College, Daniel's hind legs had started shaking all the time. We took him to the vet and found out he had cancer that was cutting off circulation to the lower half of his body. He had surgery to remove it, but going into it the vet didn't seem like he was giving him much chance. I cried a lot before the surgery. But it worked and Daniel was okay, though never quite as energetic as before.



I think it was about a week or two after Daniel's surgery, I came home one weekend and Merinda was acting strange. She was walking around in circles. She must have had a stroke. She could not go straight. I had to feed her with my hand because when she tried to eat, her neck turned right continuously. When the weekend was over I cried and kissed the top of her head and said goodbye and went back to Starkville, and that was the last time I saw her. The next weekend I came home again and couldn't find her. I asked my mom where she was and she started crying and said she had found her dead that morning and buried her in the back yard. I cried a lot, instantly. I was sad most of the times when I was alone after that. But fortunately up until I graduated and went back home at the end of summer that year, I wasn't alone very often. I had a recurring theme in a lot of my dreams after she died. In one of them, I was with a lot of the people I knew at the time in a room made out of glass. They were all in sleeping bags but I was up and trying to stay awake because Michael Myers (the dude from Halloween) was standing across the street with a butcher knife waiting to come in and slit my friend's throats. He was afraid of me, so as long as I was awake he would just stay across the street looking at us. And I wasn't afraid of him either. But I was sleepy. Whenever I fell asleep, Michael would come in a kill one of my friends and go back across the street before I woke up. I don't know why I couldn't just go across the street and beat him up or something. I guess it was one of those rules dreams have for unspecified reason. Or I was afraid something else would get my friends while I was gone.



Road Trippin'
A little while after Merinda died, I started looking to get a new cat. I decided I wanted a girl black cat. I went to the pound first. They had a new litter of kittens and some of them were black, but none of the black ones were girls. There was one black cat that seemed to have way more energy than the others. He would jump up on things and slap his paws on the tops of the other kittens heads. But he wasn't a girl so I didn't get him. I checked some ads in the paper for free kittens, but I kept remembering that energetic kitty from the pound, and eventually I went back and got him. I named him Hobbes.



After I graduated, I came home. My mom had steam coming out of her ears whenever I was around her because I wasn't looking for a job hard enough. I only wanted to send resume's out to places in other states because I wanted to get away from Mississippi. She wanted me to only send resumes to places in Tupelo. So I never applied for any of the jobs in Tupelo that she suggested, and whenever I thoguht about applying for a job somewhere else she'd act more pissed off than usual, so I didn't end up doing that much either.



Most nights, I would go outside after 1 or 2 AM and walk a lap or two up and down our street. Daniel and Hobbes would both follow me. They were our mini road trips.


Hitting Bottom
Every once in a while Hobbes would start breathing with hard with his mouth open, for no reason. It usually went away in a minute or two. One morning in February of 2001 after we'd been on our road trip, he started doing it again. But this time it didn't stop after a few minutes. I determined that I would stay up until the vet opened and take him in. Around 6 my parents woke up. I told my mom about it. She yelled at me that I couldn't just walk into the vet, you had to call them first, and was she gonna have to call them for me because I was such a sad sack of crap. I said I would call them myself. I didn't want to call, and I was starting to get really sleepy. I talked myself into thinking it wasn't a big deal and it would be fine, and I went to sleep. I had o set my alarm for around 1 or 2PM I think, because I was supposed to take my grandmother to the dentist. I woke up and walked into the kitchen and saw Hobbes laying on the floor from the back. I said something to him and he didn't move. I went around to the other side. His eyes were open. I put my hand on him and he felt like a block of ice. His mouth was open and his tongue was purple and laying on the floor and he was in a puddle of saliva. It was the worst moment of my life and the worst image burned into my brain. My grandmother put him in a garbage bag for the time being and I took her to the dentist. I dropped her off but didn't want to go back home where his body was. I thought about going to my sister's house, but I didn't. I drove around a bit and tried to tell myself to just pretend he'd not existed. He'd only lived a year so it should be easy.



