The View from
Above the Close
Easter and the Big Cat…
Less than
two weeks ago, as I’m writing this, we had to put euthanize our “big cat”. Vincent had been with us—part of our
family—for 13 years. He was a huge gray cat who, in the last few years, had
grown fat and lazy—but remained, as always, sweet natured and
affectionate. He was the kind of cat
that is always jumping in your lap—heavy and unpleasant as he was. Had Bern and
I imagined how quickly Vinnie’s life
would have to end, we may not have knocked him off our laps so many times….
Well,
that’s not true. He was heavy and
emotionally demanding and had a habit of digging his claws into my legs when he
jumped on my lap. I often pushed him off
and would still, even if he could be back with us.
Vincent
wasn’t a pleasant cat to live with. He’d
run to the basement whenever people came over and hide until they left. Some people who have been at our house many
times never saw him. He was the cat we
“made up” and had no evidence for…he was a cat just for his family. When he was just a kitten, we had another
cat—a big yellow cat named Pajamas, a sweetheart of a cat—who would spend hours
cleaning Vincent. When Pajamas got hit
by a car and stumbled into the bushes to die on a cold winter day, Vincent went
to the basement. He stayed there for
days. We’d carry him up and make him
eat, then he’d retreat to the basement again.
Don’t tell me animals don’t mourn.
Vincent mourned his buddy Pajamas for weeks and was never the same
again. Before Pajamas died, Vincent was
aggressive and loud and independent. But
from that cold winter day on, he was calm, sweet and needy. And he never learned to clean himself—Pajamas
did it for him. So he was always dirty
and unpleasant.
On the way
back from the vet’s, with Vincent in a box in the backseat, Bern said, through
the first of many tears: “He was a pain-in-the-butt cat…”
We both
smiled and laughed and cried.
I dug
Pajama’s grave alone. We found him just
as Bern was leaving for work and taking Josh to school in New Haven. This was almost a decade ago. So I dug his grave, tears streaming down my
face and snow swirling around me. The
earth was hard and unrelenting. When we
brought Vincent home—mercifully killed by the vet’s needle because of extensive
cancer and feline AIDS—Bern and I worked together on his grave.
We have a
cemetery of pets in the space beneath our back deck. Annie is there as well as Pajamas and
Vincent. Several guinea pigs as well.
And Goose, our other yellow cat—we have great yellow cats but not much
luck with keeping them alive—is buried there too.
Anyone who
shares their lives with pets will have lots of sad days and lots of graves to
dig. We human beings outlive most of the
creatures we share our homes with.
Sometimes I think the pain is too much to risk. And then I remember how wondrous they
are—what unmotivated and unconditional love they give—and then I know we’ll dig
other graves before graves are dug for us.
We’ll weep profusely each time and miss them terribly. But there is something humbling and
humanizing about sharing your life with other creatures.
At any
rate, the day after Vincent had to die, Bern said something about how she
thought that the best heaven of all would be a place where Pajamas could be
cleaning Vincent again. And I’m hard
pressed to disagree.
Theologians
might have some issues with such sentimental thinking. And people who’ve never had pets might think
it daft. But Bern is right—I can’t
imagine a heaven worth being in that didn’t include animals and two creatures
as connected as Pajamas and Vincent should be connected always and
forever. The Kingdom must have room for
pets.
The next
day I got an email from Bern’s Brother, Dan, who is a member of the Alexian
Order of brothers in the Roman Catholic Church.
Dan is a psychiatric social worker for a religious order that
specializes in health care. His message consoled us about the loss of
Vinnie—and went on to say, “at least Vincent and Pajamas are playing together
again.”
Well, if an
Episcopal priest and a Roman Catholic brother can agree that heaven’s like
that, it must be so.
Easter is
that time when we have an opportunity to imagine how all the pain of death can
be washed away with joy. Easter is a
time when “dead things” need not stay dead. Easter is the time when all the rules and
assumptions about death get turned upside down and inside out. Easter is the time when God simply went into
the tomb and made Jesus—who was dead—alive again. Easter is the time when we can dare to
imagine life beyond life, eternal and abundant life. Easter is full of eggs and lilies and
balloons and good things to eat and chocolate and old, sick cats who are
kittens again, washing each other and playing together in a eternal spring
afternoon on grass too green to imagine beneath a sky too blue to speak of when
nothing else matters but the wonder and gift and blessing of being alive….
Christ is
risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia….
Joyous
Easter, JIM
