Recently I marked the second anniversary of the death of my beloved cat, Barnacle Pete. Wasn’t he handsome?

I know, this bougie white childless lady is obsessing about her cats way too much. As Groucho Marx says, “I resemble that remark.” Hey, we’re all working with what we’ve got. 

Pete was a friend who was with me through the drinking days, and loved me anyway. When I started meditating, he was also my meditation object. He taught me how to be still, without trying to stuff food or alcohol into my body. He also taught me to be present, to feel perfectly content with moments where there was nothing to do but breathe and love.

So when he died, I had only about 4 months of continuous sobriety, and it was the biggest test of my recovery I’d faced. I was pretty afraid that I would crumple under the weight of my sadness, and drink the pain away. Fortunately for me, I had also been meditating for the previous year.

When it came time to grapple with grief, I had a different relationship to my thoughts and emotions. I knew that emotions, even big hard ones, come and go. I knew from meditation that the grip of sadness would loosen for a few minutes here and there, and I didn’t have to pick up a bottle to loosen the grip. I also suspected, from listening to the wisdom of other people who’ve loved and lost, that there would slowly be more moments that weren’t so sad, the moments would be closer together, and they would last for longer. I would get there, I just needed to have faith. And I did get there.  

And of course, I needed to not drink. Drinking would have had one of two unpredictable outcomes: 

1) That I would have a momentary distraction from the sadness. 

Or: 

2) That I would be seized by a huge wave of sadness that was worse than any I typically experienced while sober. 

There was no way of predicting from the first drink which of these two experiences I would have. The only predictable outcome was that I would eventually wake up sober, and sadder than ever. Oh, and I would be a practicing alcoholic again, so I would also have that to be sad about, and now ashamed about too. Instead of a cheap shortcut around the grief, I stayed on the path, and it led me out eventually.

So I kept meditating. Yeah, I wrote a bunch too. And I didn’t drink. And in the end, my grieving was characterized by a quality that was totally new to me: Maturity. People drink the pain away for good reason, we’re not stupid. But accepting those hard feelings, and learning to accept the things we cannot change, this was something I hadn’t tried when I’d lost people and pets before. And I fully engaged in the human experience of bereavement, connecting me to a tradition as old as love and death. 

It would have dishonored Pete’s memory to use his death as an excuse to drink. He deserved for me to fully experience his death and my reaction to it. My meditation practice meant that I had the mental resilience and perspective on my own mind to get me through the worst of it without picking up a bottle. It’s another thing he taught me. Life is long and hard and I will experience worse losses than the best cat in the whole world. But I have more faith in my ability to endure because of what I practiced two years ago.

Another way I successfully coped with Pete’s loss was that I had Fatberry. I didn’t know it, but Fatberry had been waiting his whole life to be the only cat in the house. He stepped in with a love I didn’t know he had in him. He was cuddly and sweet, and a great comfort. I don’t know how I would have gotten through those times without him. 

Over the last 6 months, Fatberry has been getting treatments for cancer. This week, the cancer came back, and now it’s time to let him go. I’m so sad about it, and now I won’t have a cat friend to see me through like Fatberry saw me through last time. But my meditation practice and relationship to my emotions are stronger than ever, and I’ve got almost 3 years sober now. I think I will be okay. It will hurt like hell, but I’m equipped.  

You won’t know what you will need to be prepared for. I meditated before I knew I would need to be prepared for loss – hell, I meditated before I knew mindfulness could prepare me for loss. But this is my testimonial: You will be better prepared for the unexpected if you start meditating today. You will tolerate emotional pain better if you have seen your emotions come and go like weather. And all you have to do is breathe.