Wednesday was a day of convergences.
Rose is a food-driven cat. When I arrived home Tuesday afternoon she was moving slowly and showed no interest in eating. I checked the litter box for small pee balls, indicating a possible UTI, but there were none. I called the vet clinic and had her there within five minutes. Her blood work-up showed signs of renal dysfunction. She had fluids injected subcutaneously and we came home. Her appetite returned. She ate and went directly upstairs and curled up on our bed.
Nick never left Rose's side until the morning. He curled up at the foot of the bed and looked at her with worried, adoring eyes. Yes, a cat can do that. For three years she has slapped him and tumbled him and demanded that he yield his spot to her, and as a result he is devoted to her.
Wednesday morning I dropped Rose at the clinic so they could collect a urine sample from her. My heart was full as I drove to work because my thoughts were six hundred miles away with my family in Tennessee. It was the day of the funeral for Great Aunt Zilpha, the gentle and quiet one hundred year old Rock of Gibraltar for several generations of Sharps and Darks. For years I have been ready to jump when the call came, and she endured, and when the call came I could not find a way.
I knew I would be listening to Shakespeare all day. My students had memorized Hamlet's meditation on existence. Though they are not one hundred, they spoke with understanding. Aunt Zilpha's answer to the question was emphatically "To be" and she gave that answer every day of her life. I thought of the time ten years ago when she stood next to a portrait of her parents and told me about them and their general store, and about her childhood in the village where she lived one hundred years, as if it were not so long ago, when it had been eighty years. I wanted to be one of the crowd that honored her on Wednesday.
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