Spilled Wine

There was the night my cat knocked over a glass of red wine. Not that she had never done it before — but this was not the usual feline carelessness.

It was a Sunday evening. I had a retail job with a Wednesday-Sunday schedule, so this was my Friday. It is interesting, being out of step with the world at large. Coming home on the bus Sunday evening, I would be surrounded by people who had been enjoying their weekend in downtown Seattle. Some would have been to a Seahawks or Mariners game, depending on the season. Others would have been to see a movie or attend some event. Most would have been shopping, and there was usually someone sporting a large bouquet of flowers from the Market. All wore that deflated aspect of someone whose weekend is over, while I was in happy anticipation of my weekend just starting. Wine was a part of my Sunday evening. But wine had been spilled on other Sundays.

Before getting settled to watch TV, I washed dishes, took out garbage and ate a quick dinner. With the essentials taken care of, I poured a large glass of Merlot. I set it down carefully on the small table next to my easy chair and retrieved the TV remote before making myself comfortable. I turned on the TV — and that is when it happened.

My cat joined me. But instead of jumping into my lap, she regarded the glass of wine with unusual interest — and then sprang at it. She did not jump up onto the table. She rather jumped over it, but with not enough clearance for the wine glass, which somersaulted into the air, casting its contents around the room.

It is hard to fathom how the contents of a single glass of red wine can inundate such a large area of floor. Every square inch of the carpet within a six-foot radius was stained red. And smaller splatters found their way into every corner of the room. The cat knew she was in trouble before I even yelled at her. She bolted for the bedroom to hide.

I let out a loud cry, a howl of anguish completely out of proportion to the relatively mild calamity of a spilled glass of wine. I cried and howled and wailed with the grief of a person who has just learned that everyone she ever loved has been killed in a horrible accident. Sobbing hard, I went to the kitchen for a sponge and a bowl of water. In desperation, I poured water onto the carpet, mopping up excess with the sponge, wringing, rinsing and repeating. For around two hours, I poured, mopped, wrung, rinsed and repeated.

At some point, I must have calmed down enough for the cat to dare to venture back into the living room. She crept in gingerly, one foot at a time, with a humble look of apology on her face. But I yelled at her to clear off, and she hurried back into the bedroom. By eleven o'clock, the stain was as good as gone. And I was finally done crying, howling and wailing. I drank a quick glass of wine and watched a bit of TV before going to bed. The cat was still hiding.

By the next morning, the carpet had dried sufficiently that there was no remaining evidence of wine having spilled the night before. That still surprises me, because in the many years I have been in this apartment, the carpet has acquired many stubborn stains from spilled wine, pet accidents, and the like, stains which never came out.

One of the hardest things about mental illness is getting over it. It becomes part of your life and can insulate you from the world. It can be a companion. My psychosis was only occasionally scary. Most of the time it was amusing and comforting, like having all the episodes of The Office playing in my head on a repeat loop as I went about my day. I got over it. But I never got over getting over it.

The cat died a couple of years ago. She was eighteen with some health issues and it was not unexpected — but it happened on Labor Day. I found her in terrible distress on a morning when finding an open veterinary facility was a challenge. She died on the way.

A couple of days later, I was reliving her death over and over again as I attempted to start a day of work at home. Something weird happened on my laptop that set off alarm bells for malware and I spent the morning investigating that instead of doing real work. By lunchtime, I had found no answers and decided to take a shower as a break. Something about the sound of the water prompted me to cry — and I was flooded with emotions I had not felt since the night of the spilled wine, sixteen years earlier. I cried and howled and wailed until the water ran cold.

Over the next few months I fell into a horrible depression. More weird things happened on my work laptop and also on my personal devices, and I was sure my home network was compromised. Eventually, I had to pull the plug on my home internet for peace of mind. I stopped working from home and began to split my time between the office and a local co-working space. I filled my house with plants and started taking sertraline (Zoloft). And everything calmed down inside me.

The night of the spilled wine was possibly when I first realized that I was getting over the mental illness — and that I had to let it go. And that harrowing morning following the death of my cat, as I cried and howled and wailed in the shower, was perhaps when I finally realized it was time to get over getting over it.

Recovering from mental illness is not merely a matter of restoring a backup copy of yourself taken back you were well. You emerge as a new version of yourself and you might grieve the loss the version that got left behind. This is what I mean by “getting over getting over it.” And then, when you finally get over getting over it, yet another version of you emerges.

I miss my cat. I brought her home as a six-week-old kitten, when I was in the early days of getting over mental illness. She was a naughty youngster and once took a running jump at an open overhead kitchen cabinet, sending spice containers scattering. Over the next eighteen years, I watched her grow into an elderly cat who needed help getting up into my lap. And I grew old with her. She died shortly after I turned sixty. There are a couple of door frames in my apartment that are marked from years of her rubbing her cheeks against the wood each time she walked by. I am leaving them there.