Memento Mori
As the coffee drips, my hand reaches for the cups and bowls in the dish rack to begin putting them away. The soft shuffles of movement echo from the bedroom, so it is safe to rattle a bit in the kitchen. As I clear away the top layer, I reach for a collection of small plastic plates that were, I think, purchased as party supplies. Their bright faces have just finished blossoming all around the house, appearing on the floor of almost every room. Each plate bore its own particular mix of soft foods offered, desperately, to our elderly, and now dying, cat. We knew she was elderly because she had lost her rounded middle-aged shape and the skeleton that underlies us all revealed itself. We knew she was dying because the vet told us so. A constant in our lives wasn’t, not because she ever stopped being herself, which had always added to her constancy. We struggled with what we knew and what we saw, the cat she remained. In our struggle, we made offerings to the gods of aging and death and disease in hopes of placating them, of the small being in our house suddenly rediscovering her appetite and additional life. Sometimes she ate a bit, but mostly she took a few licks and shakily pushed off. The food stayed, crusting on the plate as hours rolled into a day. Eventually we gleaned the plates from around the house, cleaned them, and fitted them in the dish rack for a return to the party supply cabinet. But I am not ready to put this memory away, and so while I put some of the plates on a shelf, I leave one in the dish rack. This one, this one is for the calico. It will stay here, I think, for a while.
