Where Should We Bury the Cat? A Story of Devotion and Grief

“It’s premature to talk about where to bury the cat.” Artie shook out the Sunday paper and then refolded it so the first page of the obituaries would be on top. He did this every week, sort through the paper to find the death notices which he then handed to Kath while they started on their second cup of coffee, still in bed while the kids on the street started to roll by on their Big Wheels.

For years, she read every word in the obits but lately she zeroed in on just the long ones, dead people with impressive resumes and interesting foibles. She was looking for the community notables, the leaders, thinking that someday she’d be one of them. But a few weeks ago, she found an important colleague from long ago whose obit was only two inches long. Did they make you pay per word, she wondered, and she and Artie talked about that. How rich people would always have longer obituaries, another example of income inequality. Obituaries ought to be parceled out by how much great stuff you’ve done with your life. It didn’t work that way. All your medals could just stay put in the drawer.

            “The vet said the cat would be on steroids for the rest of his life and okayed just two refills.  So that’s 40 pills times two plus the dozen or so pills in the bottle. That’s 92 days. Not that long. We need to get a head start on our grief.” Kath folded the obits into a bat and swatted Artie on the arm. He ignored her, turning the page on the story he was reading about the growing popularity of turkey hunting in Wisconsin.

            Kath swung her legs over the edge of the bed and contemplated getting up to shower. Both dogs and the cat were curled up on a blanket on the floor, all of them old, like them – she and Artie. The whole bunch of them bumping along on borrowed time. They should have a death pact, set a date and get it over with. All this countdown action was exhausting. Ninety-two pills. Like the old rock song, “Ninety-Six Tears,” except four less. Nobody but them was old enough to remember the song anyway.

            “I’m going to hop in the shower. Can you feed the animals and get breakfast going?” Sunday was Artie’s day to man the kitchen but sometimes she had to nudge him. He folded the paper so that later he could read all the Letters to the Editor and called the dogs and cat to follow him down the stairs.

            “Come on, men! Let’s give mommy her privacy.” And with that, with barks here and there and loud meowing, the bunch of them left the bedroom and headed downstairs.

            Kath knew the minute her foot touched the slippery bathroom floor that she would fall and that she would crash her head on the sink and lay crumpled in a silently moaning heap next to the shower door. She could see all this in her mind’s eye in that instant. And it happened just as she saw it.

            There was blood everywhere.

            She thought she saw the cat’s shadow under the door, him padding back and forth waiting for her. Sometimes, he slipped a paw under the door to let her know he was there but he didn’t do that this time. Had Artie given the cat his pill? The pill that would make it 91 days? She should yell out to Artie, scream that she’d fallen and needed help, but she couldn’t so she lay there, suddenly sleepy even though they’d had a good nine hours of sleep last night.

            She dreamt about the cat. The cat had died, not in her arms, but in her chair. He looked like he was sleeping but he was stiff when she touched him. When she picked him up, he felt like a pretend cat, a stuffed cat like the expensive one relative had bought for her older son when he was little. He called the cat, “Kitty,” and he had the cat for a long time until she threw it out after he’d moved out on his own. Kitty lived in a pile of old toys in the attic and then she cleaned the attic and Kitty was tossed with Beary, another beloved stuffed animal. She’d lived with the guilt of throwing them out for a long time. It was silly. People had to downsize.

            The blood in her nose and her throat made her feel like she was drowning. She blinked blood in her eyes. She knew it was there because once she’d fallen off a ladder and hit her head on a radiator and her eyes became a wild, mad red, the next day her eyes were black and blue and she looked like a racoon or like a rich person at a masquerade party where they hand out little masks for your eyes with feathers pasted all around.

            In her dream, she was arguing with Artie about where to bury the cat. He wanted to bury the cat in the yard, under a tree or bush. When their kids were little, they’d buried dead pets out there – birds, hamsters, once a chameleon. There used to be markers so their ‘graves’ could be found but now everything was so thick and heavy, like the yard was drowning. The drowning, it took her breath away. There was so much of it.

            No, she said to Artie. We can’t bury the cat in the yard. Some creature might dig him up, drag him into the street, and cars would run over him until he was flattened. The cat would become road kill. No, she yelled, screaming, “OUR CAT CANNOT BE ROAD KILL!” She knew all this was a dream. The floor, wet and slimy, was cool against her cheek. She had fallen and hit her head in the bathroom. Everything was very clear. She closed her eyes.

            In her dream, the vet was handing her a Mason jar full of ashes, and she knew that was her cat. We should cremate the cat, she told Artie but by then it had already been done. Time was scrambling, things happening out of order, every which way. Kath wondered if all of them – Artie and the dogs and the cat – would come back upstairs in time. There was still the scattering to consider. Loose ends in thready piles all around her and floating like fireflies behind her eyes, tangles of them, knotted. She had to tell Artie where to scatter the cat’s ashes but she couldn’t remember, so she rested instead, let her mind flatten, her hands holding the Mason jar to her chest until the thing that happened next.