⚱︎ Dead Friends ⚱︎

Trip over a box enough times and eventually you will have two choices: toss it down the garbage chute or unpack it. So you decide to pull the little urns out and see if they spark joy, or in this case, brief melancholy touched with bemusement that the six-pound cat’s tin of ashes is twice the size of the heftier dog’s. You try not to think about why you have saved these things, moved with them over the years. You don’t even let yourself acknowledge that this past August you said no thanks to a portion of your newly dead father’s remains.

            So now unpacked, finally, again, what do you do with all these containers of bone dust, your dead animal friends? You find a tall shelf with a small clearing of space and shove them up there. Far enough back so no one immediately thinks to ask what they are. Not that anyone comes over these days, anyway.

            And then you pack the family, your bags and bins and pies and go to the mountains for a Thanksgiving in a tiny house around a tiny table filled with too much food. You watch your son eat turkey off the floor pretending to be a cat and you think, This is how everything should always be. You even go so far as to let yourself hope that everything might be okay.

            The eventual return to the city: the long traffic-clogged drive chasing recalculated routes, a pizza-high three-year-old yammering away from the back seat. And of course no parking on the block, so you drag the kid and ten suitcases upstairs while the husband drives around looking for a spot. You are exhausted, bone-tired, just ready for a hot shower and sleep, and there in the corner of your son’s room, the cat.

            Curled in her bed, but not quite, her head hanging over the edge…it’s enough. You’ve seen this sort of death before. You hustle the bed, the body, from the room, son tottering after asking what’s going on and you lock your newly dead cat in your bedroom and try very hard to pretend that everything is fine until your husband gets back from parking the fucking car.

            But everything isn’t fine, is it?

            The kid knows even without telling him. He races manically from room to room, screeching the tires of his toy truck, bouncing with the madness of five hours in a car seat and now home, and mom is perched on the edge of the couch, clutching a seltzer can, sniffling, and wondering why the fuck now?

            Your son finally asks where the cat is and you say she’s not here anymore, which is a lie but also not. But you can tell he is wondering what this means because he saw her in his room, he almost put his hand on her stiffening tail. So you revise and say she’s gone, that her body stopped working, that she died. He accepts this for the moment and you are grateful even though you know he will ask again, and again. And it will be your job to explain, as you add the new tin to the shelf, that this is what happens. This is what life is. And that it’s okay if he doesn’t like where any of this is going.

            Because nobody does.