Ebb and Flow

Death has always made sense to me as an inevitable part of life. When I say that, I mean death by natural causes. For example, I miss the two great-grandmothers I was lucky enough to know in my childhood, my father's grandmothers, but when they died, I understood that was just part of life and I remember thinking, they're old, that's what happens. It's supposed to. Of course, as I get older, their advanced ages (86 and 87) no longer seem that old to me.

I had a cat that lived into his twenties and even though he's been gone several years, I still miss him. His name was Ralph. In later years I took to calling him Ralph the Reiki Master. He knew when you were upset or unsettled and would come to calm you down, literally putting his paws on you. He was also a welcome cat, bounding out to meet any person who entered our home, and he never exhibited fear.

When he was younger, Ralph loved to leap from the floor to the top of an open door and then perch on his back paws and reach down the front of the door with his front paws. I wondered what on earth he was doing until one day I saw him doing the same thing to my aquarium and realized he'd been in training.

Ralph loved to ride on people's shoulders like a live mink stole, down to the shiny black fur. I remember once he startled a tall friend of mine by leaping unannounced to his shoulders from the floor. I always wondered whether Ralph was a cat who wished he could fly.

As he got older, he started getting thin and bony and then one day, lay down and said he was done. My partner called me and said I should come home from work because he wasn't going to last long. I came right home and Ralph died shortly after I came into the room, as though he'd been waiting for me to say one last goodbye and to ease my transition into a life without him. Oh, I cried. I missed him then and there are times today when I miss him so. I don't ever seem to wish that he were still alive, but rather that I could go back and revisit those days. And of course I do that in my memory, which ebbs and flows.

Several years have passed and we again have a really old cat. He's feral, so we don't know exactly how old he is, but he's been around our family almost 20 years and he's starting to get that old man cat look that Ralph had - bony and skinny. He's heading towards that point of ebb we all will hopefully reach in our lives. For now, Sky still has a lot of flow - he has a great and insistent appetite so I'm hopeful that he won't go soon, but when he's ready, I will be too. Perhaps Sky will join Ralph in the afterlife, he certainly will join him in the ebb and flow of my memory.