November was supposed to be the month of MARM and November Novellas, and I was preparing a series of fun posts. But all of a sudden, my life had to come to a halt.

At the end of October, we travelled to Mexico for my sister-in-law’s wedding, spending 3 days in a beautiful eco-resort and feeling blessed. Right when we came back I noticed something was wrong with my cat Lucy. She was barely eating. The problem had started a month before, but I thought I had fixed her, with a new dinner routine and a bunch of different wet foods and treats. I thought she was just being picky. She lived with me since I found her as a kitten in the streets of São Paulo, 14 years ago.

Turns out she was losing weight fast, which is a major problem for cats. On November 1st I took her to the vet clinic, and they referred her to the Veterinary Emergency Center of Toronto, for an ultrasound. She had to stay for 4 days under their care. On Monday morning the vet called me with the ultrasound results. There was nothing wrong with her stomach, nothing wrong with her kidney, intestines, or blood. There was nothing wrong with her, except… her liver. “There’s some alteration suggestive of Hepatic Lipidosis,” the vet said.

When I heard those two words I immediately broke down.

Hepatic Lipidosis, or “Fatty Liver Disease” is what killed my other cat, Hana, a day before the Christmas of 2018. I already knew everything that was about to happen. In a nutshell, Fatty Liver disease happens when a cat gets intoxicated with its own body fat. It’s irreversible, unless the animal gets intubated, and I already had decided against any invasive procedure for my 14-year-old senior cat who was already dealing with stage 2 kidney disease.

So there was only one thing left to do.

I didn’t want her to go in suffering, on a cold table of a vet clinic or to spend days in a cage in a strange hospital. My partner found out that there’s an in-house hospice service in Toronto, that provides veterinarians who will put your animal to sleep in the comfort of your home, a place where they’re most at peace, on your own terms. “It’s a privilege to be able to choose how your pet is going to leave this life,” told me the doctor at the VEC clinic. He was right.

So on November 6th at noon my beloved Lucy left this word in peace, on my lap, in her favourite spot in the sun. She didn’t suffer, but inside me the pain was unbearable. I’ve lost two other cats before, but this grief was another level. I stumbled for days around the house in tears, seeing her everywhere. I still see her.

There was very little time to process my grief though, because in 2 weeks we would be boarding a plane to visit my family in Brazil. If you’re an immigrant, you know that visiting home is not exactly vacationing, and depending on your family situation, it can be extremely emotionally challenging. And this is my situation. I won’t go into detail about my family drama, but let me just say for starters that my mom had a stroke-like event two years ago and is still under 24-hour care. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The trip went better than expected but it was exhausting. My partner and I had only 2 weeks to visit 4 cities. We tried to cram all the friends and family visits in that time, not to mention that Brazil (and Portuguese) is still new to him, so we also wanted to do some tourism. We did have a good time, but during those days there was still another shadow hanging over me – the company I work for was not doing well.

We had a lot of ups and downs during the year and had to let some people go in September, including some close co-workers of mine. I knew that if we wanted to survive we would need to hit our targets for Q4. And being one of the only two Data Analysts in the company, I already could see in the data that we were not going to get there.

And so it came to it. A second wave of layoffs. This time I did not make it to the safe zone, no one in my team did.

So that’s how, one month after losing my only cat, one day after arriving from the most draining trip of the year, I was informed that I was going to lose my job, after five years in the company. All of that 20 days before Christmas. 😆

Other than the financial worries (after a $6,000 vet bill and expensive plane tickets) and the stress of job searching, there’s also grief here. This was not just a job for me, I was in a start-up in which I believed in, for almost five years. This is the longest I ever stayed in a company. I was comfortable there and my co-workers felt like family, we had supported each other during the most challenging times.

Other than the grief of losing my job there’s also the grief of seeing a company with so much potential just falling apart. Everyone in there believed that we would change the world. And we just hit a wall.

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have no new posts for November other than the Weekly Lines.

I’m slowly getting back to my activities, since now I’ll have plenty of time anyway. But everything feels heavy, the last week has felt like I had to move through a pool of heavy mud to get anything done. In just a month, a whole chapter of my life is suddenly over.

I know there’s another chapter ahead, but for now… for now I all I can feel is grief for all we’ve lost.

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Read more about my life-long skills at dodging curve balls:
– The Craziest Day of My Life
– Interview: Galabin Boevski, An Olympic Champion in Jail
– Celebrating 3 Years in One Place