Before Ophelia’s suicide attempts, Rowen used to feel the need to emphasize to us that blood was thicker than water. To be fair, he also only said this in relation to one of us wanting to hang out with our friends instead of our parents. However, to be very truthful with you, I never thought that he could be so wrong until after Ophelia decided she wanted to die.  

Generally though, I never really felt included in my immediate or extended family to begin with. Rowen was always referring to our extended family on his side as his family. He referred to them as my brothers, my mother, my father, and my great-grandfather, but never as your uncle, your grandma, your grandpa, or your great-grandpa. Oddly enough my mother was not of the same frame of mind. My mother always talked to us about our relatives as if they were our own.

Ophelia had been given the benefit of knowing our grandparents to some extent or at least the grandparents on my mother’s side. My grandfather on my mother's side had suffered from a stroke that left him unable to speak for several years. He eventually passed away before I had the opportunity to meet him. Additionally, I didn't really get a chance to know my grandmother before she became senile. We only visited every other summer if we were lucky, so we weren’t exactly close despite the fact that we talked to her on the phone every Sunday.

I remember the first time we visited our grandmothers’ house. It was more like an apartment, and it sat across the street from an abandoned school that Ophelia and I loved to find ways to break into. The television was propped against the only window in the living room and the kitchen was the first left when you walked in the door. The living room had two rocking chairs, and a couch with a hide-a-bed that Ophelia and I would sleep on when we came to visit. My parents would get what I thought was my mothers old room but must have just been the guest bedroom. For some reason I always pictured her growing up here but I realized much later that wasn't the case.

There weren’t many pictures up in my grandma’s home except there were a few I do remember. In the living room there hung a large poster with a picture of Ophelias’ three-year old face on it that stated, “I love my grandparents”. Ick, barf! Again she'd succeeded at being a fantastic suck up without even trying. On the coffee table that sat between the couch and the television there was a large 8x11 photograph of my grandma and grandpa, alive together and smiling. They weren't holding hands or anything, just sitting together. Not another picture in site. Not one of my mom, me, or my mom and dad at their elopement, not even the picture of Ophelias baptism. I wasn't baptized so there was no offense taken that there were no baptism photos of me out and about. However, this simple fact led me to believe that I was obviously not the favorite grandchild of my mothers’ parents, at least Ophelia had a poster. It was like I didn't even exist for her, no trace of me to be found.

I met my father’s mother once at a café one summer when we were visiting our other grandma. She was very old and wheelchair bound, just like my uncle Roald, except she had very long salt and pepper colored hair instead of that short 50s style haircut. I sat at the café while my dad talked to this woman who seemed to know him but not know him at the same time. How could you not know your own children? He introduced me but I didn’t have anything to say to this strange and frazzled looking woman so I remained silent and focused on coloring. While this woman had kind eyes it was clear that she wasn't all there. I'd later learn she was suffering from Alzheimer’s. One minute she was lucid and the next she had slipped somewhere back in time and didn’t remember who the man in front of her or the child sitting next to him was. Ophelia wasn’t at this meeting for some reason. Perhaps her and my mother were doing something special together, like they usually did, but I certainly don’t remember them being with us.

Sometime that same week we met my grandfather on my dad’s side and he was an ornery man. Like father like son I suppose. We entered his house and our dad went immediately up the stairs to his childhood bedroom. Curious about the life our father lived before we came along, Ophelia and I saw fit to follow him. However, this man in his maroon bathrobe and dark-rimmed glasses, with his face pinched in anger forbid us from doing so. He was screaming and yelling as we tried to ascend after our father and he eventually stepped in front of us, which for a 3 or 4 year old was terrifying. We ran down the stairs horrified by this tall, gangly, enraged man and hid underneath the kitchen table and chairs. Eventually he went to the bathroom complaining loudly about pissing blood all the time, which I know now, meant he was in the later stages of kidney failure.

We hid from him and I remember my dad coming down the stairs to find us hiding. It clearly offended the old man that we'd hide from him but we meant no offense we simply didn’t know any better.

"Well, I scared your kids, Rowen", grumbled the old man, clearly dissapointed in himself.

"Don't worry, dad. They don't get yelled at very often, sometimes they need it."

