Sorry to say... (Patreon)

Pardon the extended silence here. Not exactly what you're paying for. Apologies.

In addition to the usual COVID-19 related "life is terrible," "hope I can hug my dad again before he dies" sluggishness, I was derailed last weekend by final grading for my five classes for the spring term. I have also been trying to be offline and more present with my wife because she's going through some hard times. Her mom is terminally ill and has taken a precipitous slide. (This would be sad under any circumstances, but is complicated because she and my wife have had an extremely difficult relationship, to put it lightly.) 

Also, our beautiful, funny, wise, and all-round perfect 12-year-old cat Neko (my wife's specially bonded friend, although we are close too) is dying of intestinal cancer. We are keeping her comfortable, but it is a matter of days, and so we are spending as much time with her as possible.

Some of you, no doubt, aren't cat people. Nothing wrong with that. Dogs are good. But here's the thing. Most of the cats Jen and I have had have been Siamese or Siamese mixes. And they are a weird breed. A lot of them don't really know how to "cat." My cat Boonmee follows me around, begging for table scraps, and actually wags his tail. He acts like a puppy. Our cat Lemieux from a few years back could jump, but never landed on his feet, and when he was threatened, he froze like a possum instead of running. Decades of inbreeding has yielded spotty results.

Neko is a garden-variety brown tabby. But she has been the center of the cat family because she understands cat behaviors, exhibits appropriate cat / human bonding, and aside from chewing on books on the lower shelves when she was a kitten (she had a special taste for Heidegger), has never caused any trouble. She has always been the "adult in the room." And so losing her is hard. But we are glad to have the time we do. (And yes, during a time when thousands are dying around the world, it does seem strange and privileged and tone-deaf to mourn for an animal, which is just another facet of these horrible times we're living in.)

One of my all-time favorite movies is Earth, the Soviet silent by Alexander Dovzhenko. It has a politically complicated past, as do most films from that era. But it also features one of the most poignant, untroubled death scenes the cinema has ever produced. An old peasant is preparing to pass away, surrounded by friends. He eats a last ripe pear, and then slowly drifts away. His friend, holding back tears, remarks, "he liked pears." The simplest, most mundane of memories from a life spent in the service of the soil, the earth to which this man will now return.

Neko loves Wheat Thins. It's a treat we've always shared together (whether I wanted to or not), and that I'll never enjoy without thinking of her.