Cleo

He sent us home to mull it over. If Cleo was a person she would have been forced to have a “natural” death like the one Mum had endured. I’d seen how, as disease takes hold, the victim enters a grey realm of pain that makes death a welcome visitor. Maybe it’s nature’s way of making the process ultimately acceptable. Given the choice, I wouldn’t want to suffer what Mum went through. Fortunately, Cleo’s animal status ensured she wouldn’t have to. Death is one of the few areas where animals are granted superior rights.

Katharine, her face a waterfall of tears, readily agreed this was the right thing. Philip helped us wrap Cleo in her blanket for the last time to take her to Tough Vet, whom I’d decided wasn’t tough at all.

“It’s time, old girl,” he said, slipping a tiny needle into the back of her paw. The movement was so gentle she didn’t flinch. As we said our good-byes, Cleo curled in the shape of a crescent moon. Her head drooped. She was suddenly gone.

The vet put her in an opaque plastic bag and we carried her home inside the blanket.

Philip began to dig a hole under the daphne bush in the front garden. The spade hit the ground with soft, regular thuds. He wasn’t in the mood for talking. Reading the back of his head as he swung the spade, I could tell he was upset—not in the tears-on-television way that’s become grindingly fashionable for both sexes. His was a restrained, dignified grief, the sort men were famous for until they were told it was bad for their health.

I wanted to make him put down the spade and just hold him for a while, but it would only drag things out. Men are better off doing things. Besides, there were my own useless tears to deal with.

After what seemed a very long time, he stopped and rested on the spade. We both stared down at the hole. It was deeper than it probably needed to be, but this is a man who always went the extra mile for his family. And Cleo was an integral part of that.

“I don’t suppose we want to bury her in the blanket,” he said.

Unwrapping the blanket he slid Cleo’s lifeless form from the vet’s plastic bag onto the soil. He bent and kissed her head before lowering her into the hole.

“She’s been with this family longer than I have,” he sighed.

Birds sang a requiem as, spade by spade, the earth covered her body.

Some cultures prefer to bury their relatives in their gardens. I was beginning to understand why. Every morning I said hello to Cleo on my way to the letter box. The gardener looked alarmed when I told him not to dig too deep around the daphne bush. Our precious cat didn’t need disturbing.

Cleo presided over our family through nearly twenty-four years. She helped heal wounds I thought we’d never recover from. Maybe her work was complete now, the healing was done, and we could get along without her. Except she left us with a different kind of sorrow. I suddenly understood the logic of ancient Egyptians shaving their eyebrows when a family cat died.

People asked when we were getting a new cat. They spoke as if one cat would lead to another. A friend took me to a pet shop. We watched a bunch of kittens tumbling about in an enclosure. They were mostly tortoiseshell. Adorable. Some were locked in a play fight, rolling around in a bundle of fur. Others dozed. Cute, so cute. A small grey kitten climbed the wire mesh, hitching himself paw by paw above our heads. A group of shoppers gathered around the cage, the expressions on their faces tender as a Leonardo da Vinci portrait. Among them was a disheveled man I’d noticed out on the street earlier. He’d looked angry and so withdrawn people had stepped sideways to avoid him. The layers of aggression he’d been carrying around disintegrated when he saw the kittens. His unshaven jaw softened into a smile. Leaning against the wire he gazed at them with pure benevolence. Now he was watching the grey kitten, who’d suddenly realized he couldn’t get back down as easily as he’d climbed up. He glanced anxiously down at the floor, then back up at the wire. He couldn’t climb any higher. There was no choice. The kitten performed an impressive backwards flip and landed safely back on ground level. The man laughed. Maybe the kitten reminded him of himself, climbing for the heavens only to land with a thump back on earth.

“Can we take one home?” a teenager asked his mother. He, too, was enthralled. If he persuaded her to take a kitten that day it had a noble task ahead. The young man was mentally disabled.

A sad woman pointed at a pretty tortoiseshell. Maybe her house was empty, just waiting for the pad of velvet paws.

Every kitten in the enclosure had a purpose to fulfill, human hearts to heal, lessons to teach about the true nature of love. There wasn’t one I didn’t want to scoop up and hold warm and soft against my chest. But I wasn’t going to take one home that day.