I went back to the dentist and waited for my mother to get there to pick my grandmother up and told her what happened. Then when I knew I wouldn't be alone there I went back home and with my mother with me I started digging a hole next to Merinda to put Hobbes in.  While I was digging, my sister drove up and came over to talk to my mom. They talked to each other all happylike and finally I yelled at them to go somewhere else if they were going to do that. They went inside and I finished burying him alone.



My mom stopped having steam coming out of her ears at me all the time after that. I cried all the time. And time didn't make it fade. I wanted to die. What stopped me was knowing that if I did I would make a lot of people feel the way I did, instead of just me feeling that way. A few months later, I finally went about a week without crying. I thought I was getting better. My mom thought I was getting better. Then it all just hit me all over again and I started crying. My mom asked me what was wrong and I said "it's just to much." She had tried to talk me into seeing a psychologist and I relented at that moment and said I would.



So I went to see a counselor dude. He wasn't a full fledged psychologist. I don't know what his qualifications were. I just know that he sucked. He had no idea. I felt worse after talking to him than before. Then I went to a regular doctor and he prescribed celexa. For the first few weeks, I felt like I'd swallowed a battery whenever I took one. But I also started to feel... well, a little more emotionally numb. Which was an improvement. Around the same time I got a new kitten. I made sure to get a kitten born after Hobbes died. I was hoping his soul would be in there. When I went to go pick out a kitten from some lady who was giving them away, none of them paid any attention to me being there. Except one who climbed into my lap and look up at my face and pawed at my chest. So I figured maybe that was him. When "he" was old enough to not need his mother's milk, I came and got him. I knew it wasn't Hobbes after I had him home an hour. But I loved him and named him Calvin in honor of Hobbes. But he turned out to be a she, so I renamed her Callie. So celexa and Callie helped get me back alive. And one other thing... But I'll save that for later. In 2003 Daniel had to be put to sleep because he had. I can't remember what it was. It's on the tip of my tongue. Anyway, when they told me there was nothing else to do, I wanted to take him home and stay hold him overnight and take him back to do it the next day, but I got vetoed. Mom didn't think she could handle it. So we did it the same day. I stayed in the room with him and held him while they did it. Then took him home and buried him next to Merinda and Hobbes. I still cry about him sometimes. But it didn't knock me down like Hobbes did. I had celexa, and I was used to it by now, and I knew that he'd lived around 16 good years. Merinda got around 20. But Hobbes got a little less than 1.



Science. It works, bitches.
A little while after Hobbes died I bought a book about near death experiences. Trying to get reassurance that Hobbes had a soul that wasn't extinct. The book sucked. The experiences people had were contradictory. They couldn't all be right. The author was too easily convinced of anything. It basically left me feeling an afterlife was less likely than I had thought it was before.



I read "The Emperor's New Mind" after that. In that Roger Penrose, (mathematician famous for, well, lots of things), argues that it is impossible for a computer to do certain mathematical things the human brain does. That was a nicer reading experience. Though I don't think his intent was to convince anyone about the immortality of the soul.



The contrast between those two books made me want to start over in math at the beginning and understand why everything was true this time around, rather than just learning the methods. I wanted knowledge and certainty, and that's the only kind of knowledge that is certain. Eventually I decided to start over in my college math courses with college algebra and pursue a 2nd degree in math. Originally I thought maybe I would be able to go from there to figuring out that souls are real and immortal and if not I could figure out a way to get the people back I've lost. I'm not that smart though. I know if any of that's even doable, I'm not the guy who's going to do it. But I still want to keep pursuing math and at least a bachelor degree in math. Whatever the highest degree I ever obtain is, I hope I can somehow get two copies of it. Because I intend to bury it next to Merinda, Hobbes, and Daniel. Because along with Lumpy, it's for them. It's a tribute.

Epilogue
Sometime next February it will have been a decade since I hit the bottom. I think at that point I will try to ween myself off celexa. I also take wellbutrin now, and I will keep taking that. But I think celexa hurts my stamina and makes it harder to not be a fatty.



I think that things that don't involve anyone dying affect me about a quarter as much as they would have before Hobbes died. Partially because celexa makes me numb. And partially because I've seen the bottom, so I'm too afraid to indulge in sadness too long or hard. And if Hobbes dying didn't kill me, I'd feel like a tremendous jerk if something else did. Because nothing should be worse than that.