Lilly
I must dig a hole.
In stead, I am writing about it. Digging a hole in my mind. Not to avoid it. Only because it is early morning and the digging will take place late afternoon. With a pickaxe. The three of us will head out with a wheelbarrow to a far corner of the flowering meadow. Tools, gloves and a cardboard box. The cat will come with. On a green felted blanket. Where's she's been on the last twenty four hours. The shine of her fur already fading. The stillness of her body. It is her, hair by hair, cell by cell. But the creature that has been with us for fifteen years no longer is.
My body still remembers hers.
Soft and warm, digging her wet nose in the palm of my hand, dropping in for a lie down on my writing screen. Cats look you in the eye. A predator's privilege. All cats are natural born killers. They play with what they catch before crunching the skull to get to the good bits.
There are differences between a cat and a human. We emphasise the pretty things. We distinguish good from bad. And hide our blatant nakedness. Boasting about leaving the garden. Blaming the angels for not letting us back in.
I think I know why we are held back by the fiery swords protecting the realm of nature. We fear death.
There's the whole christian faith in a nutshell. At least as I see it and would consider acceptable. Getting back to the garden is done by entering death back into life. By dying and rebirthing. By living into the unknown. By falling face down into the flames.
Yes, metaphorically. But no less scorching when lived.
It is the simple that is hard to get.
The easy we complicate.
Life is not in us. It is us who are in life.
A slight difference.
My son said about the death of his lifetime pet that she didn't leave us. And he was the one fully present at that moment of departure. He was the one asking for alone time just before the vet would inject the ending straight into the tiny heart. My fourteen year old said goodbye and thank you out loud. He comforted the soul departing that sleek body on the vinyl covered table. She has returned, is how he sees it. That all of us will return. Which makes you and I the ones who have left. Temporary. Just for now.
When today's sun sets we will dig a hole to say goodbye. The hole is not for Lilly. It is to remind us, away from home, to tread carefully and pay attention to whatever crosses our path.
All will return.
It might be as simple as that.
A fitting and heartfelt tribute. Putting down an animal at the vet's is some kind of epiphany moment in a strange sort of way. Our cat is 16, so I'm wondering when ...
Burying a creature once full of life is a terrible memory. As I lifted the cold, stiffened body of my small dog, Michelangelo's Pieta flashed in my mind. In that moment, I felt the dog's rigid limbs relax, like in the statue, a sense of peace settling over, as if the dog was relieved to have been found that October morning.