It was a very tough night. I could barely close my eyes, thinking of yours. In my denial, I still couldn’t accept what had happened. It was like my mind was stuck in the memory of a bad dream that kept repeating itself over and over again, every time I woke up. At home, everyone was sleeping. They were exhausted. So was I. My head was aching and my eyes were burning with the light of my night lamp. It was horrible. I didn’t like that reality. I didn’t accept it. I didn’t want it to be true. It couldn’t possibly be true. You weren’t gone; you were outside, hunting mice. Just like every other night. That poor kitty that I had found on the side of the road wasn’t you. It only looked alike. The same blue grey and white fur, the same “mask” on its face, the same furry tail, with a white tip. It was another cat. Yes, that was it; it was dark, the batteries of the flashlight were low. I was mistaken. The little cat that was laying there in your favourite cardboard box wasn’t you. It couldn’t be you. Not you. No.
It was 6 am and I couldn’t stay in bed any longer. You would be home soon, seeking for food and a warm bed to sleep on after a hard night shift and someone would have to open the window to let you in. While I was waiting for you, I couldn’t help but think of the poor family that probably were out there, desperate, looking for that poor soul. We would have to take it to the vet and have it checked for a chip, to let its humans know where it was. Yes. That was the right thing to do. It was my duty. After all, I had found it. I had a shower thinking about you and your whereabouts. You hadn’t come to eat for almost 18 hours and I was worried you were hidden somewhere, eating mouse.
Getting dressed was a difficult task. For a reason, I couldn’t focus on finding the right spring outfit; the Sun doesn’t shine much on this side of the World in spring. I didn’t have a generous breakfast. I could barely finish my bread and butter; your absence was bothering me. Your father ate fast and in silence. We took your box with the cat inside and set off to the vet.
“One of our cats was hit by a car last night and we want to cremate it”. The sentence hit me like a thunder. My eyes got suddenly full of tears that I couldn’t hold back and my mind forced me to go through the horrible truth again: it wasn’t someone else’s cat. It was you! You hadn’t come to eat the day before when I called you all. You were always the first to show at the door to the sound of the dinner bell. Something was wrong. After waiting for an hour, I took my coat, my flashlight and my mobile and headed out to search for you. Something inside me was telling me I would find you, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. I let my sixth sense lead the way and I walked to the avenue, calling your name, shining every corner, every bush, every driveway. After 10 minutes, I found you. You were laying on the grass, on the sidewalk, just behind our house. I called you again, while I was walking towards you. It was rather stupid of me to believe that you were sleeping there or that you were wounded and unable to walk. It only took a glimpse of you to understand it all. My howl of sorrow didn’t shatter the German neighbourhood. Your dad took us home. He was the one to find the exact place where you had been hit. The killer had been decent enough to place you on the sidewalk after he hit you. It had been an accident.
At the vet’s, they had advised us to go directly to the crematorium and so we did. In my head, there was only an explanation: you had tried to cross the road to go home when you heard the dinner bell. It was my fault. Nothing but my fault. When I opened the bedroom window to let you and your brother out, a sharp pain in my stomach had told me I would never see you alive again. My heart asked me to stop you, but my head begged me to be rational. You were always playing in the garden and entertained yourselves chasing and hunting mice. What could possibly happen to you there, among the flowers? “If only I had stopped him, if I had stopped him, if I hadn’t let him out, if only I had stopped him”. A cruel soul had shamed our wish to keep your ashes in a decent urn at home, instead of spreading them on the grass. “Don’t you think you are going too far with all this? It’s only a cat”. I had cried so much and my mind was so busy torturing me that I didn’t have the energy to get angry and ask her to go to hell.
