22.10.2026 Diary LII Penthos: after Pofik
Today our cat Pofik died. The name of grief, the weight of the words just a cat, a three-thousand-year-old dog, and an ADHD mind trying not to run from pain.
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22.10.2026 Diary Page LII
When a small life goes missing from a home, you learn how big the silence in that home can be.
Thursday. Today our cat Pofik died.
Yesterday I ended this page by saying I would sit down at the desk again tomorrow. I sat down, but for something else. I did not want today to have a concept. Still, this diary walks on words, and I looked for one that could carry today. The word I found is penthos.
Penthos
Penthos means grief in Greek. The sorrow that follows a loss. A very old word, one that already appears in Homer.
Grief having a name gives me something to hold on to today. In the aletheia entry I wrote that a name changes nothing, it only lifts the cover off what is there. Grief is the same. Naming it does not make the pain smaller. But knowing what I am going through makes it a little harder to get lost inside it.
Just a cat
Nobody said this sentence to me. But I noticed that somewhere inside me I was afraid someone would. Maybe the one who hears that voice and the one who says it are both me.
In 1989 Kenneth Doka proposed a concept called disenfranchised grief: losses the people around you do not count as grief, losses that are given little room to be mourned openly. The death of a pet is one of the most common examples given when the concept is explained.
Reading that eased something in me. I do not have to prove the size of my grief to anyone. A life going missing from a home is reason enough to grieve. There is no need to measure it, compare it, or make it smaller next to other losses.
Argos
In the seventeenth book of the Odyssey there is a dog. His name is Argos.
Odysseus comes home after twenty years in disguise, and no one recognizes him. Argos does. Neglected and old, he is lying in front of the doors. He wags his tail and lowers his ears, but he no longer has the strength to come to his master. Odysseus wipes away a tear without letting anyone see. And shortly after, Argos dies.
This scene is roughly three thousand years old. So crying after an animal is at least that old too. Thinking about this did me good today. This pain is not mine alone. It is a very old, very shared pain.
Grief does not keep a calendar
An ADHD mind is already on bad terms with time. Hours slide into each other, a day feels either far too long or as if it never happened.
Grief has no calendar either. One moment everything flows as usual, then something reminds you and the day breaks again. I know this, and still I feel the urge to give myself a deadline. It will pass in a week, I will pull myself together in ten days. I will not set one. I will meet each wave when it comes.
I wrote in the emotional regulation article that with ADHD emotions can arrive suddenly and intensely. Today I know this not from inside an article but from inside myself.
Not running
The easiest way to postpone pain is to bury yourself in work. I have a mind that can do that. Hyperfocus can be the best hiding place on a bad day: you go into the screen, hours pass, and you have felt nothing.
Today I am trying not to do that. Burying myself in work is not forbidden, it is just not right for today. A day that passes without feeling Pofik's absence would feel unfair, to Pofik and to me.
In the hypomone entry I wrote about staying under a weight and enduring it. I wrote that entry about the weight of work. Today the weight has a different shape, and what there is to do is the same: not trying to get out from under it right away.
To Pofik
I am not writing the details about you on this page. Let them stay with us. A diary page cannot carry everything, and some things do not belong on a page.
I am only writing this, so that it is written: I am so glad you were in our home, Pofik.
A piece next to the concept
Erik Satie: Gymnopédie No. 1.
Written in 1888. A short, slow, plain piece for piano. The marking Satie wrote at the top is Lent et douloureux: slow and painful.
It speaks of pain not in a loud voice but in a low one. Today I could not have borne any other kind.
Toward tomorrow
Tomorrow is Friday. I am not making a plan for tomorrow, and I am not choosing a word either. If the day stays empty, let it stay empty.