Later Rowen would let us know that he'd only yelled because the stairs were crumbling in decay and were unsafe for us to be climbing all over. Our grandfather's overbearing reaction was only meant to keep us from falling through the floorboards and into the basement.

This was my view of family. Family was this weird, scary, distant thing that I didn’t know what to do with. And even though I loved my grandma dearly in my later years, I also realized that she could be a real cold-hearted bitch if she wanted to. To give you an example, I remember the last time that I saw my grandmother on my mothers’ side alive. She was so mad at my mother that when my mother gave her a hug and kiss goodbye, and told her she loved her with tears streaming down her face because she knew it would probably be the last time she'd see her alive, my grandmother said absolutely nothing back to her. My grandmother let my mom walk out of that house without a single word to say to her, not even an “I love you” in return. It wasn’t like it was cheap or easy to make the road trip from Arizona to Montana State every other summer. Nor was it easy to watch a woman with diabetes ignore her condition and eat whatever the hell she damn well pleased.

Anyways, back tracking to the summer after Ophelia tried to kill herself the first time. Our family was so emotionally detached from one another that summer, and I was so excited to see another family member. I just wanted to tell someone how I was feeling, since no one ever really asked. I remember asking my mother what she'd told our grandmother about it.

“Nothing! And none of us are going to bring it up. That’s between the four of us", she barked.

I was appalled. These people are supposed to be family, right? Doesn’t family support each other in times of trouble? Well, not our family. That’s when it hit me that my mother was embarrassed and ashamed, as if it were some sort of scandal that she didn’t want to get out in her small town. Somehow Ophelias’ misery was a reflection on her! As an adult I understand that society has some strange agreement where we don't talk about suicide, instead we carry it around like a lead balloon and the silence only makes it worse. As a kid though, that was the final straw for me and my mother.

There came a moment for each member of my family where I cut them out of my life, like they were a malignant form of cancer. They had to go because the betrayal and negligence was just too much. This was that moment for my mother and myself, she couldn't take back what she said or how she felt, and I couldn't believe the person she'd become.

In that moment I decided that blood wasn't thicker than water and it was just a matter of time before everyone else would follow. All my family had done was make everything about themselves and ignore the real issues plaguing us as a group. Why would I want to be a part of a family that didn’t care enough about each other to support each other? Why would I want to be a part of a family that didn't know me or even care to get to know me? It was a result of these negative impressions of family that after Ophelia had tried to off herself, I began to look for loving relationships from complete strangers. If my family didn't care, I'd find someone that would.

Family had left a sour taste in my mouth so my whole middle school to adult life was about trying to find the group of people that understood me best. However, I'd quickly learn that I'd only ever let a person get so close before I’d close the gates behind them, shoot arrows, and pour hot tar on them from the murder holes of my fortress walls. Long into my late 20s, when I met a person, I'd hand people the rope they'd later use to hang themselves with in our relationship. It was like I was waiting for the opportunity to cut people off, "Go ahead, make one mistep", I'd think, "and that'll be it for you."

How could I be so cruel you wonder? Because it was a mantra I'd say to myself and still catch myself saying, "I don't need you", and the truth is I really thought I didn't need anyone. I'd become a master at being alone, to the point where I could be in a crowded room and still be very much by myself. I'd become comfortable without needing a single person to lean on. It was all me, myself, and I, everyday because the voice in my head concurred that no one really wanted to know me. No one would ever really care about me. I'd never really fit in anywhere. No one would ever understand who I was, what I'd been through, or why I was the way I was, so no one could ever really love me for who I was. So, it was best to cut them out before they could come close enough to hurt me. That's how I lived my life. A game of how do I hurt the other person first, so I never have to feel rejected. It's a hard thing to admit and an even harder habit to break.

Like I said, I still scream, "I don't need you" in my head when things get tough. I say scream because it's forceful, it's that thing you scream back at whatever thoughts are running through your mind that just won't let up. It's like you're two feet tall and your thoughts are just a swirling mist monster that won't let up. The only way to intimidate your thoughts is to make yourself seem stronger than you are. That's what "I don't need you" did for me. It made me stronger, wiser, bolder, but it also made me lonely, sad, and disconnected from everyone.

