Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [17]
From behind me I heard, “Let me help you.”
It was the hippie.
“Huh?” I said.
“I’m a professional,” he said.
I wanted to say, “What? You’re a professional grave digger?” But, again, he was very helpful, so I didn’t.
He took the shovel from me and began attacking the ground with a jackhammer motion. His body type (lanky), level of tattooedness (high), and general speed of motion (spastic) called to mind Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He attacked my cat’s grave as though he were performing a lunatic encore at the Wiltern.
He handed me the shovel silently. I tried to place Gabby’s box into the hole. It didn’t quite fit. So I poked the shovel around the edges to create a few extra inches of room. From behind me, I heard, “Hey, Neal, you need a drink?”
“I’m cool,” I said.
“You need some bud?”
“Hell, yeah!” I said, and I started to dig faster. Gabby would have wanted me to get stoned at her funeral.
A few minutes later, I scooped the last shovelful of dirt onto my cat’s grave, and patted it down. Less than one hour before, she’d been alive. Now she was in a box in my backyard. Life went away that quickly. Man.
The smoke could wait. My family needed me now. Or I needed them. I went into the house where Elijah was watching an episode of Curious George on TiVo, sat down beside him on the couch, and immediately broke down sobbing.
Regina rushed me out of the room.
“Get a grip on yourself,” she said.
“How can I?” I said. “My kitty is dead!”
“You need to be strong for your son.”
“You fucking Protestants and your repressed emotion!”
“This has nothing to do with me being a Protestant. I just don’t want you upsetting Elijah.”
“Fair enough.”
A few minutes on the bed calmed me. Then we switched our focus. We were concerned, at first, that it would be tough to get Elijah through Gabby’s death. But he moved quickly through several odd stages of four-year-old grief.
1. Lying in bed at night, listing all the family members who are still alive.
2. Asking what Gabby is doing in heaven. Asking what a soul is when we tell him that only Gabby’s soul is in heaven.
3. Asking how Gabby can eat underground.
4. Pronouncing “We have a dead cat!” upon entering the schoolyard the day after Gabby’s death.
5. Less than a week later, asking if we can eat “Gabby stew” for dinner.
I think the kid will be fine.
As for me, I miss my little Gabby. She was a good companion in the days when I didn’t have permanent female company. She saw me through the writing of four books, the editing of another, and the composition of countless newspaper and magazine articles. She moved with me from Chicago to Philadelphia to Austin to Los Angeles. She also left little pools of barf everywhere and consistently tore holes in my clothing with her claws. Basically, she was a cat. But she was a sweet cat, and she was mine, and there’s a hole in my life without her, even though I now have to do a little less cleaning.
But I also feel like, in some ways, her death was my fault. They say you cut several years off a cat’s life when you let them go outside. So why did I let her, in a congested urban neighborhood? In some ways, I was still trying to make up for how I treated her after the “incident,” and to show that I still loved her in the pre-incident way. I now realize, and for some reason didn’t realize it then, that pets don’t really have memories. They respond to how they’re being treated at the moment, and that years of kindness and loyalty can erase a couple of nasty afternoons or weird, semiperverted nights. Yes, you should live every moment like it’s your last, and all that, but pets are around for even less time, and we should appreciate them fully before they’re gone.
Gabby used to sit on my laptop. Sometimes, I’d leave it open, and she’d sit on the keyboard and really screw things up for me. For eleven years, I made it a habit of running into my office and making sure my laptop