The small kid is asleep in my arms, our cat curled up next to him. This scene has played out hundreds of times over the last few years. Tonight may be the last.

When I brought Mina home, I was fresh off the sudden loss of a kitten I had had barely a year. I had recently moved away from CU, following a relationship that I believed would bring me more joy than staying for a beloved job in a place that was home. I was unhappy in my new job, questioning my choices, and unmoored by grief when my then partner and I stopped by the shelter “just to look”.

Mina came home with me on my 28th birthday. By my math, we’ve been together fourteen years and nine months, two marriages, one divorce, two relationships, ten apartments in four cities in three states, two pregnancies (and newborns, babies, and toddlers), one roommate, four cat companions, and one visit from tiny dogs that she reacted to as if they were space invaders.

She caught two mice, knocked a bottle of balsamic vinegar out of a kitchen cabinet, stole cookies off a cooling rack, and once broke into a neighbor’s apt via their sixth floor patio. She has been a constant and devoted companion to N, and a hovering mother hen to the small kid. She used to do this thing we called “noodle dancing” where she would flop back and forth showing everyone her excessively soft belly.

I don’t know how to make sense of this. I don’t know how to make the decisions I know I have to make. I feel like I’m drowning in grief – while at the same time feeling very calm, in part because I know all of these feelings are rooted in my love for her and in an awareness of and gratitude for the honor and responsibility of sharing a life right up until the end.

I hope I’m wrong and that we have more nights of her warm body curled by our feet. And if we don’t, I hope she knows how tremendously loved she is.

I am back in the office today, working onsite for the first time since mid-December. I expected to work from home for a couple of days before winter break, but then on the first day of that break, a work from home period was announced for after that break, and then on the last day of that period, I came down with something (not COVID), and now here we are, a week later, finally back in the office. What does it all mean.

Does it all mean anything? Probably not. Today around lunchtime was the longest I had been away from my (still nursing) toddler since mid-December. On the one hand, my head is clearer and I have been better able to focus than for most of the days when work from home was punctuated with joyful (and other) screams, with tiny hands at the door, with “MAMA YOU DONE WORKIN'” as a statement rather than a question.

On the other, when I read this comic, I cried because how many more times will that toddler run to me, call for me, fall asleep curled up in my arms? It’s not that long ago – and yet it is a distant memory – that the big kid did those things, and now, like the child in the comic, he mostly walks on his own and is starting to keep his own counsel, to open up to us separately and selectively, to keep his hands in his own pockets more often than he slips them into ours.

The last two years have been largely devoid of landmarks, mostly just a series of days spent mostly together. We haven’t gone anywhere. We have rarely seen anyone. We have had some small adventures, most of them within a few miles of home. We are all older than when this began, and some of us are taller.

But as is the way of getting older and taller, it doesn’t happen all at once, just an ongoing processional of cells dividing, finding their place, and dying, making microscopic adjustments until one day your pants are too short, or your hair is a different color, or faces once familiar have new features all of their own.

Which I guess is what this means: that for awhile, I was home, and then I wasn’t, and then I was again, and now I’m not. And like many parents that were home, and now are not, it means that I won’t be there for the screaming and the blanket forts and the constant demands for snacks, but it also means that I won’t be there for the moment of disappointment when the exciting program is canceled, or for the moment of mastery when the right combination of stacked things produces access to the forbidden shelf, or for the last time quiet time turns into an unexpected nap, and it’s the accumulation of those moments that make a life.