A Third Death in the Family

And so, yet another death in 2024. This time it was our beloved cat, Cream.

Cream came to us as a rescue about 17 or 18 years ago. My son found her as a wisp of a calico kitten, abandoned and trapped in a construction site. Since that moment, Cream lived with us and became family.

It is so hard to articulate the depth of the loss. It is as though the tendrils of her soul wrapped around our hearts, and now those tendrils have been severed.

Earlier this year, our two deeply beloved dogs, Luna and Sally, both died. In September we acquired a new puppy, Otis, who is now five months old. Since Cream has been gone, Otis has been searching the house incessantly, checking out all her usual haunts. Watching him seek her is beyond heartbreaking. Even a five month old puppy understands that some energy, some other soul has gone missing.

Years ago we had a Great Pyrenees named China, along with another cat, Oreo. When China died, the cat cried for days, pacing the house and calling out to her. That too was heart-wrenching.

I believe with all my heart that all creatures, all our fellow earthlings, have a soul, and have their own essence. What happens to that soul upon their deaths is unknown to me; perhaps the tendrils of those souls intertwine with ours, and our duty is to remember.

Before the time of the ancient Romans, an older people called the Etruscans had a word that we know today only in Latin: saeculum. The literal translation relates to a century, but the actual meaning of the term refers to the span of time lived by one person, an expanse of time when something is in living memory. Every person, every thing, every event has its own saeculum. Some (myself included) believe in “witness trees” whose saeculum is far more than 100 years.

So silly as it might seem, both I and the cat have our own saecula. Cream’s was just under twenty years and mine continues. We share an overlap of being witnesses and having our lives interwoven.

Now those tendrils have been cut. But it is my duty, despite the immeasurable loss, to carry the splinters of them with me in memory for the duration of my life.