grief

We lost our cat, Pierre, last week after a rapid and devastating illness.

I’d been searching for some parallel I could draw between the death of a star and the loss of an animal companion, but it’s a forced metaphor and I’m not feeling particularly clever. In considering stellar life cycles, I found a similarity to the process of grieving, but even that left me feeling empty.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has long been part of our cultural understanding, even as the linear framework of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance has been challenged. My experience of grief has always been more cyclical, dipping in and out of various “stages,” sometimes in an unpredictable order and often revisiting these emotional responses again and again as I process through. And I don’t think we’re ever truly done with grief; instead, we carry a bittersweet burden forward with us, feeling both the pain of the loss along with the joy and comfort of memory.

I could compare these stages of grief to the possible fates of stars — explosive anger as the brilliant supernova of a dying star more than eight-times more massive than our own Sun, for instance, or depression as the hypothesized black dwarf stellar remnant of a cooling white dwarf that has at last stopped emitting heat and electromagnetic radiation. But this isn’t a linear process, either. It’s more of a flowchart, with different types of stars destined for different ends.

And I won’t go into “circle of life” stuff, with new stars forming from the expelled materials of dying stars. Because the truth is that all the science in the world can’t mend a broken heart. But stargazing and our inherited, ancestral urge to look up into the sky offers a poignant balm.

Millenia ago, people turned their eyes to the night sky and traced the outlines of familiar characters from their legends. They saw inhabitants of the natural world — like dogs, snakes, and cranes — alongside more human-like, mythic archetypes. Many of the stories surrounding these patterns in the sky were commemorative in nature: Orion the hunter was “set in the stars” after a fatal scorpion sting. Far outlasting any terrestrial monument, the constellations remind us of the stories we tell about ourselves and our world, even as we move forward.

It was with this in mind, and at the the prompting of a friend, that I traced  a new memorial constellation about five years ago, following the death of a beloved and extraordinary cat, Kenobi. I borrowed the handle of the Big Dipper to form the “toe beans” of a stellar paw print, with the pad outlined by stars too dim to be easily seen in my bright suburban sky. But I know that massive paw is there, and it’s visible through the year thanks to its circumpolar location.

Too soon, Kenobi’s constellation became a memorial for subsequent lost companions as well, and now Pierre has joined their ranks. But with each fresh loss, I find deep reassurance when I stand outside at night and spot those twinkling toe beans overhead. Sometimes the stars help me cry in the quiet dark. More often, they help me remember, and that is a precious gift. That constellation will outlive the glare and the sharpness of new grief, and it will endure as my memory softens into comfort.

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IMAGES
1. Under the Big Dipper, by Donal Mountain
2. Pierre with green ribbons, by Jennifer Willis