GRAVE MATTERS
A Widow Bit – April 5, 2009
By Mary Koch

I stood there on the riverbank, staring at the corpse, wondering what I should do next.       

            Great opening line for a Sam Spade-era mystery, eh? Only it was real, not fiction. I had just discovered the dead body of my cat, RC, and wondered, “What am I supposed to do about this?”

            Truth told, RC was never “my” cat. I’ve co-habited with many cats and spent many hundreds of dollars feeding and medicating them, but I’ve never owned a cat. I’ve never even gone out of my way to acquire a cat. They simply show up and stay.

            RC appeared on our patio one night the summer of 1997, a tiny white kitty with an extra toe on each front paw. She cried and cried until Russell, the caregiver who was responsible for my husband that night, could stand it no longer. He poured a saucer of milk, muttering, “Mary’s gonna kill for me this.”

            I didn’t, but I sarcastically named the new, full-time resident RC, for “Russell’s Cat.”

            Of course, RC was nobody’s cat but her own. She ate the food we provided, enjoyed shelter in our home, benefitted from veterinary care at our expense, and expressed nary a purr of gratitude.  Au contraire. Yowls of demand and complaint were frequent.

            On the evening in question, I was growing concerned because it had been nearly 24 hours since I’d heard her complain. I went exploring and found her by the river, kind of curled up, no sign of trauma, but very dead.

            If you live on a riverbank, you’re no stranger to death. Critters’ bodies wash up in various stages of putrefaction. Not pleasant, but a part of river reality. Generally, you find a way to shove the remains back into the current.

            I knew that would not suffice for RC. I called a friend for advice.

            “If it were my cat,” she said, “I’d dig a hole on the riverbank and bury her.”

            She asked if I wanted help. I didn’t want to admit that help was exactly what I wanted, so I declined her offer. I’d never dug a grave before. I remembered a friend whose children’s 4-H lamb had died on a bitterly cold night. Her husband was out of town; it was left to her to dig the grave.

            “Now I realize,” she later told me, “how the pioneers survived all those deaths of family members. By the time you dig that grave, you’ve worked your way through a lot of grief.”

            RC did not require a large grave. After I buried her, I vacuumed the cat hair off the rocking chair she’d commandeered as her own.

            I spent the rest of the evening rocking, reclaiming the chair while thanking RC for the years she spent with us. Her sheer orneriness had prompted much laughter in this household. All of us recognized a bit of ourselves in her.

            Death, even the death of a stray cat, diminishes but oddly enriches at the same time.