the pure sweetness and beauty of my curious, precocious feline neighbor was done in today by a motor vehicle. yesterday evening she came in through the back door again while i was in the bedroom packing my clothes into a suitcase. after snooping around the closet a bit, she hopped up on the bed and began kneading some dresses i had laid out.
i heard the knock on the front door of my apartment building this afternoon and i heard someone answer. then came the few words and phrases that made my heart sink as they became distinct from the muffled conversation. "dead cat." "saw it there this morning." "wanted to check if it was yours." then the faint scream, and the sobs, because yes, indeed, it was little arwyn the cat lying dead underneath a parked car just at the end of the driveway. i immediately went outside to find my poor neighbor--the kitten's equally lovely owner--folded into herself on the porch, crying. she said she couldn't bring herself to look and see for sure if the cat was, in fact, hers. so i did it for her. a few moments later i kneeled down on the sidewalk with her as she slid her innocent little babe from underneath the car. the cat had been dead since early that morning. i don't think i will be able to forget that image ever. time is swift and transformative. the stiff, misshapen thing she wrapped in a towel was unfamiliar.
and so began insta-flashback time for me. all over again, i was hearing the words "hank's dead,"over the phone, and learning that my 11-month-old kitten had, inexplicably, unfathomably, vomited, collapsed and died almost instantly while i was away visiting my parents. it is shocking, and horrifying, and crippling when someone who plays such an integral and intimate role in your daily life changes fundamentally from being alive to being dead. from being there to being gone. parallel in our dead-cat tragedies is the presence of the abandoned sibling, the stark suddenness of the de-twinning. my heart broke for my delilah left without a brother, and it breaks for arwyn's sister, sophie. this splitting of a matched pair is perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of it all. i wonder how animals comprehend that contrast between the "thereness" and "goneness" of a close companion. does their quality of life shift the way it does for us?
i realize that in the full spectrum of universal occurrences, all tragedies are not created equal. today's events reminded me of movies i've seen where shocked and grief-stricken parents are carted off to the morgue to identify the body of the son or daughter they just saw at breakfast that morning. how does one reconcile a living creature with a lump of a flesh? how do you bring yourself to deal with the post-mortem protocol when the deceased belongs to you, owns part of your heart?
while some might consider the comparison of feline and human life insulting, i think it's unfair to rate some intimacy and affection as less significant than any other. love is love, and loss is uniformly incomprehensible. i recall the intermittent, gut-wrenching sensations of guilt i experienced during my several days of serious mourning for hank. guilt, because even the death of my grandfather years before hadn't evoked the same intensity of emotion. it was then i realized that the value of relationships--and the experience of loss therein--is rarely determined by external qualifiers.
a former coworker once reacted in surprise and disbelief when i described myself as empathetic. probably because i was a super bitter, overworked and underpaid employee. but empathy isn't necessarily synonymous with niceness. yes, i may misspeak, i may make inappropriate and hurtful jokes because i want so badly to make people laugh that i err in judgment, i may be crass or vulgar or not pick up on social cues, or be offensive or cold or bitchy or awkward. but i am empathetic to a fault. when i cried at the aforementioned grandfather's funeral, it was primarily an emotional reaction to the emotions of the people around me. seeing my aunt, my widowed step-grandmother, my own father, cry and lose their breath and stumble over their words at the loss of the family's patriarch, is what triggered my own outpouring of sadness.
my empathy has often gotten the better of me, and i have become completely overcome with surrogate emotions. thanks to therapy and pharmaceuticals i have learned to reel it in when it gets overwhelming--when i start expressing the anguish i feel for the sufferers of atrocities i've only watched pbs documentaries about and i'm being just generally insane and ridiculous. i hold it close to my heart, too, though, because it reminds me that i am a good and decent--if horribly flawed--individual. i have acted cruelly and without consideration of others' feelings.
in school i was the bully as much as i was bullied, i taunted and gossiped and glared. but empathy does not stop at sadness. i have felt the full spectrum of emotions of others as fully as if they were my own. as i move forward in my life i am trying my darndest to be a caring and warm person, despite my natural tendencies toward introspection and judgment.
it is the empathy, i realize, that is sending me to boston away from my life as i know it to pursue education, to try to create a career that i actually care about and like doing while actually improving the lives of others as much as possible. i do not want to just be a taker in this world. strange that the personality trait that is driving my career and education forward is the same damned one that is making me burst into tears, over and over again, for arwyn the cat. i'm not quite sure how to express it in a socially appropriate way to her owner. these are the things i get less-correct. do i write a thoughtful card even though i knew her cat better than i know her? do i just ignore it and slip quietly away at the end of the week?
i feel this evening, for the gorgeous and sprightly little cat that brightened so many of my dreadfully boring days of unemployment simply by rolling over onto her back and purring at me while i was taking the recycling out or getting groceries out of my car. it's just plain sad to see a sweet, tender spirit extinguished by something as stupid as a passing car. she'll be missed.
delilah, c. 2006. just for good measure.
