Interpreting and Re-interpreting in the Aftermath of Lucca's Death

I just finished reading Steve Magness’s book Win the Inside Game, and there’s a section I loved.

“Those leading psychologically rich lives tend to have more complex reasoning styles, consider multiple causes for others’ behavior, and do not believe that a few discrete categories can explain individual differences.” Psychological richness frees us up from the duality narrative. The world is no longer right and wrong, good and evil. It’s rich and full of details.
…
In rapidly changing environments, a psychologically rich life might be the most adaptive for learning and accumulating experiences, whereas happy and/or meaningful lives might be more advantageous in stable, benign environments.

And later in the book:

It appears that well-being has more to do with interpeting meaning in one’s life than with interpretting life as turning out well without a stated reason.

Reading these parts of the book made me think of the Substack writer Henrik Karlsson, who seems to be constantly thinking about how to make meaning of his experience and the experiences of those around him. I thought a lot about Henrik Karlsson’s processing as Lucca, my cat, passed.

When my cat Lucca died in April, my experience was vastly different than I’d have predicted. I felt transformed. I felt more grateful for his life, for the lessons he taught me, than sad. Still, I was sad. I cried every day for a week.

I tried to explain how I felt about Lucca in his memorial on my website: https://alexledger.net/lucca.

I know I didn’t do the feelings, and Lucca, justice. It makes me think about the limitations of my ability to communicate and how deep feeling, for me, is incommunicable. Those moments of psychological richness, which are far more interesting than just moments of adversity, can sometimes be explained to others, but more often, others get a fragment of my experience, and that’s okay.

It’s okay because I was transformed by living with Lucca and the experience of his passing, and critically going through that experience with Cat, my life partner, and our other cat Rilke. It was the journey that changed it all.

And those around me get to experience transformed Alex, whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not.