Creatures Whom I Admit to Having Loved

Sixteen years ago, our beloved marmalade cat Sharky died. It was the same day the pope died, and two days after Terri Schaivo was finally allowed to.

Even though, as the Dalai Lama says, we all suffer and are going to die someday, there never seems to be a good day to die.

As we slid him out of a shoe box into a hastily-dug hole out in the daisy garden under a dark sky and a pelting spring rain, I imagined that runty bag of cat bones drifting along in Bardo-land with the souls of Pope John Paul II and Terri Shaivo.  How evolved were those three souls? Would they be searching for a couple in love into whose embrace they would be born again?

Did they lose their way?

Or . . . what?

Freakish & Ordinary. The magnificence of the planet, the solar system, the universe. The kittens. 

The name for these two little beings who were just ours for our unique lives together. Those small meow-makers who came into our family, and it seemed like they were made just for us. The family of us, into whose embrace they were welcomed, our each-and-individual human uniqueness. The lottery that we won when we came into being; and the cats got lucky too, when they piled into their mama-kitty’s womb. 

Then I think of Mumbai and all those people in India. How many we all humans are. But then, there must be waaaay more cats in India, and China and . . .everywhere there are cats.

And then again, these small creatures who shared our lives. Shark and Spaff.

The Freakish coincidence of just this little example.The mundane, the ordinary fact of our existence alongside the extraordinary miracles of everyday life. 

But first, there was Sharky.