Where are YOU, Bert? I know where I buried your body in the earth, wrapped in an Opthēan vestment, a few hours after your death around 4:30 a.m., on Wednesday, January 5th, 2022. But YOU were no longer in that body, and it is YOU I so profoundly love and miss.
I crave your on-your-own-terms, affectionate, soft, quiet, alert, sherbet-orange-and-cream, constant furry presence.
We first encountered each other after my veterinarian friend, Elaine Chambers, called to say she had treated a young male Maine Coon who had been wounded while challenging a Doberman Pincer for his food. She wanted to find the right home for this assertive cat and thought we were ideally suited. I met her in the kennel area of the P.V. pet clinic, where she pointed you out. You were calmly grooming your barely mature, but burly bobcat-like self while regally enthroned atop the dog cages, calmly disregarding the raucous displays of canine frustration swirling inches beneath you. I was instantly drawn to your unflappable composure, attitude, and fearless spirit.
For two decades afterward, you constantly awed me by engaging life head-on with inspiring curiosity, persistence, and courage. During the latter half of your life, even total blindness did not diminish your character, vitality, or bold bearing in any way. After your fierce golden eyes had been removed due to melanoma, you summoned up a mysterious, alternate form of vision that somehow gave you an even keener means for accurately “seeing” everything in the world around you.
Every day, I recall and celebrate the love and comfort we gave each other as we shared our daily lives during the all-too-brief twenty-plus years of our partnership.
I long ago began expecting you to always be somewhere nearby, monitoring Kyle and me from some cat-tactical vantage point—our trusted, vigilant, and occasionally napping guardian.
You are with me now because I am keeping you and your character alive in my heart, thoughts, and imagination. Your being and existence go on with and within me. I have made it my sacred responsibility and discipline to keep YOU present in this world, and I will do so until the last moment of my existence.
If the magical thinkers turn out to be right, and life does go on beyond death, look for me, Bertie. I will be looking for you, and we will find each other.
But based on my experience, critical thinking, and science, I accept the evidence that our being is contingent and temporary, confined to the physical terms of the cosmos. I will honor you by resolutely stepping into the mystery of the entropic void into which YOU disappeared like a meteoric campfire spark soaring magnificently into the night sky—only to vanish in the black, silent nothingness. I draw strength from your bright example of energy and persistence, and I will strive to engage life and death as courageously, nobly, and receptively as YOU.
For now, I will take comfort in the anamnesis of the softness of your face and chin; your chest and warm, round belly; the moist coolness of your nose; the resonant rumble of your purr; and the restrained power of your great paws, softly feeling my hands and face as if you were reading braille.
I celebrate the extraordinary character with which you lived and all the gifts you were—and continue to be—for me.
I deeply loved and respected you as my example of bold engagement with life, and now I love and respect you as my guide for facing and embracing aging and death.
For as long as I have consciousness, I will love and honor you and your Maine Coon ways with the whole of my being. I will maintain the hope that somewhere, somehow, beyond memories and dreams, I will once again hear your Murrreep, delight at the sight of YOU trotting toward me, and exult in the joy of scooping you up, holding you close, and sharing a tender Eskimo kiss with YOU.
Should this hope go unfulfilled—should I never again get to physically see or touch YOU, Buddy—I expect I will never re-experience the crackling, static-electric connection with the squirming-to-get-free wonder and mystery of life itself, as I so often did with YOU.
Wherever YOU have gone in spacetime, Big Cat, I hope YOU have found your special place, where you are bathed in the warm radiance of a nearby star, vigilantly monitoring the cosmic expanse, and catching an occasional nap in endless comfort and peace.
Above all, I hope YOU somehow know how much I love and miss YOU, and that, as long as I have will and agency, I will never, ever stop looking for YOU.
I love YOU, Bert.