The other problem was that I always felt I was too complex for people to understand. Other kids my age had problems like what to wear to the 9th grade dance and my problems included hiding the sharp objects in my house from Ophelia. Or attempting to distance myself from a family that didn’t seem to care about me at all. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of friends and I'd pass my time by staying at their house until I absolutely had to come home. But those friends didn't really know me, because I never really shared any of these things with them. I kept the real me locked away, changing the outside to fit whatever type of friend they needed; a chameleon of sorts. These people didn't know me, they didn't see me because they saw what I wanted them to see. They'd never be able to replace having the love of a family, that supported you no matter what. I was looking to fill a void that no one could fill.

Before I developed the ability to allocate friends though I was pretty much resigned to just hanging out with my cat, Tiger Lily. I would read to Tiger Lily, cry about my life to Tiger Lily, and invent ways to runaway with Tiger Lily. While I know she was cat she became my best friend in the whole wide world. I used to put her in my backpack and leave a hole for her to climb out of and we would go on walks together. Sometimes I would sit on the front porch steps to our apartment and she would just sit patiently by me because she knew I needed some form of comfort. That cat was my constant companion throughout my childhood and well into my adult life, and I wish I hadn't tricked myself into believing she'd live forever.

Luckily, as I got older I found other ways to get out of the house. Chief among them was walking around on the canal listening to music and singing at the top of my lungs for hours on end. This was one of the only "healthy" outlets that I could think of because I didn’t want to be like my older sister. I would turn up my music as loud as possible on my Walkman, CD player, mp3 player, and eventually my ipod and completely exit reality. I was present but only physically because music had a way of transporting me into a world where only words seemed to matter.

I see now that I probably did this because music is an expression of emotion that all humans seems to understand. Key for a child that couldn't express their emotions to anyone. I even have trouble expressing my emotions as an adult without music because I've become so accustomed to turning them down just to get by. Turning the dial down so other people can feel safe and comfortable around me. Turning the dial down to be able to excel without anyone noticing why.

So I'd listen to the music, memorizing the melodies and the words. I began to see that words were the most important part of a song. A song could have an upbeat sound but be saying something very serious. If you would only slow the beat down or hear just the words you could feel what the person that wrote the song was really trying to convey. For instance, one of my favorite upbeat songs “I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)” was covered by Sleeping At Last and the ending lines are “And when I wake up I hope I’m going to be the man who’s waking up to you. And when I’m dreaming, well I know, I’m going to dream, I’m going to dream about the time I had with you”. Just the simple act of making these words past tense implies that the author has lost this person and is afraid they're never going to see them or spend time with them again. Did he offend the heroine of his story and she won’t talk to him? Or did she pass away from old age? That part becomes open to the interpretation of the listener and that is what made and makes music so beautiful to me.

I could get lost in it for hours just analyzing the semantics of what was being said. Music had become a series of create your own adventure stories that I could lose myself in. In Musicland no one was fighting, no one was starving herself, no one was unhappy with his or her spouse, and no one was cutting. Musicland was my alternative to having to deal with all of the horrible thoughts that were running through my mind at a breakneck pace all of the time. This was my safe space, and I could create it virtually anywhere.

Earlier, I mentioned that there came a moment for every member of my family where I made the concious decision to cut them out of my life. The point where I gave up on each them. It started by giving them chances to be interested in the things that I was interested. Ophelia's opportunity had long since passed before now, what follows is what made me cut out Rowen. He was the last to go because he was still a superhero to me until this point.

Once a week for the past several months we'd been going to Ophelias’ therapy sessions and waiting for an hour or two in the lobby while she told the therapist her life story. The life story where everyone of us was an evil villain and she was just the damsel in distress. Funny isn't it, how in your story you're a savior, but in other people's you're the enemy.

This place was horrible, it was cramped, and I was too short to touch the ground in the uncomfortably stiff chairs they provided for us. The color of the walls was an ugly Pepto-Bismol pink, there were stupid fake plants everywhere, they didn’t even have a coffee maker instead they only provided instant coffee, and they played smooth jazz. Couldn’t they play something else? Like something with words or at the very least a catchy beat? This elevator music was beyond irritating!

