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 yearn for your on-your-own-terms, affectionate, alert, sherbet-orange-and-cream, constant presence.
We first met after a veterinarian friend called to say she had treated a young male Maine Coon who had been injured while taking food from a Doberman Pinzer. She wanted to find the right home for this assertive cat and considered us a perfect match. 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, burly, bobcat-like self while establishing your dominion over the clinic from your position atop the dog cages. You looked so regal in your serene indifference to the raucous displays of canine indignity swirling inches beneath you. I instantly bonded with you and your confidant panache.
For two decades afterward, you constantly awed me by engaging life with inspiring curiosity, drive, and courage. Even total blindness during the latter half of your life caused by ocular melanoma did not diminish your character, vitality, or bold bearing. After they removed your wizardly golden eyes, you developed a mysterious way of seeing that gave you the vision of a Tiresias.
Every day, I celebrate the love and comfort we gave each other as we shared our lives during our all-too-brief twenty years together.
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 here with me now because I keep you and your character alive in my heart, mind, and imagination. Your being and existence go on with and within me. I made it my sacred responsibility to keep YOU present in this world, and I will honor that vow until the last moment of my life.
If the magical thinkers are correct, and consciousness continues after death, look for me, Bertie. I will be looking for you, and we will find each other. But based on science, experience, and critical thinking, I believe that all life is conditional and temporary, subject to the laws of physics. When my inevitable death comes, I intend to honor you by stepping with determination into the mystery of the entropic void into which YOU disappeared like a bonfire spark soaring with orange brilliance high into the night sky—to vanish in the vast starry blackness. I drew strength from your example of of living with energy and persistence, and I will strive to engage death as courageously, nobly, and receptively as YOU did.
For now, I 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, ever so softly gliding over my hands and face as if you were reading braille.
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 again know 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 see or touch YOU—I question if I will ever re-experience the astonishing, 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, Buddy, I like to imagine YOU have finally found that perfect place, where you are basking in the sunny radiance of a nearby star, free from pain, hunger, and thirst, vigilantly guarding the cosmos, and catching an occasional nap in endless comfort, security, and peace.
But my deepest desire is that 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 Bertie — forever… however long that may be.