Lessons from “Pet Cemetery”

Header by Maddy Baird

It’s September 5th 2023. I stroke her back, running my index finger along the individual ridges of her protruding spine. She has a crimson. bald patch on her chin, and her legs click like a typewriter when she walks. Sometimes her back legs wobble when she tries to stand, so she drags her legs along the ground to avoid falling. She only eats if I feed her wet food from my hand, and even then she struggles to chew. Her purring, once with the same intensity as a lawnmower, is now a quiet hum you can only hear if you press your ear to her shoulder. Her meow is reduced to a squeak,  her heartbeat dulled from a strong thump to a murmur.

Her breath is that signature stench of death, seeping from her mouth like the thick fog  that shrouds the beginning of the end in a horror movie. For her, I know this is the beginning of her end, too.

When I was age 9, I got my first cat  - a tiny white kitten with giant blue eyes. She wasn’t my first pet, but she was the first one that belonged to me.  Once, she fell asleep on me while I was sitting on my bed, and I stayed awake the entire night, unflinching, so as to not disturb her. I named her Mia, for no particular reason.

When I was 10, we had 5 cats, 4 dogs, and 20 chickens. Before that, I had a hamster, a fish, and a frog. By the time  I reached 16, we’d added 2 donkeys, 2 rats, several foster kittens, and a mouse.

By the time I was 21, I had watched the deaths of 4 dogs, 3 cats, several chickens, my rats, my hamster, and my fish. I watched my donkeys being loaded onto a trailer to be sent away, because my mom refused to care for them when I left for university.

At the same time, I watched my grandfather fade from a strong, happy cook into a confused skeleton, kept alive by machines because the traffic in his heart and lungs had grown  too congested for oxygen to make its morning commute.

And with each death, I grew ever  better at seeing the signs of the end.

At some point, I developed a love for Stephen King, and found Pet Cemetery at a yard sale. Although the central lesson of Pet Cemetery is to never mess with the laws of nature, it also highlights the destructiveness of grief.

In most horror movies, grief tears away at the main character until they do something destructive, in turn becoming a husk  of their former  self, much like in Hereditary, Midsommar, and Pet Cemetery.

After witnessing  so much death, I’ve  learned that forgetting is easier than feeling. Now, when someone dies, the time I cry has been significantly stunted,  from weeks to mere hours. I still feel the slicing pain in my chest whenever I remember the dead, but I trick myself into thinking they’ll just walk through a door one day, and we’ll be together again. That they aren’t gone, just somewhere else.

My disconnect when it comes to processing death has also infected my relationships with people. Every time one comes my way, I shut it down immediately, because I’ve never learned to undertake the hurt that came with my past breakups. I fear that the worst parts of my previous relationships will be unveiled through every new person I meet… so, I opt out of romance

If I’d learned my lesson from Pet Cemetery, I would have worked toward forming healthy relationships, instead of favouring one-night stands and their emotional absence. However, much like the main characters of all my favourite horror movies, I let my unprocessed grief shape my character. However, instead of playing the grieving  parent trying to reverse a death with magic, I’m already preemptively searching Kijiji pages for free cats whenever I sense that the end of one of mine is near. In real life, you cannot bring someone back from the dead to absolve your grief, but you can distract yourself with the living, the new. 

Comparatively, running from grief feels like watching a character get bitten by a zombie, trying to hide their wound from everyone, in denial about the fact that they will inevitably  turn into an emotionless being, only recognizable to others by their clothing, unrecognizable to themselves.

It’s September 10th 2023. I tell myself I’ll watch her fade away. I relive the ending of Pet Cemetery year after year after year, and have decided that I’ve learned my lesson. I will not mess with the laws of nature. I will watch as she struggles to walk, imagining that she’s just learning to crawl for the first time. I will tell myself that she’s not scared, and that she understands death and dying, and even though I don’t. I know that it is something I can’t change, but that doesn’t stop me from being trapped in denial.

It’s September 15th. I didn’t learn my lesson. I spent $4000 on emergency surgery to drain the fluid pooling in her lungs and around her heart. The vet said I’d likely have at least 6 months with her following the surgery. I had 2 days. On September 17th , I held Mia for the last time before I took her back to the vet. Again, as I did on the first night I got her, I stood completely still while she fell asleep… but I was too still this time.

I haven’t called my grandpa in months and have a new kitten. His name is Kevin, and he has soft white fur and bright blue eyes.