Eulogy for Spike - The Dance of Lives

This post started life as a eulogy to a cat. You see, Wednesday night my cat died. His name was Spike.I buried him on Thursday.

Talamar

Spike’s death ends 25 years with his family. When Lady Glynis and I got married, she had a cat - Talamar. Talamar was a tortoise shell. Talamar refused to stay in the house. Shut the door. Put screens on the windows. It didn’t matter. Open the door a crack and she was gone. Leave a window open, and she would use her claws to rip the screen to get out. We may see her in a couple of hours, bringing a bird to the porch. Or we may not see her for a couple of days, coming back home with a smirk on her face and a demand to be let in so she could get a bite to eat and a drink before laying down for a nap.

Talamar liked to have kittens. As long as she had a litter of kittens around, she was fairly sedentary. She would stick around home, making sure they were fed, groomed, and well trained in the way of the cat. She knew when they were old enough to be weaned, though, and immediately returned to her alley cat ways. As a result, we were never able to get her to the vet to be spayed. As a further result, we populated half the county with kittens.

Talamar died young. I think she was around ten. The major cause was she just had too many babies. It wore her out before her time. Talamar, or Mars as we usually called her, is buried in the back yard.

Talamar’s kittens were generally healthy. Though not a thoroughbred, she had proven hunting skills and a strong maternal instinct, so we never had trouble giving her kittens away. But we kept a couple.

Harvey

The first of these was Harvey. Depending on the day of the week, we named him after the six foot puka in the shape of a rabbit in the Jimmy Stuart movie of the same name, or we named him after my older brother. My older brother was partial to dogs, hunting dogs in particular. He, like my father, was a coon hunter. I liked to tease him about naming a cat after him. I also like to think it amused him, because sometimes I would see the slightest smile on his face when I talked about it.

We had Harvey his entire life. We used to call him the old man, even when he was young, because he helped raise our kids. He was always good with them, never doing any serious harm, though if they acted inappropriately with him, he wasn’t above slapping them with a paw to let them know he wasn’t a toy.

Harvey liked to put the kids to bed. Even if we lost track of the time because we were playing or watching a movie, Harvey didn’t. At bedtime he would run upstairs to the bedrooms. If we didn’t follow fairly quickly, he would come back downstairs, meow, then go back upstairs. He did this until we noticed the time and put the kids to bed, or, when they were older, send them up to bed. He would then stay in bed with them, especially our oldest son, who was his human, until they were asleep. Then he’d come back downstairs and do his catly things, mostly getting pet and lying around, until he was ready for bed. Then back up he went, where he slept with the boys through the night.

Harvey did this for each of our children until they reached the point that he thought they were old enough to take care of themselves. He was never the hunter or outdoorsman that his mother was, but was content to keep the fort in order. After our oldest boy left home, he started going downhill. He passed away last year at the age of sixteen. He, too, is buried in the back yard.

Spike

The second kitten we kept was Spike. Spike came from a litter about a year after Harvey’s litter. Spike was unusual for one of Mars’ kittens. He wasn’t healthy. In fact he was downright sickly, a runt. We kept him because we didn’t think he would live, and felt guilty at the thought of giving him to someone only to have him die on them in a few weeks.

That’s where the name Spike comes in. You’ve heard of the use of names in magic. Knowing the true name of something is supposed to give you the power to control it. Using a name on something imbues that thing with the power implied in the name. This is one use of mantra in yoga. We decided this sickly kitten needed all the help he could get in this world, so we named him Spike.

In most senses of the word, Spike didn’t fit his name. His idea of a tough afternoon was walking to his food bowl or having to find someone else to pet him if the person he was with went somewhere. He never got obese, but his middle-age spread developed awfully early. And he did live. Coincidence? Probably. But….

Spike’s human was our youngest son. If you’ve not spend much time with cats, they do have definite likes and dislikes. They also develop attachments to certain individuals based on criteria only they know, the same as you or I. Spike loved everyone. If you pet him, he would sit with you all day. But he was especially attached to our youngest boy. If he was around, that was the lap he wanted to be in. His was the bed he wanted to sleep in.

Like I said, though, Spike was easy going. He would let you do anything to him. Once, our daughter got hold of some vaseline when she was little. If you’re a parent, you learn to listen for silence as much as you listen for noise. Though our daughter was playing in her room, it was awfully quiet. We checked, and found a totally waterproof Spike, as she had coated him with half the jar of vaseline. He saw us and said (in cat) Help me. He never struggled. He never tried to get away. He just put up with it until he saw someone who could help him. Our daughter still hears about this.

After the kids grew up, Spike was still content as long as Harvey was around. The two had been together their entire lives, and he knew he always had a friend. After Harvey passed away, Spike started slowing down. A few weeks ago I had a dream that Harvey had come back and was waiting for Spike. I didn’t think it would be long then. Last week Spike disappeared. We thought he had gotten out, because we searched the house, room by room, level by level, calling his name and looking in all his favorite nooks and padded spots. We never saw him. We never heard him, until Wednesday when I was putting clothes in the laundry and he started to meow. We finally found him under the basement steps on a stack of boxes, located in such a way we would never have seen him. We cleaned him up. We fed and watered him. We sat with him through the day. It was like he decided it was time to go, but wanted to see us once more before he did. That night he passed away at the age of fifteen. Spike is now buried in the back yard beside his brother.

We’re All Cat Blogging

As I said in the beginning, this started as an eulogy for Spike, Harvey, and Talamar. After 25 years with a family, it’s hard to let them go. But I do let them go, because they still remain.

I have to admit I made some remarks to myself about writing a cat blog in the most literal sense of the word. Cat blog has become a shorthand term for a personal blog, the online diary that this format was first used to denote.

In Blogging and Personal Development I talked about the personal history aspect of blogging. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Flow, discussed the difference between instrumental and expressive skills. Instrumental skills are meant to cope with our physical, social, and economic environment. Expressive skills, on the other hand, are those we use to externalize our subjective experience. These are the skills of art and communication for the sake of communication.

In most cases, instrumental and expressive skills are the same, only the end in view differs. Many of the instrumental bloggers - the business bloggers and the so-called probloggers, as well as traditional media types, look askance at the cat blog. They appear to believe cat blogging isn’t as important as what they do. If you’re not making money at it, if you’re not providing value, if you’re not a talking head with a presumption of expertise regarding whatever you are spouting off about, you’re just being exhibitionist and saying look at me, look at me.

With all due respect to those who feel this way, this is missing the point. You may be selling something or expressing your informed (or not so informed) opinion of the events of the day. You may be passing on the wisdom of your years or tagging a subway train. You may be writing a cantata or cooking a meal. One aspect of what you are doing is cat blogging. At the end of the day, each act we do is a reaching out to touch the world and say I am here. I made a difference.

Sometimes people listen to the sounds of life and hear a cacophony, a bickering, battling clash of attitudes, goals, philosophies, and purposes. In truth, they haven’t learned to listen. Back away. Sit still. And just listen. There is a dialectic, a dance, whose meaning is as much in the silences as the steps. And in those silences you can hear the voice of each man, woman, child, and animal who has ever lived, for their lives have led to where we are now.

Be still. Listen. You may hear their voices.

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