Cat shadows...

When my mother was hours from dying, I sat by her bedside. She was unconscious by then, slipping between one world and another, fully consumed by cancer. I remember only one light was on then, so the shadows on the walls loomed huge, and black, in stark knifed out shapes. And I remember that her two cats played on the pillow next to her, and in the next room the hospice nurses laughed softly at something. And I thought, Why not? Meaning why shouldn't her small cats play? Why shouldn't the nurses share a smile? Life goes on heedlessly, despite us.

And now, sitting with my little cat, Rita, I think that death is the same for us all. Like my mother, Rita slides between the two worlds, and stares at something only she can see. It's a hard business, this dying, and there's work to be done...work that only the dying know. There's not much for the living to do, except to be respectful.

Death, as Whitman said, serenely arriving, arriving...delicate death. But for me, death is a clown, gamboling right before our very eyes, performing his ultimate magic trick: Now you see her, now you don't.

At a Zen lecture I attended, a Buddhist abbot asked why no one had questions about death. As soon as he said that, everyone sat up, listening avidly. Why should death be any different from life? asked the abbot.

I'll have to take his word for it. I hope there's humor after death, and triviality, and love. But mostly I hope there's recognition.

I hope.