I had known that the grief would be deeper, the sense of loss more profound, when we lost Homer. It was Homer’s community, after all. But I had thought—naively, I now realize—that it would be more or less a slightly larger version of the same thing. Thinking this—that the one or two hundred comments and emails of condolence we had received after losing Vashti and Scarlett might be as many as four or five hundred now—I had waited four days after Homer’s passing, enough time to put on a “game face,” before posting the announcement to social media. It was August 25th—as fate would have it (although I didn’t register this at the time), exactly four years to the day since Homer’s Odyssey had first been published in 2009.
Publishing Homer’s story had changed my life, but that change had been a slow one—because book publishing is a slow business. I’d spent nearly a year writing the proposal and outline for Homer’s Odyssey, another year finding a publisher and then writing the book itself, and it had been six months after that before the book had first appeared in hardcover. Even all the craziness of Homer’s photo and video shoots had played out over a period of months, turning our lives topsy-turvy for perhaps one day every two or three weeks, and then leaving us to enjoy relative normalcy the rest of the time.
Nothing at all in my previous experience had prepared me for what it felt like to have my whole life change in a day.
The Facebook post announcing Homer’s death was shared more than three thousand times, and received more than eight thousand comments, within only the first few hours. People began posting pictures and stories of their own special-needs rescue animals to Homer’s page—animals they said they had been inspired to adopt by Homer’s example. Most of them were cats—cats large and small, fluffy and hairless, former street cats, backyard cats, cats who had been considered “undesirable” by their breeders. Cats who were blind or deaf or both, or who were missing limbs or paralyzed from the waist down. “Wobbly” cats suffering from cerebellar hypoplasia, and cats who were positive for FIV or FeLV. There were also many special-needs dogs, a handful of rescued bunnies and horses, and one albino gecko with poor depth perception. (I swear I’m not making that up.)
I shared these pictures and stories with Homer’s community as they came in, thinking them the most fitting tribute Homer could possibly have received. But for every one story and picture I shared, three or four more would appear in the “Visitor Posts” column along the side of the page, until I could no longer keep up. And people posted other things, too. They found older pictures of Homer that I’d posted online years earlier, and they shared them again on Homer’s page now. Sometimes they Photoshopped these pictures, to give Homer angels’ wings, to show him at the Rainbow Bridge, to frame him with solemn black borders that announced the years of his birth and his death. Each photo and post moved me deeply—until a few days later, when the numbers were so large that I was simply bewildered. I hadn’t known there were so many. I’d had no idea.
Facebook’s algorithms clearly interpreted this influx of new activity on our page as “good,” and began sending more and more and then even more traffic our way. It had taken nearly four years for Homer’s page to accumulate those thirteen thousand “likes,” to reach a point where content from the page reached perhaps five thousand people in a week. I had thought those numbers were pretty big. But, within a week of Homer’s death, his page had acquired an additional fourteen thousand followers and reached more than two million people. Hour by hour, day by day, Laurence and I watched those numbers go up, thinking every day that surely—surely—today was the day when it would all begin to level off.
And every day we thought that, we were wrong.
When you lose a member of your human family, there’s usually one day when you reach out to all the people who need to be called or notified, and then that part is done. But social media doesn’t work that way. For all the thousands of people who’d seen my Facebook post within hours of its going up, there were many thousands more who didn’t first see it in their news feeds for another day, or several days, or a couple of weeks. Every day there were people who were only now first seeing their friend’s re-tweet of somebody else’s Twitter post that had gone up days ago. Every day somebody visited my website—not even knowing there was any specific news about Homer—and, reading my blog post for the first time, then forwarded it to half a dozen other people they knew, who themselves forwarded the link to a dozen more. Every day, somebody saw for the first time the share, re-tweet, or re-post of another blogger’s tribute to Homer.
Sometimes the news was divorced from social media altogether—a rumor that people heard word-of-mouth, and they wrote to me for confirmation. At least twenty or thirty times in the typical day, I would receive emails from people wanting to know if what they’d heard was true, if Homer was really gone, and if so, when and how had it happened?
For me, every day was the first day all over again. I felt like a skipping record, forced to keep repeating the same notes over and over because my needle was stuck in a groove and couldn’t get un-stuck.
Laurence has never said so, but I suspect that I wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest wife during this time. I know now that Fanny, and especially Clayton, felt a difference in me, too. I petted and played with them as much as I ever had, but something essential within me was becoming numbed.
The emails began pouring in immediately after I posted that first announcement, and within a few days they were followed by sympathy cards in the mail—first in a trickle, then in a gush, like something out of Miracle on 34th Street. We received hundreds—literally hundreds—of sympathy cards and letters, and hundreds more cards from shelters and rescue groups, informing us of donations that had been made in Homer’s name. Along with the cards and letters, people sent us their own home-made versions of Homer—stuffed macramé Homers, ceramic Homers, Homers blown from black glass, a watercolor painting of Homer from Brazil, a Homer necklace pendant carved out of an old vinyl record from San Francisco, a hand-painted sculpture depicting a super-hero-caped Homer in front of the Twin Towers from Iowa, a soft-sculpture Homer purse that came all the way from Japan, a framed Homer needlepointed in black Egyptian silk and surrounded by gold thread from Los Angeles, and even an extravagantly framed oil portrait of Homer from “Hank For Senate’s” humans in Virginia.
Soon the media inquiries followed. I ended up asking a book publicist I’d worked with once to write up a press release containing the essential facts and some boilerplate quotes from me, so that inquiring press could have something to work with without my having to tell the same story dozens of times. A few months later, The New York Times Magazine would run Homer’s obituary online as part of December’s annual “The Lives They Lived” feature, which rounded up notable deaths from the preceding year. By then, enough time had passed for me to be proud and even a little amused, to wryly observe to Laurence that we certainly shouldn’t expect the same kind of coverage when our time came.