The road was long and very winding, but the crematorium clerk was very kind to us and made our time there more bearable. She asked if we wanted to perform a farewell ceremony before the cremation, but I didn’t have the courage to see you again like that, with your eyes open and opaque, lifeless. The man in charge to cremate the bodies took you to the oven while your dad shielded me from the sad scene. Your cremation lasted more that 40 minutes. The tea pot got emptied in less than 20 and my tears covered the sheet where I wrote my last goodbyes to you, in the condolences book. The clerk, aware of my pain, waited until I was calm to take us to choose your urn. I fell in love with a very pretty cat-shaped one, but we couldn’t afford it. After paying for the cremation, we only had enough money to get you the simplest, the cheapest of them all.I hated myself for it. You deserved more than a piece of tin of rough appearance. As soon as our financial situation improved, I would get you the prettiest, the most expensive one, the urn you deserved.
The clerk came back to the waiting room with a cardboard box wrapped in a paper with printed red roses, that contained your urn, the certificate of cremation and a polished stone engraved with a sentence in German, roughly translated as “always in our hearts”. The way back home was quiet, but a little less painful. I had you on my lap, with my hands wrapped around you; you were there with me. You hadn’t left.
Back home, I made room for your urn on the T.V. stand. Your dad took your bowl, washed it and put it next to you. The moment to cry along had come and we did it until our eyes ran out of tears. We slept a little. We didn’t eat much. We couldn’t handle your absence. Your silence was deafening. Michelle and Tolkien searched for you in the garden. Tolkien even meowed calling for you on the roof. Bécquer and Angie got it from the start: they mourned you in silence, sleeping in a corner for a week. Your father went to work and I had to stay home, cleaning, organising, keeping my mind busy in order to stay sane. I went offline. Many people got worried about it; some others criticised my reclusion in the stupidest of ways: “you cannot possibly isolate yourself just because your cat is dead; people might get upset about it”. And what did I care???? I just cared about you, about my pain, your departure, your absence!!!!
You weren’t the first love I had lost, but you are the most painful one to lose. Dolly, Ariel and Martha were older than 10 and were ill. To let them go was a very difficult and painful decision, but it was the best for them; they were in excruciating pain and were terminally ill. Your great grandmother was 96, had dementia and was lost in her past. Your aunt, the other love whose departure broke my heart, gave me the chance to say goodbye to her; she had waited for me to show before leaving. You were only 2 years old. You were a baby and an idiot with a fast carand a lack of common sense got distracted with his or her mobile and had taken your life in a blink of an eye. And it was all my fault. I, who knew, hadn’t done a thing to stop you. And you had paid for my mistake with your life.
I miss you. I am now used to your absence, but the pain is still there, every day, every morning. Some people had told me not to light up a candle to your memory because you are not a person. They still don’t get that love doesn’t discriminate species, ethnicity, sex or age. They don’t understand that losing a loved one is very painful, whether human or animal. They don’t seemto know that a cat leaves deep paw prints in the heart of their humans, as deep as their magic, their wisdom, their inner peace. Why do they refuse to see that the young roses blossom as soon as I place them in a vase, in front of your urn, like magic? You aren’t gone. You’re not in that urn, but you haven’t left. You’re still here, by my side. Sometimes, during the night or early in the morning I feel you walking on my legs or on my pillow, when your siblings sleep in the living room. I had felt your presence in the garden. I even have seen you walking out your baby sister’s bedroom.
It has been a very hard and painful journey ever since you left, but I had managed the best I could. Idon’t care about the critics, nor the nasty comments on my rituals. I know you don’t need me to offer you flowers, or to light up a candle to you, or to keep your ashes on an altar. You don’t need me to leave your favourite food in my Ofrenda. But I do. I am human and I depend on my 5 senses to feel I haven’t lost you. Maybe one fine day I will be able to see what’s beyond and will have the joy to see you again in front of me, in all your feline beauty and splendor. In the meantime, I will keep lighting up a candle, taking flowers to your altar, asking you to watch over us while we sleep or when we go out. I will continue talking to you when the weight of your absence puts me on my knees and I will continue asking you to help the ones in need.
You aren’t gone. I think you never will. You will always live in my heart and in my memory. I guess that, after all, the cat I found on the side of the road that afternoon of the 17th, April 2016 wasn’t you. It was just your mortal body.
