One of the most surprising things about this whole experience is Gizmo. Gizmo & Simba were actually brothers - the first experience I've had with sibling cats. Gizmo adored his big brother. For the first month or so that we had them, he suckled on Simba until Simba decided he'd had enough of THAT & somehow put an end to it.

Gizmo still loved to cuddle up with his big brother & was always the one to initiate it. Sometimes they'd lie intwined for hours; sometimes Simba would tolerate it a few minutes & then either bite or haul off & give Gizmo a whack. Yes, Simba was a terrible bully to Giz . . . the fur flew a lot in his younger days.

But that all stopped when Simba got sick. Gizmo didn't even try to cuddle up with him anymore, altho he would still groom him.

So how, you might ask, is Gizmo taking Simba's absence? Happy as a clam; he seems oblivious to the fact that Simba is gone for good, despite the fact that he's never been gone so long.

Several people close to me suggest that he knew when Simba got sick & detached long ago. I suppose that's true, but it still surprises me. When we had to put our first cat to sleep, our other cat would come into the bedroom in the morning & yowl; she didn't even like the other cat!

On the day we put Simba to sleep, my sister's MIL had a massive stroke out of the blue, went into a coma & died the next morning. I talked with my sister yesterday & was struck by the difference in a human dying & an animal dying . . . they have the funeral to arrange, all her possessions to go through & allocate . . . whereas all I will have to do is pick up Simba's ashes next week, another first for me: we've always buried our animals in the past.

I was just struck by the complexity of our lives & the simplicity of animals' lives.

They live in the moment; they do not brood about the fact that they are sick or worry about what is to come.

And I'm finding some further healing in a surprising source: a free kindle book I downloaded, "The Dieter Dropout's Guide to Natural Weight Loss". The first chapter happens to talk a lot about feeling our emotions, not letting them consume us - or lead us to consume food - and ways to cope with those feelings.

And as I said, each day is a little better.