Then it happened. I was presented with the opportunity to get away from the therapy office purgatory that I was forced to sit through every Thursday evening! Since I always had fantastic grades in school I had won tickets to go see the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Chicago Cubs play a practice game at the stadium across the street from my favorite cemetery. There were a total of four tickets and while I knew that Genevieve and Ophelia wouldn’t want to go I thought Rowen would. It seemed so silly that we would all sit in that room silently for an hour for no reason when we could be watching baseball. This was the first time that I tried to bring my father back to my world and I was shot down.

“Why don’t you go with Anastasia and her family?” Rowen replied when I propositioned him for one night of his time.

He just didn’t seem to get it. I wasn’t asking because I necessarily liked baseball. I just wanted one of my parents to focus on something mindless and happy for a minute. I wound up going with Anastasia and her mother and we wound up leaving early because no one was truly interested in the game. What a bust. I imagined it being way more exciting from all of the stories that my dad told me about buying popcorn, hotdogs, soda, and watching the game with his dad and his brothers.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Alright, one more try I thought. I waited another few weeks and I got another set of tickets to go watch the Coyotes hockey team play in Phoenix. However, this time there was only one set of tickets, which meant Rowen would have to acknowledge my pleas for his attention.

“Maybe. We’ll see, okay?” he replied with hesitation in his voice.

But this hesitation didn’t matter to me because a maybe was almost a promise to an 11 year old. Without a doubt in my mind it meant that we were going next Thursday to see the Coyotes play. Again, I wasn’t even remotely into playing hockey or even watching hockey but the idea of finally focusing on something less morose than Ophelias’ attempted suicide sounded uplifting. The idea that I would get to just be normal for a minute was enticing. Plus Phoenix was only a couple of miles away from where Ophelias’ therapy appointment was. In my mind we could drop Genevieve and Ophelia off at therapy and we could jet on over to the stadium, watch the Coyotes for a little bit, and then come pick my mom and sister up. It would be a win-win for everyone!

Thursday came and we took the van out to the therapists office. I shoul've seen this as a clear sign that we weren't going to go watch the Coyotes play but I was absolutely oblivious. Ophelia entered the room and I was in high spirits. The first opportunity that Rowen took to step outside and have a smoke, I pounced. I followed him to the parking lot and began the badgering. I'd thrown on my coat and was ready to go watch some hockey. He should've known how excited I was, it was the middle of summer in Arizona and I brought a coat with me. I clearly expected to be in a cold ice rink enjoying some hockey with my dad. I jogged my way up to where he was standing by our van.

“Okay! I’m ready to go! Do you have the keys? I can’t wait! But we better hurry because the game starts in 45 minutes.” I said beaming with joy.

Rowen started to kick the dirt in front of him sheepishly while refusing to make eye contact with me. It sank in before he had time to say anything. My facial expression immediately changed to one of utter disappointment.

“We’re not going are we?” I accused.

“Look, it isn’t that I don’t want to go Roslyn. It’s just that we need to be here for your sister.” he stated as if he had been rehearsing how to let me down easy.

“Yeah. Whatever.” I shrugged and started to walk away.

“Don’t be like that, Roslyn.” he pleaded.

I was so angry with him that the tears wouldn’t even raise to my tear ducts, “Yeah I know. Ophelia is more important."

And then it came out, hot and in a flurry, "Did you ever stop to think maybe I just wanted to spend time with either of you without it always being about her?” I yelled half-heartedly as I walked away, but it was a rhetorical question.

Rowen didn’t even bring himself to respond. He just finished smoking his cigarette as I trudged back to the office that I hated, where Ophelia was working through all of her problems.

I was so angry with my family for not really being a family at all that after this last attempt to reach out, I began to ignore them all together. So we grew apart into a group of people who simply lived in the same house and had absolutely nothing in common.

This strange behavior continued well into my adulthood. When we first moved to Washington State Genevieve would invite me to go shopping with her or go on a small drive to someplace new. At first I thought it would be fun, I would finally get that alone time with my mother and father that I never had, but this wasn’t the case at all. Less than two minutes in the car alone with my mother and Ophelia would call or my mom would call Ophelia. They would spend the whole outing talking to each other while I started blankly out the window or gathered the groceries, put them in the car, and unpacked them into the cupboards. God!!!! MARSHA MARSHA MARSHA!!!!!! What did she have that was so endearing that I didn't? Why couldn't anyone just try and talk to me?

