Requiem for a Cat

19.5 years for a cat is something like 133 years for a human isn't it? Something is bound to stop working at that point, and that's exactly what happened. I'm told her kidneys just stopped working.

I can't even remember when Misty wasn't around. I remember vaguely unwrapping a rainbow-print wrapping paper covered box and seeing this trembly little brown kitten in there, who promptly hid herself under the first object she encountered. I may be fabricating the memory based off an old picture of a chubby blond 5-year old clutching the terrified animal while she struggled to get out of whatever awful situation her pet-store origins had led her to.

Strange how it didn't bother me that much to hear she had died. She was deaf and almost blind; and spent most of her time walking in circles on the same spot of cat-hair-covered couch. Not a very happy existence, anyway. So, when I heard she had died, it wasn't surprising. But odd how something living that has always been there is suddenly gone forever. So, the more I think about it, the more I'm tearing up.

All in all she had been the perfect house-cat. She killed plenty of squirrels, rabbits, birds (ate them too, and left parts of them lying around as presents), retrieved pipe-cleaner balls, purred when pet, hung over the banister to play with her tail, bit the tails off of toy mice and left them sitting there, stood on peoples laps until they got uncomfortable and forced to her to sit, squinted disdainfully at anyone who refused to share a piece of chocolate cookie with her.... Ok, she was kind of weird. But you have to give credit to a cat who lived her whole life with a crooked head from a head injury the vet said she'd never survive...

That's a pretty neat cat.

If I feel this sad about a cat I haven't spent much time with for years, who was old and falling apart and died peacefully... what would I feel like if a person close to me died? I've been extremely fortunate to go through childhood and young adulthood without that happening.

Death is a scary scary thing. As much as you cling to hope and belief that there is something out there after death, that tiny, crawling, sneaky twinge of doubt still lurks in your subconscious until someone or something (well Misty had enough personality to be a someone to me) dies.
Then you wonder... what if you just blip out of existence? What if it's like passing out? You forget who you are, what you are, where you are... nothing matters, because everything is just void. In fact there is not even the recognition of the void. There is nothing.

How can anyone go through life as an atheist. What a bleak and dismal thought! If that was the way everyone thought we would all be nihilists.

I think that's where all the reverence comes for those that pass on. You can't joke about the recently-deceased without feeling horribly guilty. You feel humbled by the fact that whatever it is that happens, they've already seen it and felt it. To laugh at that would be to laugh in the face the only things that keeps us from being afraid every hour of every day: the hope, faith, or trust that there is something in us that makes us who we are... and it's not our chemical reactions, and our bodies, and our electrical impulses in our brains. But something that keeps us from turning into void when all that physical stuff stops working.

I think that even if you claim to have come to terms with death, or that you don't care what happens... you still have that fear somewhere inside you. It's part of being unable to see beyond ourselves or to ignore what we can't see. It's the source of that inescapable tension that by whatever design (the mythical eviction from the Garden of Eden) or phenomenal accident, human beings are singularly destined to live with.

So, Misty, even though this tension was most likely not a part of your life, it is a part of mine. And for that reason: here's hoping that you are off somewhere catching really fat squirrel- spirits and chomping on Thin Mints to your heart's content.