Find Light in Dark Times
Epitaph: Toes into the Light
Find Light in Dark Times gives you philosophical and spiritual tools to help you grow from losses of all kinds, including loss of pets. Here is a section from the Foreward on the loss of Toes, our family cat.
Early one morning I drove the blade of a shovel into the earth. Lifting up chunks of grass-covered turf, I dug until I had made an oval hole a foot deep on a grassy, oak-studded hillside. Then I carried the grey furred body of our cat named Toes, stiff with rigor mortis, from a stuffed chair in the bedroom to the hole and placed him gently inside. His green unseeing eyes were wide open.
We gave Toes a bright red velvet cloth to take with him into the grave. We dropped an acorn into the grave in case Toes returns as an oak tree, and a seashell, in case he comes back as a fish. Or maybe he’ll return as a spiritual leader. Toes was gentler, more peaceful, than any person or animal I have known. Maybe he won’t return at all.
I read him a brief farewell, stopping at every sentence to steady my quavering voice. Tears leapt from my eyes and sprinkled in a light rain over his body. His spirit moved with the trees, the sky, the land. In the rough-and-tumble cat world of claws and teeth and snarls, he retreated and chose gentleness instead. Toes used his claws mostly for kneading the lap of the person from whom he sought affection. After 15 years of life, his kidneys failed. During the last few days he ate nothing, drank nothing and urinated not a drop. His body dehydrated, growing lighter and lighter until he was reduced to grey fur hanging over cat bones.
The day before his death, he clambered out of the stuffed chair, pushed himself through the screen door and tried to walk down the driveway. His legs wobbled and he lurched from side to side. I carried him back to the chair and put my nose next to his, looking into his eyes. I told him he had a great cat spirit.
Later he seemed to forget his limbs had grown weak. In a sudden burst of his former strength, he reared himself up to standing and tried to jump down to the floor. When he landed, his legs splayed out and he collapsed. He lay still on the hardwood floor, his belly rising and falling slightly with his last few breaths, the life in him flickering, fainter and more fragile than the pilot light in the heater next to his chair.
In his prime, Toes mated with a grey tail-less cat named Fluffy to produce another grey cat named Benjy, who lost a front leg in a farmer’s trap. Fluffy and Benjy sometimes ganged up on Toes and made life rough for him.
When Fluffy and Benjy would come at him with teeth and claws bared, hissing, spoiling for a fight, Toes would turn his whiskers and retreat. He could have given lessons to Gandhi.
He climbed high on the rafters above a storage closet in the garage where chubby Fluffy and three-legged Benjy could not go. Toes was not a fighter.
Not that he lacked courage. Once he sniffed noses with a fox, the two of them poised in the dusk, curious about each other. They coexisted out there, Toes and a family of foxes, sharing the hill.
We gave him special attention, put his food on a table outdoors where he could dine without competition. When it rained, he ate on the washing machine in the garage. But even there, an aggressive possum frequently visited and chased Toes from his dish. The possum grew as large as a vacuum. Toes remained frail, but survived.
When we walked up the driveway, Toes would meet us halfway, weaving back and forth, escorting us to the top of the hill. He was a fine escort.
Gradually his self-esteem rose and he was able to go inside the house without slinking from room to room, crouching low like a hunted fugitive, keeping an eye out for Benjy and Fluffy. Instead he could hunker down over a bowl of half-and-half and keep his mind on the meal. At least most of the time.
When Benjy died, Toes seemed sad and lonely for a week; maybe he missed his antagonist. Fluffy died a few months later. For the last years of his life, Toes had the place to himself. He had outlived the bullies.
Every morning he would go out onto the south-facing hillside to let the sun’s first light soak into his fur. Now he has curled up one last time in this cozy earth hole I dug. We pulled dirt over his body with our hands. The moist soil smelled fresh. We tamped it down with our palms, pulling in more and more until the hole was filled. A worm wriggled out of the loose dirt. We placed flowers atop the grave.
Then we stood up.
An image came to mind—a large image of Toes resting at the bottom of his pocket on one side of the planet. I had a new and comforting sense about the rhythm of this vast sphere we depend on, which provides us enough Friskies or bread to allow us to meow and purr, to cry and dance and write for a few years. Then we all take our places at the bottom of a hole in the ground. If we’re lucky, living folks pull the dirt gently down to cover us with the earth’s blanket.
