Simba: An Unwelcome Teacher

Some teachers arrive gently.  Others crash through the door of your life uninvited, dismantling everything you thought you knew about love, attachment, control, and surrender.

For me, that teacher was Simba.

Nothing could have prepared me for the depth of grief that accompanied his illness and eventual death.  If I’m honest, I didn’t want the lesson. I didn’t want the initiation. I didn’t want to become intimate with impermanence. I just wanted my cat to stay.

When Simba came home for palliative care, our household completely changed.  The usual rhythms of life suddenly felt insignificant.  Diaries were cleared.  Plans were cancelled.  Priorities rearranged themselves without effort.  We found ourselves entering a sacred pause, where the only thing that truly mattered was being present with him.

We spent those precious weeks basking in his glory – watching him sleep and listening to his purr.  Noticing every stretch, every blink, every moment of connection.  Time seemed to slow – life became simpler and yet infinitely more precious.  We were no longer living in the future – we were living in the sacredness of now.

In our search to understand what was happening, we found ourselves exploring beyond our usual ways of knowing.  We even worked with a psychic cat communicator.  For some, this may seem unusual, but during a time when logic and reason offered little comfort, it opened a doorway into a broader perspective.  Whether one views such experiences literally or symbolically, it helped us step beyond our limited 3D understanding of life and death.  It invited us to consider that perhaps there are dimensions of existence, connection and consciousness that extend beyond what we can see.

It didn’t remove the pain, but it softened some of the fear.  It helped us hold the possibility that Simba’s journey was his own, and that our role was not to stop it but to accompany him through it.

And yet, despite all the preparation, despite all the spiritual understanding, despite all the counselling skills and nervous system knowledge I possess, there came a moment when everything in me wanted to run.  I wanted the vet to ‘deal with it’.  I wanted someone else to carry the weight of the final goodbye.  I wanted to leave the room.  I wanted reality to be different.

But love asked something else of me.  With a strength that did not feel like my own, I held Simba in my arms as he took his final breath.  I felt his body soften.  I felt the moment he left.  And I felt my heart break open.

It remains one of the most devastating and sacred experiences of my life.

Just days later, I sat my final counselling examinations.  The timing felt almost impossible.  My nervous system was flooded.  My body was exhausted.  My heart was shattered.  Yet somehow, I showed up – not because I was unaffected by grief, but because grief and life so often walk hand in hand.

There is a misconception that healing means finding closure or moving on – my experience has been very different.

What I have encountered is complex grief.  Grief that arrives in waves – surprises you in supermarket aisles and in the coffee shop.  Grief that coexists with gratitude.  Grief that continues long after the practicalities have ended.

One of the greatest gifts during this time came through our work with Bindi Sawchuk, The Grief Tenderess.  Rather than treating grief as something to fix, Bindi invited us to meet it as something to honour.  Through ritual, reflection and relationship with the natural world, we were supported in creating space for our sorrow rather than resisting it.

The elements became allies and the earth held us when we felt ungrounded.  The water carried our tears.  The fire transformed what could no longer remain.  The air offered breath when everything felt constricted.

These rituals didn’t take the pain away, but they gave the pain somewhere to belong.

Perhaps that has been the greatest lesson of all – not how to avoid grief, but how to make room for it.  How to allow love and loss to coexist.  How to surrender more deeply to life’s impermanence.  How to remain open-hearted in a world where everything we love will one day change form.

Today, we are learning to adjust to life without Simba’s physical presence.  His favourite spots around the house still catch my eye.  There are moments when I instinctively look for him before remembering.  The silence can feel loud.

Yet alongside the sadness, there is also gratitude.  Gratitude that we had the opportunity to love him.  Gratitude that we were present for his final chapter.  Gratitude for every lesson he taught, even the ones I never asked to learn.

Death was an unwelcome teacher, but perhaps the most important one I’ve ever had.  Simba’s final lesson was not really about death – it was about love.  The kind of love that stays even after a heartbeat has gone.  The kind of love that asks us to keep opening, even when it hurts.  The kind of love that reminds us that grief is not evidence that something has gone wrong – it is evidence that something precious was here.

And for that, I will always be grateful.