I embrace my child with tears streaming down my face, attempting and failing to muffle the hitching sound of my sobbing.

“Are you sad?” she questions guilelessly, squirming out of my grasp to gaze up at my face. She is not yet five, and without enough lived experience to have witnessed me in the depths of sadness before, she stares like I’m an exotic zoo animal or a Halloween decoration come to life.

“Mommy’s sad,” I admit, wiping my eyes and feeling her absence in my arms. “Mommy loves Trogdor Kitty a lot.”

Trogdor Kitty is a gray Ragdoll with whom I have been inseparable since kittenhood. She sports an inconceivable fur-to-mass ratio, rendering her just a monochromatic pile of fluff from which eyes and claws occasionally poke out, and is almost confusingly compliant. We are going on our nineteenth year of her allowing me to manhandle her in the name of love, patiently waiting until I am done squeezing the breath out of her before politely requesting to be put down. I’ve yet to meet another cat who tolerates me as magnanimously as she. 

“I love Trogdor Kitty, too!” my daughter agrees.

A lifetime ago, Trogdor Kitty moved away with me to grad school in the Midwest. She moved back with me to Philadelphia when I discovered tenure-track is a myth and Academia will eventually implode on itself like a neutron star. She slept on my lap, sharing the space with my ancient computer, as I spent the next fifteen years learning to be a writer and a poet. She slept on my bed, sharing the space with my boyfriend-turned-husband, as we tucked first one teething baby and then a second beneath the sheets. 

Trogdor Kitty is my familiar, the only living entity that has accompanied me on the journey from who I was to who I am today. Today, Trogdor Kitty is dying, and I do not think I can bear the pain of it.

“I love her, too,” my husband reminds me, and I cringe away from a fresh bolt of pain that stabs me directly in the solar plexus yet again.  

###

Trogdor Kitty resides in our homemade version of “kitty hospice”—a pile of down comforters by a heating grate on the floor, complete with a bowl of water and a plate of untouched food. As cats are wont to do, she let us know late last night she was beginning to slip away; then, she curled up in her makeshift bed and ceased all unnecessary movement. I have been stretched out next to her, crying on the floor, ever since. 

“I’m okay, lovey,” I manage to utter to my preschooler, temporarily controlling my tears and gazing down at my fading feline best friend. “Mommy’s okay. I’m just going to miss Trogdor Kitty a lot.”

My daughter tracks my gaze, then turns to me, beaming. 

“But you don’t need to be sad! Trogdor’s right there!”

She says this with all the hubris of a mathematician who has just scrawled a giant QED across a particularly difficult theorem—including the undertone of pity for the fact that I cannot solve this one myself—and then waits for the commendation she expects she is due.

“But after she dies, honey, she won’t be,” I attempt to explain again. 

Her forehead wrinkles in confusion.

“But…where will she go?” 

And that’s how I come to the unenviable position of needing to explain mortality to a four-year-old while simultaneously processing the agonizingly slow descent of my first pet into the first situation wherein I cannot conceivably follow.

###

Later that day—daughter away at daycare, cat breathing shallowly at my feet—I do what every other parent of my generation does when they have no f*cking clue how to explain something to their child: I absolve myself of all responsibility and decide to let a book do it, instead.

Can anyone recommend a good children’s book to help cope with the loss of a pet? I post in a Facebook group of local parents and neighbors. My daughter doesn’t understand what’s happening.

There are no responses as the minutes tick by, save for a few teary-eyed emojis clutching big red hearts supplied by friends who have met Trogdor in the past. Daycare is drawing to a close. There is still a dying cat on my floor. I am no closer to understanding how to best inform my child that every living thing dies, that she will die, that we will all, someday, die, and afterward—we will simply no longer be.

As a recovering Lutheran, I can’t help but envy how simple it was for my parents to explain the mind-f*ck of impermanence. After all, they had an omnibenevolent deity on which to fall back. They had the balm of Heaven to use, the security blanket of eternal life, and the promise of eventually reuniting with every person and pet we have ever lost. But I am a Nietzschean—even without tenure-track—and Abrahamic religion is not the lens through which I view the world. It is not how my husband and I are bringing our children to an awareness of ethics and values and our purpose as human beings. It is not how we regard life and death and whatever happens before or next.

But, damn, would Heaven make my life easier right now.

###

After dissociating for twenty minutes while stroking Trogdor Kitty’s limp sides, I do what every other parent of my generation does when they don’t know where the f*ck to start: I pull up the Chrome browser, then type “google.com” in the URL field. 

The search bar glares at me, and I am struck by a wave of sadness that I need to find this information in the first place. My thought process honed by years working with SEO optimization, I ponder the screen for a second then type in my search with a clattering of keys.

“Kids Book,” I type.

“Death of an Animal,” I type.

ENTER, I click.

The computer pauses for a brief moment, processors whirring. My search results populate the page.

I fall into the comfort of research mode, scanning the list of titles. The first result is a pastel cover with a rainbow and a plump, unidentifiable canine. It is called Over the Rainbow Bridge. The second, featuring two children observing a full moon with an empty leash on the ground before them, is called The Invisible Leash. I can feel the coping mechanisms bursting from its pages.

And the third?

Well, that’s how I come to the unenviable position of having to elucidate for my child that she will never again see our favorite fuzzy family member—with, apparently, only the help of Google’s third-ranked “Kids Book” about the “Death of an Animal.” 

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Thanks, Google.

###

Trogdor passes gently, and I wail intermittently for the next several days, remembering anew that she is forever gone whenever I make coffee or step out of the shower or anticipate the weight of her body settling against mine in bed. 

My daughter treads around me with caution for the next week, uncertain when I am about to break down crying, not fully trusting in the omnipotence she—not yet 5—has always associated with me. She notices the absence of Trogdor Kitty. She acknowledges our sorrow that the kitty has died. She repeats that Trogdor is not coming back—and she almost understands it. 

As time passes, however, I see the seed planted by Trogdor’s death begin to germinate in her mind. Trogdor Kitty got dead, she announces to her best friend, apropos of nothing, one day during a playdate. She’s not here anymore.

It only takes six more hours before it really clicks, before she questions tearfully as I am getting her ready for bed, “Wait…are you going to die?” 

It turns into a very late night, indeed, because that’s how I come to the unenviable position of attempting to balance the overwhelming grief of death with the sheer ecstasy of being alive for my child.

###

Several weeks later, I still miss Trogdor Kitty viscerally, and I already know I will never again have an animal I love so intensely. I am thankful I was destined to be her cat-mom. I would not change a single day I was lucky enough to have her in my life. But even more importantly, my child’s introduction to the finite nature of existence was due to the best kitty I have ever known or will ever meet, and I am grateful for that, too.

I may or may not have done a good job illustrating the cyclical nature of life and death for my daughter; she has not yet stopped talking about the prospect of her own demise, even as the memory of Trogdor Kitty begins to yield solace instead of pain. But amid my own anguish, I found I did not need someone else’s words to help my child cope with loss. I needed, instead, just blanket compassion and the naked truth — that yes, death is incredibly scary and so very sad, but life is also a gift. We are fortunate for every single breath we get to take while we are alive.

Incidentally, despite all the poignantly placed keywords that drive the Google search algorithm, I did not need William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

And I thank the God in whom I don’t believe for that.

---

Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/they) resides near Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of Through the Lens of Time (2026), a fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing, and These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things (2022), a book of poetry from Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her passions include Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-racism, the Seven Summits, the Hamilton soundtrack, motherhood, and acquiring more cats. Find her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter and Bluesky at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks