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| Plata |
My high
school friend Lee Lytton III died a few days ago. He was 74. I am 75. This has
been happening a lot so I have been thinking about death and the lesser importance
of what I used to think was important.
Today I
became depressed because I could not find a Fuji storage card that I used in
January 2016 to photograph former dancer Nina Davies who was back from England
to visit her parents. I took some very
rapid portraits of her with the burst capabilities of my Fuji. Davies was going
to write about her obsession about the music that somehow is there between
notes. The idea that my portraits would not be intended but somehow shot in
between would illustrate her essay. That never happened and I gave up nagging
her.
There is now a finality in those lost exposures.
While
looking for those shots I found this one of my former little and most beautiful
female cat, Plata. She liked the top of the fridge because of the pump that dispersed
hot air above.
We moved to
our present location in late January 20016. Plata became sick and died in
December 2015.
When I told
my granddaughter Lauren about this I could tell that she knew that I was going
to bury her in the little garden of our new house. This I did.
When my
father died in the mid-60s I never saw him dead. I have almost no recollection
of the funeral or if I was the only person there. Of my mother it is different.
My
Rosemary and I watched her expel her last breath of air on her bed. She was
living with us in our house in Arboledas, Estado de Mexico. Rosemary does not
remember but I do. A doctor came, the only one we could find. He was a
veterinarian. He looked at my mother and then told me in as kind a voice as he
could muster, “Está muertita.” The diminutive little-dead-one has a sound that almost lessened the
shock for me.
By my count
we have had 8 cats that died in the years we have been in Vancouver. One of
them Cigarra we never found. Perhaps she was taken by a Coyote from VanDusen.
The other cats I buried in our garden and somehow broke two spades doing it.
Luckily Rosemary never saw my white female Polilla. She was eviscerated by a
Raccoon and she was not a pretty sight.
Of Mosca,
Rosemary’s black cat, I left him and Rosemary on the bed on my way to some job.
They were watching Vertigo. When I returned I heard Rosemary scream, “Mosca has
not moved. I think he is dead.” He was and probably died of some heart seizure.
Before
Plata the sorriest death was our Toby. I had to take him to be put down because
he was old and very sick. At Cats Only I was given a shoe box. Inside was Toby
wrapped in a little towel. I buried him in the garden.
Now Plata
is the one that will induce insomnia tonight after having found her photograph. She was very sick and
shivering one night. We put her by the heat register in the kitchen. A few
hours later she was dead. Rigor mortis can be shocking. The flexibility and grace of a cat is its identity.
The death
of a father and of a mother is an experience we all have to go through before
we consciously, or not, meet our own death.
But the
idea of picking up a dead animal that you loved and then to place her in a hole
in the ground is a wrenching experience that makes death that much more alive
(if I can use that word).
Casi-Casi
is getting old and Rosemary fears for him. He stares at us and sleeps between
us in our marital bed (so much for that marital bed).
I keep
wondering if he is aware of his identity of being a cat. I wonder if he can
think. Is he frustrated that he cannot talk to us?
Somehow the
death of a pet is more in your face. Does it lessen the impact of thinking that
one’s days are numbered?