In my journalism class, we’ve decided to shift from pure journalism to a bit of literary nonfiction, so we began the day with a writing exercise. I provided a starter and fifteen minutes to write: “During winter break, I learned…”

I wrote along with them and found myself thinking again of Bida and so began writing again about Bida:

During winter break, I learned anew that love and pain are often so closely twined that one cannot separate the two, that tugging on one brings the second along with it. I learned all this watching and participating in my daughter’s grief as our family cat slowly died as she lay on our couch.

We’d had Bida for ten years. My daughter had never known life without that gray, grumpy, yet sweet rescue cat. She looked pitiful when we got her, hence the name, which means “poor little thing” in Polish. She looked even more pitiful as she lay dying, thin, slow, her bones protruding, her long gray hair matted because we could no longer brush her without causing her pain.

When we arrived home that night, my wife went to check on her in the room in the basement where Bida always loved to sleep. In a panicked voice, she called me downstairs. The poor cat had fallen off the bag of insulation that she loved to sleep on and landed on her back, wedged between the bag and some shelving. I thought she was already dead, but when I pulled her out gently, she shuddered, gasped, and began breathing in shallow breaths.

“Go get the kids,” I told my wife. “They’ll want to say goodbye.” She headed upstairs while I gently carried Bida to the couch in our basement family room and lay her down on the middle cushion. The four of us sat around the old, ornery cat for two hours as her breathing slowed, then stopped.

The first to come running from upstairs was L, my daughter. She was already beginning to cry, and when she saw Bida, the cat that had been around for as long as she could remember, she broke down into a sobbing, shuddering cry.

“No, Bida!” she shouted, dropping to her knees beside the couch and throwing an arm protectively but gently over the cat, who lay with her eyes open, her mouth gaping, the only movement being her rib cage that went up and down, up and down, up and down. “No, Bida! No!” she cried, her body shaking more and more violently.

I’d never been a big fan of that cat. I put up with her because L loved her so. But in that moment, watching my daughter wrecked with pain, her face a puddle, her voice almost instantly hoarse from crying, I realized I loved that cat because she loved that cat. I understood that I was near tears because she was in tears, and even because I was sad to see that grumpy cat go, to see that sweet cat suffer, to see my daughter suffer along with her.

When you love something, you open yourself up to pain because of that. You will feel that person’s pain with them; you will feel the pain of separation; you will eventually feel the pain of ultimate loss.

To love someone is to love their mortality, their temporariness, and the ________ness of everything they love.

A first draft — shows some promise, but nothing spectacular. That’s the idea.

Afterward, I had students choose the sentence they like most, the sentence they’re most proud of. “Be prepared to explain to a partner why you like that sentence, why that sentence fills you with a bit of pride,” I instructed. For my own sentence, I chose the first one: “During winter break, I learned anew that love and pain are often so closely twined that one cannot separate the two, that tugging on one brings the second along with it.”

“I like it because of the word ‘twined.’ I don’t think I’ve ever used that word, and it somehow provides a theme for the whole piece that I could go back and incorporate — images of thread, fabric, sewing, weaving, and so on,” I explained.

It was just the final lesson of a day filled with successful engagement from all students. I always worry a bit about how students will perform that first day back, and I’m always impressed. And then ask myself, “Why are you always worried? They’re always great!”