I even remember asking my mother one time what it was that made her need to talk to Ophelia all of the time. This was her response,

“You just have a bond with your first child that you don’t have with your second.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? I must've made a face because she went on to explain herself,

“You know, with your first child you have absolutely no clue what you are doing! Everything is shiny and new! They have all of your attention all of the time because your world revolves around them. With the second child you’ve been through it all before. I wasn’t as scared when you had fevers or got a cut or a bruise because I knew that you'd be fine. Plus you are so much different than your sister. I've never had to worry about you. You’ve just always been fine and you’ll always be fine because that’s your personality. You’ve never really needed our help.”

Right, I thought. Because you engineered it that way! Maybe I didn’t need your help but there were certainly times when I wanted it. Was I inhuman to them? Was I that cold and calloused that they just assumed I'd be fine on my own? I know she thought it was a compliment but in my mind it just felt like sheer neglect. You never worried about me, and that's why you should've been worried about me!

The problem got even worse when Ophelia was forced to abandon her life in Arizona and come live with my parents at the age of 25. I was so frustrated with Ophelia resuming her role as the center of my family’s universe that I finally lost it. I finally let my mom have it when I came home from one of my quarters at the university. She was going on and on and on about herself or Ophelia and how she was the victim of whatever fight we were all having. Honestly, I didn’t care I was just so damn mad about how everyone in our family seemed so concerned with his or herself that I had tuned her out. So, I interrupted her midcomplaint.

“Hey mom, when is that last time you asked me how I was doing? Or how my day was going?”, I asked sarcastically. I knew she wouldn't be able to recall the last time that she'd asked.

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” she screamed back at me.

I remembered that it was long ago maybe when I was 8 or 9 before Ophelia had become the center of the God damn universe of our lives. My mom fell silent and the conversation stopped with immediacy because she really didn’t have an answer for my question.

“That’s exactly what I thought”, I said with my hand on the front doorknob.

With that being said I walked out of the house and our relationship entered a new stage. The stage where my parents realized how angry their youngest child was at having been left alone her entire life. I think in that moment it was easy for them to realize how alone I'd led my life and from then on my mother and Ophelia have attempted to make a concerted effort to change things.

It hadn’t quite hit me how well Genevieve had understood my hatred, disdain, and general rage about how I was treated while we were growing up until Tiger Lily passed away. I knew that Tiger Lily was getting older and that cats don’t generally live past 15 years old, but I had made a promise to Tiger at a very young age that she wouldn't die. I was planning on building a bionic heart to keep her alive but little did I know that her kidneys were slowly shutting down and that her heart was not the problem at all. Also, I clearly hadn't worked on my bionic heart idea because let's face it that takes time and money that I didn't have.

One of the biggest regrets I'll ever have is leaving her with my parents when I went to the university. She was old they argued, she would miss her sister, Cali, and the stress would probably kill her. So I did what I thought was best and chose to let her live the rest of her life out with my parents. This was a horrible, no good, very bad choice. Every time I came home was heart wrenching for myself and the cat that clearly felt that she'd been abandoned by her human.

When I came to visit for the holidays she would sleep on my chest and in the middle of the night either to show ownership or how angry she was with me she would pee all over me. The first two times I thought maybe she just didn’t want to get up and go to the bathroom for fear I would leave. However, I quickly realized this was her way of making it clear how pissed off she was at me for leaving her. I knew that Tiger Lily wanted to come with me because I found her hopping into all of my boxes and even hiding in my duffel bag before I packed up the moving van and fled to Bellingham, Washington to finish my degree. I knew I should've found a way to pay for a pet deposit but I was poor and I knew that she would hold on until I moved back home.

Needless to say the way that Tiger Lily passed is something that I'll regret for the rest of my life. I'll also blame the people close to me and myself for the events that followed. I had moved home to live with my fiancé but he didn’t like pets. Tiger Lily wasn't welcome at our home, so I thought she'd be better off at my parents’ house until the end. My parents had been crying wolf about Tigers’ condition for about three years now so when they said that she wasn’t doing so well I didn’t think much of it. I mean I'd noticed that her depth perception seemed a little skewed and that she seemed to cry a lot more for water and things but she was still pretty mobile.

