For years, those who follow this blog have known Wolfgang. He was a constant, vibrant force in the background of my life and creative spaces, and his presence was quite the opposite of quiet. It is with a completely broken heart that I share some news I have spent the last three months trying to find the words to process: Wolfgang has passed away.
He has been gone for three months now, and I haven’t even slightly stopped missing him. He was my perfect baby, and I still think of him so many times every single day. I miss his loud, un-quiet, constant presence so deeply, the familiar physical weight and warmth of him always on my lap or nestled in the crook of my knee, the way he would meet me at the door, and the absolute unconditional love we shared over the twelve years we spent together. The silence he left behind is heavy, and the grief is a constant, ongoing ache.
On the fourth day after his loss, when the initial shock began to settle into the reality of a routine completely emptied of him, the weight felt entirely too massive to contain. Every walk to the bathroom, every step in the door, and every brewing of a cup of coffee is reminder of what is gone. I grabbed my phone, hit record on a voice note, and simply started talking to myself through the tears. I couldn’t write, and I couldn’t form structured sentences. I just needed to let the raw noise in my head out into the room.
Recently, I went back and re listened to that voice note. Re listening to that audio file wasn’t about finding content for a blog post. It was a window into my own survival. Forcing myself to announce Wolfgang’s death through a standard, curated update would have required me to “clean up” my grief for an audience, forcing a neat narrative onto a loss that is still entirely fragmented and painful. The voice note preserved the spontaneous, messy flow of a mind under immense emotional weight on that fourth day alone. It captured the exact, unpolished psychic blueprint of my love and sorrow before my intellect could step in to over rationalize it.
Hearing my own voice jump rapidly between guilt over the final days at the vet, sudden waves of profound sadness, memories of him learning to sit on the couch with me, and listing out the endless silly nicknames I called most: Bunker, Lobster, Boo Boo, Booger, Monkey, Kitty: it made a historical concept click into place. I realized that in my rawest moment of pain, I had accidentally used Freud’s foundational technique of free association.
The Fundamental Rule of the Unfiltered Mind
In the late nineteenth century, Freud developed free association as the “fundamental rule” of psychoanalysis. He asked his patients to speak entirely without censorship, editing, or intentional logical selection. He famously compared the process to a traveler sitting by a train window, describing the changing, chaotic landscape to someone sitting inside without judging whether the sights made sense.
The purpose was simple: conscious filters normally clean up our thoughts to make them presentable and logical. By speaking continuously without pausing to edit, a person can bypass those conscious psychological defenses, allowing raw truths and the deep, unpolished architecture of a hurting mind to spill out.
Waking at the Threshold?
As part of my current Media of the Mind and Techniques of the Surrealist self experiments, I am trying to figure out how to navigate this specific brainscape of mine. I don’t feel like creating a photograph or turning this loss into visual art, but I did intend to share both the loss of Wolfgang and information about Freud’s Free Association with you all, so here we are.
Thank you for being in this space with me.
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