Elegy- Garrett Uebelhor

No Children, No Pets

BY SUE ELLEN THOMPSON

I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s

in a running-shoe box held shut

with elastic bands. Then I clean

the corners where she has eaten and

slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food

from the baseboard, dumping the litter

and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic

dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-

soaked towel I put in the trash. I put

the catnip mouse in the box and I put

the box away, too, in a deep

dirt drawer in the earth.

When the death-energy leaves me,

I go to the room where my daughter slept

in nursery school, grammar school, high school,

I lie on her milky bedspread and think

of the day I left her at college, how nothing

could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax

out from between her floorboards,

or taking a razor blade to the decal

that said to the firemen, “Break

this window first.” I close my eyes now

and enter a place that’s clearly

expecting me, swaddled in loss

and then losing that, too, as I move

from room to bone-white room

in the house of the rest of my life.

For the most part this elegy follows the three traditional stages.  In the very beginning of the poem Sue Thompson describes the death of her cat and the circumstances surrounding the cats death. Although this stage where the grief and sorrow take place is present the next stage is where the poem does sort of deviate from the normal stages. Although we do see some version of praise for the "idealized death" in phrases such as "in a deep dirt drawer in the earth" it is not as easy to identify in the poem as the other two stages.  Lastly we have the stage of consolation. In the last phrase "I move from room to bone-white room in the house of the rest of my life" I think we definitely see acceptance of the situation and although I wouldn't say she was comforted in the end it definitely still mirrors the consolation and solace stage.  I believe that the message presented in this elegy is one of unavoidable change.  By the end of the poem I think the author has shown that as you grow older some undesired things will occur which simply cannot be changed. I think by the end Sue Thompson shows that in life you sometimes just have to try and accept the cards you have been dealt.

Thompson, Sue. "No Children, No Pets." Nimrod International Journal: The Healing Arts,49.2 (2006). Print.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178865