It was August and Genevieve decided that she needed to see the Kite Festival in Long Beach, Washington, which is quite the drive. I was irritated because this meant that my mother, father, sister, and her boyfriend would be in one car while my husband and I would be in another car. They said that they would switch off while we were driving but that clearly wasn’t a thing. We pulled up and just as we were about to leave my mom and Ophelia started to talk to me about how Tiger Lily wasn’t doing very well and before they could even get any words out I started to cry. My husband did something that I scolded him for in the car,

“No. Just shut the fuck up” he cut them off “Can’t you see that this is just upsetting her?”

My mom was not in tears but she did seem distressed as my husband got in the car and I was still sobbing. I love this cat so much that I consistently judge other cats by her character traits. I had her since she was a baby and she had become my baby, my responsibility and here she was dying on me. But the thing is, no one told me how bad it really was. Instead we all got in the car and drove to the damn Kite Festival.

We went to the Kite Festival and drove home separately just as we had while driving there. Just for curiosity’s sake I stopped by the house to see Tiger Lily before we met the others for dinner. They have to take a smoke break every 50 miles or so, so they were straggling behind. I walked in the house but Tiger Lily didn't sound like hereself, instead when she meowed she sounded weak, a lot like she did when she was a tiny kitten. She was lying on the kitchen floor and couldn’t move. It wasn’t that she was paralyzed but that she had no sense of balance anymore. I picked her up and held her. She weighed absolutely nothing and clearly hadn't been eating. I held her and cried for almost an hour and she seemed comforted by my presence. How could they not have elaborated on her deteriorating situation you ask? Unfortunately, because I know that to my mother going to see the Kite Festival was more important than ruining the day and taking Tiger Lily to be put down. For that I will never forgive her.

We left to meet my family at dinner as had been planned and I was a mess. I couldn’t stop crying and I’m sure that to other people we looked insane. There were no veterinary clinics open at this late hour and I needed to get Tiger Lily to the vet soon. Ophelia, my husband, Gevenevieve, and Rowen were convinced that she would make it until Tuesday, which was my day off but I knew that she wasn't going to make it that long and nor should she have to.

I wasn't aware of any veterinarian open on a Sunday and I worked that day so I didn’t take Tiger to the vet this day either. At lunch I began to text my husband to ask him to change the appointment for me to Monday evening because I knew that she wouldn’t make it. I was texting my mother about her situation and I could tell from her description that she wouldn't make it beyond Monday. This was cruel and unusual punishment for her to waste away in the living room of her home with all of the other cats watching in the terrified realization that this would one day be their demise as well.

I stopped by after work and I attempted to console her and give her water to keep her hydrated. At least if she wasn’t going to eat for me, she could drink some water. I have heard statistics that you can live without food for weeks but you’ll die in two days tops without enough water. It was at this point that my mother divulged to me that my husband had been texting her and telling her to stop trying to make me change Tiger Lily’s appointment time. I realize that he was trying to protect me from the inevitable out of love but for this I will never forgive him. As I left Tiger Lily that night having had to force her to drink water, petting her, and seeing her exasperation I told her that I would see her the next day. I told her that I just needed her to hang on for one more day and that it would all be better.

I had to work the very next day and so I wasn’t able to come visit in the morning. As I was putting on my shoes to head out the door I got a text from Ophelia and I knew before I had even glanced at it what it said.

“Roslyn, I’m really sorry for your loss.”

I was devastated but I couldn’t call into work on such short notice so I cried my way there, I cried on my lunch, I cried on the way home. Most of the people I work with thought I was losing my shit for sure but I didn’t care.

In order for me to take Tiger Lily to be cremated later that evening she had to be frozen. I knew that she wouldn’t fit in the upstairs freezer and that they had probably placed her inside a box in the large downstairs freezer. I told myself that I wouldn’t open the box as I drove to my parents house, but I couldn't help it. There she was wrapped in a little blanket as cold as cold could be. Her eyes were open because she was so dehydrated that rigor mortis had set in too quickly. I petted her and talked to her and told her how sorry I was but everyone was in a hurry to get her to the vet.

