Its not easy. I just lost my old man. He would have been 21 this year. Below is a Eulagy my brother wrote about him [spoiler] This is a lament for my recently deceased cat. Please don’t laugh. I’m sadder than you’ve ever been. I know no one wants to read a poem about someone’s dead cat, but -blam!- you, Derek. Derek is the retarded neighbor kid with the cleft pallet, club foot, partial deafness, whose poop-smelling brother has Tourettes—their parents clearly unfit for reproduction—Derek is the three-foot tall, fat-headed jar of factory-reject marbles responsible for the sign on our suburban street that reads: SLOW DEAF CHILD AREA, a sign that made me question when I was younger, whether some contaminant had tainted my neighborhood causing a local profusion of slowness and deafness, a sign that, when I was older, annoyed me with its ambiguous syntax. I would like a grapefuit spoon and some zip ties and a metal chair in a dark, unfinished basement with a lone bulb swinging on its cord as I dig the organs of sight from Derek’s skull, saying, Look, look mother-blam!-er, look underneath your car next time. As if he could kill my best friend all over again. Derek is twenty-two. Only three years older than my cat, Climber. I stopped knowing him years before he could drive, when he still had that idiot’s bliss on his ageless face. A nice boy, my father says. He came to the door, apologizing: I think I, I think I backed over Climo. Really such a nice boy. Not a drop of malice. It’s not your fault my father told him. I’m sorry, my father said to Climo, I’m sorry, as he petted him through the last moments of what had been a long and superlative cat life. I was out with a girl who had not yet seen my bedroom ceiling, when I got the call I ignored, knowing my father wouldn’t after midnight, unless it was news in extremis. The letter had come: I’m famous. Or Grandpa died. I wish my grandpa had died. The next morning, I stood back from the plastic storage bin as my father popped the lid. He lay curled up as if asleep, though his eyes never once in life focused with such dull intensity on nothing. I willed myself a single pass down his fur, which had lost none of its remarkable softness. We buried him in his favorite cardboard box with scraps of wrapping paper, toys he’d long since grown too arthritic to attack. We slid his rigid body, stiff as a waiter’s tray—though you could balance him on your palm even in life, so radically did Climo redefine docility—inside a green plastic bag meant for compost. Goodbye, Dear Compost. You will be missed. At 5 AM, when nothing meows at my door to be let out, to be served fresh water, you will be missed. On a Sunday afternoon, when I lie on the carpet in the parrallelogram of sun, wishing my life did not include such obligations as book reports, or taxes, sharing that warmth with no other living thing, you will be missed. When my grandfather dies, when my parents die, I will not miss them. I will miss you. You who taught me love, first, grief, first. I will mourne you as my intimates drop away into the waters. Forgive me for murdering Derek in your name. Forgive me for thinking of you at the regal funerals I will attend, for using your image to conjure up the appropriate display of tears. Forgive me, Climo, for one day replacing you with something more living, as if that were possible. [/spoiler]