Death.
Recently, my beloved cat, Cat, died. I was at work when my girlfriend, Ashley, called to inform me that Cat had just died in her arms. I had been expected this call around the year 2025. After being hit by a car, she crawled home, fought off one of the neighboring cats for a place to lie, and then died. I was bewildered and miserable, but didn’t have the luxury of grief. I still had a shift to finish. I work in a bar, so within 30 seconds I was smiling and telling jokes. The experience was awful, but I’m can’t decide which part I liked less: the sadness, or the cognitive dissonance of wearing a façade of happiness because it wasn’t a professional moment to grieve. I composed myself until I could leave.
When I arrived home my beloved Cat was in a basket, curled stiff around a bundle of sage and bougainvillea. I lost my poise. My bottled emotions flowed in cascades. I was angry. I threw my keys to the floor, and then approached her corpse. Her eyes were open. I attempted to close them –I’m not sure what possesses people to do this– but found that rigor mortis had already set in. I sat, tears dripping from my face, while her cold, lifeless eyes glanced in my general direction.
Cat had a brother, Richard Parker. While I sat on the floor next to the basket holding his sister, he approached. I expected see some recognition of the loss we were all experiencing. A noise, a hiss, a howl; something. Granted, he’s a cat, and doesn’t feel emotions to the degrees that humans do. But he’s still a mammal; a warm blooded, emotional, animal with attachments to others that clearly go beyond the pragmatic. So while he draws closer to his dead sister, I expect some form of emotion response. Instead, he walked up, sniffed her butt, and walked away. That’s when I noticed Cat was farting. Even in my grief, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of it all. This is not what I would have hoped for Cat. But not for her, not for anyone would there be any true dignity in dying.
Despite the fact that had just finished a 12-hour shift, and it was 4:30 in the morning, I knew we would have to bury her immediately. God only knows what Cat would have smelled and looked like by the time we woke up. I grabbed a shovel, Cat, and then we all got in the car. At the top of the Berkeley Hills is heavily wooded park, Tilden, which has secluded areas appropriate for an ad hoc burial. After a brief drive in the last moments of the night, we parked with the sunlight spreading in the East.
We made our way into the park. After a moment of hiking, we found a spot off of the main trail, and I began to dig. The dirt was hard and dry, coming apart in heavy chunks that resisted the flat blade of the shovel. It was early enough in the morning that we had privacy, but before I laid Cat in that shallow hole in the hillside, an older man came by. He had a familiar look. When I was 13 years old, I was involved in a head-on collision. I remember standing in the freeway, looking back at the faces of onlookers. Part concern, part curiosity, like they’re watching the spreading of a disease that is both dangerous and entertaining. I was tempted to tell the man to fuck off. I continued digging, and he left.
As I put Cat into the ground, the sun crested over the top of Mt Diablo. Taking in the somber beauty of that quiet moment, I imagined what the final 24 hours of being’s life is like. I can’t comprehend how something as life altering as death can come without a harbinger. Can it truly be so random, so dispassionate? I suppose dignity is something only afforded to the living, and with death one losses all right to it. Meaning, purpose, and any of their attachments are erased like words off of a page. This was my profound realization. I stood in the light of the dawn, overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of the experience, of dying. Eventually I will die, and it will be on anyone’s terms but my own. Elvis Presley, The King of Rock & Roll, had a heart attack in the middle of taking a shit, and then drowned in his own vomit. My grandfather died alone in a nursing home. What does dignity have to do with death? I chuckled. Ashley and I stood next to Cat’s grave while we watched the sun fill the swatches of night in the valley. I told Ashley that I loved her, and we made our way back to the car.
