Happy Holidays 2025, Part X: Home for Christmas

Days until Christmas: 3

 Around noon today, Daisy got the call -- Pete's ashes are ready for pickup. He will be home with us for Christmas. 

"I want you to come with me to pick him up," she told me.

"Of course, my love," was my immediate response. I wouldn't ever assume otherwise.

Daisy is dropping off the car in the morning, with Dad, so that she can get the EVAP part replaced by the mechanics. Once it's done and they call her to come pick it up in the afternoon, I will be awake by then and we can go pick up Pete. Daisy is working a modified schedule tomorrow in order to accommodate an extra day off with me and will likely have to put in a little PTO in order to take a longer lunch to get the car back and to get Pete.

It's sad and bittersweet. For the past two weeks since he died -- and it will be two weeks to the day -- he has just been gone. Now knowing that his remains will be back in the house with us will give us a sense of final closure, but in a way it's like we now have to fully acknowledge that he is, indeed, dead and gone forever, with the ashes in the urn all that's left to prove he was once here. 

I don't know where we're going to put him. I feel like we should clear some space somewhere we can constantly see him and have him there with us, and at the same time also feel like that's intensely creepy. 

But then again I also think ashes in general are strange. It was important to Daisy that we get him back, and I was never going to fight her on that.

In ten or fifteen years I will likely feel differently; I can't imagine not wanting to keep the ashes of the other cats now, as strange as that is. I let Maggie and Sadie be scattered in the park because I loved that idea of letting them both be one with nature again, but there's a small part of me that wishes they were here with me in the house in urns of their own, and I can't reconcile that or even fully understand why I feel like that. 

I know for a fact that the ashes of my parents' dogs -- the old dogs, the ones they had when I was still living at home and growing up, but who died after I moved out -- are in the closet in the house in West Virginia, where they have sat in boxes for many, many years. I never understood that; why go to the trouble if you're just gonna keep them in boxes in the closet?

I couldn't tell you what they did with their multiple cats when they died -- they had three cats who died before ours did. Yes, there was a time where that house had three cats, two dogs, and a bird all living together with my parents -- a veritable zoo.

It's not much different now, as they now have three dogs and the same bird, but I digress.

Everyone grieves in their own ways, I suppose.

Moving onward, we are now in the home stretch of the holidays. Tonight, Monday the 22nd, is my last night of work until the 30th. My holiday vacation starts at exactly 7am -- twelve hours and twenty-nine minutes from this exact moment. I have had two energy drinks and I am about to go downstairs for the night and make a 20oz cup of strong coffee, log in for the night, and put my head down to power through it. The last night I work before any long stretch of vacation -- especially before the holidays -- is usually brutal, as if the job knows it won't be able to punish me for a while, so it has to get all its beatings in all at once. 

If it's not brutal, it drags on and seems like it's five times longer than it should be, and I stare at the walls and the clock trying to make time move faster. This is also why I didn't want a large painted canvas of my three dead cats on the wall staring back at me. It's not exactly the best motivational material.

The Powerball jackpot tonight is $1.6 billion. Yes, billion with a B. We have $24 worth of tickets sitting on my desk in front of me awaiting the drawing. I told Daisy yesterday, when she went out to run errands, to take the money I had left from the Canada trip to the gas station and to dump it into the lottery tickets because I do not want to have to go back to work after the holidays and winning even $1 million -- one of the smaller jackpots -- would be my ticket out of there. It would give me the leap I'd need to quit that job and dive into the multiple writing projects I have been waiting my whole life to finish. 

If we win the full jackpot, bye, y'all won't hear from me again for a very long time, not until well after our financial status and that of our families and likely multiple friends have been secured. 

But, let's be real, that's not going to happen. None of it is. I'll check the tickets when I get off work in the morning to find that someone in some giant state like California won the jackpot and I won't even have two or three numbers across all of my tickets.