Two things happened this week. A friend of mine abruptly lost a close family member. Separately, a colleague lost her 15-year-old cat. During a Zoom meeting with my colleague, her cat made loud noises in another room, and she thought her other pets might be bothering him. After our meeting, she checked on the cat and realized he was in pain and could no longer walk. She took him to the vet right away, and the vet said there was very likely a blood clot. The vet asked my colleague to touch the cat’s back limbs and confirm they were cold—there was no blood circulation.
“[The name of the cat] has lived with me through some of the most difficult moments of my life,” my colleague told me a few days later. She described how the cat was full of energy and often acted like a dog, guiding guests to where the treats were.
This week’s events make me think about probabilities. The probability of a tragedy happening to a given person on a given day is minuscule, like 0.001%. But when a low probability is applied to a large number, say the world’s population, it means a tragedy is happening to some people somewhere every day—most of which we will never know (or, perhaps, care) about. It also means that when applied to a large number of days in our own lives, a loss can hit us when we least expect it.
Losses are always sudden, even if we know they can happen. No one teaches us how to deal with them, so we are often left to cope as best we can. Some losses leave a delicate mark but eventually recede into the background with time. Others change you forever.