Death of a Cat
Now that all our children have left home, my wife and I are entirely responsible for the care of the pets that have accumulated over the years: two dogs and four cats. The oldest of the cats, Jessie, was twenty years old when she died last Monday. I mention her age and the number of cats by way of explaining and justifying the fact that we did not feel this as a deep loss. Jessie had lived longer than the average cat and had a pleasant enough life (except perhaps for the period of several years when she disappeared and presumably lived in the woods), and, to tell the brutal truth, I’m somewhat tired of feeding cats. For the past couple of years Jessie had spent roughly twenty-three and a half of every twenty-four hours sleeping, rarely moving from one of two or three favorite places. Within the past few months she had declined visibly, and so it was no surprise when she grew very weak, stopped eating, and died within a few days.
We had considered taking her to the vet for a few things that might have made her last months more comfortable, but figured that he would just recommend that we “put her down” (a term I hate), and I didn’t want to do that. I know it would have prevented the suffering she experienced in her last two days of life, but something in me recoils from it. The end came on Monday night, a couple of days after we had noticed that she was having trouble walking. I sat with her as she expired on our living room floor. Her last few hours were obviously painful. And however prepared I may have been for it, the slow and difficult departure of life from her body was still somehow appalling.
It was not so much the loss of a cat that bothered me, but the sheer ugliness of death. Humankind will never learn to accept death. We can learn to deal with it more or less gracefully, and certainly there are times when it comes as a welcome release from pain. But in general we hate and detest it. And I think this hatred is a necessary function of our consciousness. Able to see before and after the present moment, we know that things we love and moments of joy will always be lost. Apart from the physical horror of it, death is the ultimate statement of time’s dominion over us.
I often wonder about the place of pets in Christian hope. “All dogs go to heaven” is a sentimental saying that generally implies mistakes and misunderstandings about the nature of the soul and of heaven itself. But no one who has ever really loved an animal can be content with theological abstractions about the vegetative, sensitive (animal), and rational souls. It is difficult in this case (as in so many) to accept that the beloved thing is forever lost in the past. Perhaps it must be so, and we will understand and accept it. But I favor the idea that these animals will somehow be present to us in heaven because our fullest happiness requires it.
What if the master or mistress does not attain heaven, but is lost eternally? What happens to the pet then? Certainly it would in some sense always exist in the mind of God. But wouldn’t it be true that the pet as pet would not exist apart from its relationship to its master or mistress? Perhaps one’s own salvation involves more than one’s own salvation.
Another conjecture follows directly on this one: is it the case that some part of creation would be lost with every human soul that is damned? It is said that artistic creation is a sort of limited re-enactment of God’s creation. Might it also be true that human knowing constitutes, in the same limited way, an analog of the fact that to exist is to be present to the mind of God? If a flower is seen by one person before it fades, and if that person is eternally separated from God, isn’t the flower also in some sense lost or at least diminished, in that it is no longer known by that conscious knower? The delight of the conscious observer is a thing in itself.
And then the greatest question: how can a person be lost if he or she was ever loved by a person who is saved? A few days ago I posted a quotation from Father Alexander Men in which he pictured souls ascending to heaven on a rope made of their prayers for each other. I pictured these as people holding to the rope with one hand and to another person with the other. Yes, of course, we know that every person’s salvation is ultimately his or her own decision. But surely it must make a difference if a person is loved by someone who has a firm grip on the rope, and who takes hold of the other’s hand and will not let go unless God himself tells him he must?
These questions are unanswerable for now, I know, but worth thinking of as we enter Holy Week and contemplate the death that killed death.
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