I heard all the right words coming out of my mouth as I stood in the vet's office this morning, yet it was as if I were off to the side of myself watching the play unfold yet again, time and again.  My vet is a little person - I believe that's the correct term - but her heart is clearly infinite.  So we stood there looking at one another across the exam table, while one of our eldest cats, TK ("Tiny Kitten") lay between us, his fate in our hands, his lifeforce ebbing.

For a moment, it was 13 years ago.  I had gone to the convenience store one night and heard a tiny kitten mewing, lost.  Took some doing and chasing the little fellow around the parking lot which adjoined to a very busy road, but eventually he cornered himself, and I scooped him up and brought him home.  Just a little runt of a thing.  Eyes still blue.  And pissed as hell to be caught, because obviously someone had failed to inform me he was the master of his fate, the guardian of his own destiny.  So that night, I sat on the bathroom floor showing him his food, water and litter box (it offended him that I should think he would need to be shown at all), and I told him with a little chuckle that he had allowed me to catch him because it's his destiny to live with us... and that seemed to calm him down.  Even got him to purr just a little.

By the next morning, his eyes had turned green.  Normally a gradual process in kittens, the change from newborn-blue to adult-green literally occurred over night - probably as a result of the trauma of being captured, a vet later postulated, even going so far as to say, "You brought him into this world kicking & screaming."  Even then, it had seemed like something a sorcerer would have said, a reference to shifting the willful kitten's assemblage point.

Time went by, and TK integrated into the house with the other critters and became the comedian of the bunch.  About 18 months ago, he was diagnosed with diabetes, but once we got his insulin stabilized, it didn't seem to bother him much.  He could still sneak out the door between one's feet like an unseen ghost, but was content to spend most of his time sitting on the windowsill twitching his tail at jackrabbits and garden squirrels.

All of these memories played out like a flashfire on the hologram of my thoughts as I was standing in the vet's office, wondering how his life had come full circle so quickly.  He had seemed quite his usual self when we went to bed last night, but this morning it was obvious something was seriously, fatally wrong.  No point recounting the details, but suffice it to say the vet speculated a brain tumor or some type of severe trauma.  Since trauma was virtually impossible, being an indoor cat, the reality of a malignant brain tumor began to weave itself into the molecular structure of Existence as I stood off to the side in a state of emotional detachment, questioning how an animal who was healthy yesterday could be literally dying in my arms less than 24 hours later.  Knowing the answer didn't make it any easier to accept.

Life is fragile.   And there are few answers as to the hows and whys of it all. It just is.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  No guarantees for any of us.  You.  Me.  TK.  Ask the dinosaurs.

By the time I got home from the vet, I was in a peculiar state.  I could sit in the silence of my shady sanctuary and cry... but for whom?  TK has gone to the garden beneath a pile of earth and stones, but that is no longer TK.  I could hold my emotions in check... but for whom?  No one around but me at that moment, plus the 2 weenie dogs and TK's daughter - my sweet China - who is almost a literaly photocopy of her father.  Like a ghost in the shade of a sapling poplar.

So I sat on the doorstep for awhile, gazing out at the huge cactus blossom which opened up overnight.  It, too, is fragile, blooming for less than 24 hours.  A transient thing of beauty to be appreciated and experienced for the time it is here.  No different, really, than anything else, including TK.  Bees buzzed at the flower's center, so heavily laden with pollen they were like heavy bombers hanging in the air.  Zero was enthusiastically digging at a squirrel hole, giving me space to grieve.

And I felt a soft, gentle licking at my toes.  Looked down to find Morgan (Wendy's Weenie) sitting at my feet, looking up at me with bright brown eyes that seemed quite wise in that moment.  Without waiting to be asked, he simply climbed up into my lap and snuggled against my chest - a sun-warmed, fuzzy, living presence in my arms, such a contrast to the lifeless body I had just consigned to the dirt in the little pet cemetery.  Though Morgan is normally off chasing squirrels and exploring with Zero, it was as if he paused in his journey to offer comfort and even amusement in the midst of so much pain.  Like TK, he is a comedian most of the time, but for that moment, he had become a somber sorcerer, a wise old man who is frolicking in a weenie dog suit for the time being.

"Life goes on," he told me as surely as if he had spoken out loud.  And for a timeless instant, the full meaning of those words stretched beyond the sphere of my being and into the infinite.  Life goes on.  Within the hologram, TK is "recorded" and exists for all of time.  Beyond the hologram, we become as we Will.  Zero sleeps in my lap now, Morgan on the royal purple pillow on the couch, and TK dreams in the shadows of the chapparals.

Life goes on.

*****

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