Start From Beginning
This morning at 9:30 I am awakened by a loud knocking on the back door. I can hear it from my room upstairs. It continues for a while and then I hear Dre get out of her room and go and answer it. A man with a high-pitched and tremulous voice is asking her for the key. It is Mr. Nussbaum, who she has never before met, and he is convinced that he needs to be here in order to get a key. She is patiently (considering the circumstances) explaining to him that she doesn't have the key he is looking for.
"Is this 123 Somewhere in Winnipeg Lane?" he asks, desperation tinging his voice.
Yes, she says, but I don't have anything for you.
"But I phoned!" is his reply.
Finally after a bit more of this Mr. Nussbaum apologizes for waking her and walks away, dejected.
What seems like minutes later although it is actually more like an hour, I am awakened again, this time by a cat's yowl that sounds like the poor creature is in heat. In my groggy state I am thinking of a monologue by T.J. Dawes that I heard a few days ago about a cat in heat, and I linger for a while on the punchline, which was "will somebody please fuck that cat?" before a second insistent knocking comes at the door. The return of Mr. Nussbaum?
I hear Dre getting up to answer it and am bracing myself to hear another exchange with the mysterious Mr. Nussbaum, but instead I hear this:
"I'm sorry, but I just ran over your cat."
Everybody in the whole house wakes up at this. The three of us are dressed and downstairs in minutes, in time to see Dre coming inside, cradling Benny who is wrapped up in a blanket. Her boyfriend Shaw, who stayed the night, is standing beside her. Nobody says anything. She is getting her shoes and purse so she can drive him to the pet hospital, and in another minute she and Des are on their way. As they pull out of sight, Shaw tells us that he's absolutely sure that Benny is dead, but he thought it would be better not to say anything.
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Ten minutes later they are back,carrying the swaddled body of Benny, which is still warm. There is some horrible awkward silence as everyone tries to think of what to say. Dre has a very far-away look on her face, sort of shell-shocked. Distressed does not begin to cover it. She carries him out on to the back porch and we all follow. In the course of sitting around lamely trying to offer comfort we decide that maybe it would be useful to make some breakfast, so three of us take off for the Safeway and return with food some twenty minutes later.
In our absence Dre has begun assembling significant items in her backyard for whatever ritual she is planning. She has begun digging a hole next to the bed of bachelor buttons. She has positioned various icons and artifacts at the four cardinal points of the compass and consulted several shamanic tomes for an appropriate eulogy. We are silent as she performs a brief ceremony and then puts Benny in the hole she dug and covers him with dirt.
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Dre continues performing various improvised rituals throughout the afternoon. She confides to me at one point that a lot of people probably would think she's crazy, what with talking to invisible spirits and all. I don't say anything. I can tell that she assumes from our previous conversations that I am one of those people.
And I am, but also I'm not. That is to say, I don't really know what really constitutes sane in the face of random death. How would a sane person react? Would a sane person say "Oh well. It's just a cat."?
I've always thought that it's easy to be facile and dismissive of ritual and religion until you are faced with some situation of personal loss yourself. It's the whole "there are no atheists in a foxhole" thing again. What are you going to do when it's your cat, or your mother, Mr. Reasonable? This is the question I ask myself. You gonna read a little essay by Noam Chomsky at the service? Descartes maybe?
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Later on, we are reconstructing what happened. When Mr. Nussbaum knocked on the door, it woke up Benny, who was sleeping at the foot of my bed, and he went outside to be let out. Dre let him out and went back to bed. And that was the last time any of us saw him alive.
In reflection, we can't help but decide that in the future if Mr. Nussbaum comes a-knockin', it might be best not to open the door for him.
It's something we all go through eventually, and regardless of our view about how the universe operates, we each find our own way of coping with the loss.
The thing that's important to remember is that Reason and Emotion co-exist side-by-side, and while some of us lean more toward one end of the spectrum than the other, unless we're raging psychopaths we're never completely devoid of the other quality. So, when we confront things that simply can't be handled by our Reasonable side, the Emotional side is there to kick in when appropriate.
Posted by: KING COMTE I at August 12, 2004 01:10 PM