Saying goodbye to Bobby, part 2
Thursday night was quiet. All that long night, Bobby Cat was in his crate at the foot of my bed. He was here, and not here. He was dead, but his body, though lacking animation, had its own gravity and presence.
When my apartment was pierced, as it sometimes is, by a moving beam of light from the headlights of a passing car, that light caught Bobby's white fur and briefly gave him the illusion of breathing, which stopped my breath for a moment. Then my pattern-seeking mammal brain figured it out. The light visited and moved off a few more times before I went to sleep, like a hospital nurse on the night shift.
Of course, Bobby had no pulse or respiration to check. In fact, at this point, his body was like that of a taxidermied cat: stiff and cold, and unyielding to the touch. Rigor had set him like a stone several hours after that final injection. He looked the same, curled in his crate, and I petted him anyway. The issue of petting had been our one long disagreement: I wanted to, he wanted me not to, except on the top of his head. We had negotiated an acceptable truce (I only petted him on the top of his head). But now, I could pet him all I wanted, and I did. Because the body is important, And because I learned from my dogs that there is a measure of sensory input one needs before letting go. By which I mean I had to pet him.
When my dogs died - Shekinah in 2004, Shadow in 2006 - I had them cremated. I thought that was wise . I had never recovered from a childhood grief of my dog Spring disappearing without a trace one day while I was at school. I wanted to have something of them to hold in my hands, and I thought ashes would be enough. So I last saw each of them cradled in the arms of a vet tech, their lovely heads lolling, their bodies sagging. The tech turned, walked out of the room, and they were gone. I went home with a collar and a leash attached to my heart at one end and attached to... to nothing... at the other. A couple of weeks later, in each case, I picked up their ashes. "Cremains" is the current term, and I think it is ugly and snide. It's bone you get, mostly, bone meal, really, and the container (for Shekinah, a plastic bag inside a Tifffany-blue cardboard box, for Shadow a bag in a pretty metal box rather like my tea tin), is heavy for its size. I'd paid an extra fee to ensure that the ashes I received would be those of my dog and none other, and there were little certificates with the boxes testifying to that. I don't believe them, though.
It's taking a long long time to recover from losing those dogs. I still wish I had sniffed the top of Shekinah's sweet-smelling head one more time, and buried my face in Shadow's fur. My hands were too empty too soon. My tactile sensory body still yearns for those final hands-on benedictions that it did not have. Instead, I kept, for far too long, the old blankets they slept on. Not the same thing at all. This long night with Bobby's body in the house is part of not making that mistake again, of finding a different way.