When we arrived at the veterinarian’s office they had me fill out paperwork and as I did so they started to shuffle her away. I asked if they were taking her right now and if I could have a minute with her to say my goodbyes. The woman holding Tiger Lily and her box looked absolutely irritated and disgusted with my last display of affection for my best friend of 18 years. However, the younger woman at the counter seeing that I was inconsolable let me have my wish. They wrapped tiger in a towel and brought her to me so I could hold her and it helped a little bit. She was starting to thaw, which meant I didn’t have much time, but at least her fur had started to be more soft and velvety like it was before. Her ears were no longer stiff so I could scratch them like she used to love. I had everyone say their good-byes which were quick, and that’s when it hit me that they had time to do this in the morning. They were fine because they'd already come to terms with her death.

I called the woman in who had brought Tiger Lily to me and I said good-bye one very last time. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do to hand her over to these people. These people didn’t care about Tiger Lily. In fact when I told them how old she was they said,

“Well she had a nice long life. Most cats don’t live past the age of 15.”

But in my mind of course she had lived longer because she wasn’t most cats; she was my cat and I had loved her since the day she climbed into my lap on that wicker chair, fluffy, and small enough to fit in one of my tiny hands.

The next few weeks were absolutely awful. I cried all of the time. As soon as I left for work or left work to come home I was in tears and there was no stopping it. I could barely step foot into my parents’ house without becoming the sob monster and I'm crying right now as I write this. That is when Genevieve finally said it,

“Will you cry this hard when I pass away?” but it wasn’t a question because she already knew the answer.

“Probably not.” I said with complete honesty. To me blood was never thicker than water and I had just lost my most loyal confidant.

There was no malice in my voice, but I know that the comment had cut my mother to the bone. So I began to explain to her why I felt this way.

“You’re an adult and you've made your choices about your health. When you die it will be the natural progression of things and while I'll be sad and I'll cry it won’t be the same. Tiger Lily was my responsibility. I spent so much time alone as a kid that Tiger Lily was one of my only companions. To me Tiger Lily dying didn’t just take my best friend away. My childhood and all of those dreams went with her. I'm not the same person that I was at the age of 7 and she reminded me of that little girl that I lost so long ago. That little girl who was happy even when everything was falling apart. While everyone was busy doing their own thing I was talking to her, telling her my hopes and dreams, crying into her fur about some stupid boy that didn’t like me or about whoever was making fun of me. Tiger Lily was around when none of you were!"

Genevieve responded with, “We were just fighting to keep everything together and you seemed to do just fine on your own.” and then there was silence.

In that moment, I didn't feel bad about anything I'd said to her. In my mind, they deserved it. All of the years of pain that I had built up in my heart, I wished that they could feel for a moment what I felt. Alone, unloved, unimportant; I wanted them to feel all of it in surround sound. But they never could because they weren't me, and they didn't share those experiences and feelings. These were just the words of a grieving young adult, and they carried no weight.

That was the day that it really sunk in for Genevieve that I hated them all. They were just an obligation for me at that time. People that I had to visit because if they died, I wanted to say I made the effort. But the truth is I wasn't making the effort genuinely and that's why our relationship didn't work. I didn't really want to know them, I wanted to deprive them of knowing me. I was so angry and hurt that I couldn't keep it in anymore, I had to spread it around so it would stop consuming me.

After that, I stopped visiting for a few years. I decided I'd just do me and if they really cared they'd make the effort. They didn't though, the most we talked was in group chat. On occasion my mother might call me on the way home, once every 4 months, just to make sure I was alive but that was it.

It wasn't until I sat down and told them how I felt. Told them that I was sorry for cutting them off. It wasn't until I really owned my part in the whole mess, that all of us were free to just be. Blood may not be thicker than water, but cutting people out of your life only spreads the pain around. You think you're doing yourself a favor. You tell yourself it's about self-care and it's okay to cut toxic people out of your life. But the truth is that you're just trying to do the most damage in the least amount of time. The toxic person in that situation is usually yourself as much as it is anyone else.