Feline Nirvana

I lay on my side upon the woven carpet in the living room of my two-leggers’ home in the gated community we all inhabited in the Pacific Northwest. My breast heaved and I expelled breaths stertorously. I was in pain. Felix, the alpha male of the household, regarded me uneasily. He wasn’t comfortable around the sick. He didn’t even like my kind, truth be told. I had been diagnosed with feline leukemia only weeks ago.

Marjorie, on the other hand, fawned all over me, coaxing me to take this elixir or that, rubbing my furry belly with gentle fingers or stroking my fur with the slicker brush. It did little to salve my distress, however; I knew that the end of the 7th of the 9 lives accorded all cats was at hand.

I had no regrets. I had lived with the Handlebergers for almost 14 years, since I had been reborn a kitten following the end of my 6th iteration. That life had expired after just 4 years: I was run over by a car on HY 70 outside St. Louis, MO. After the road crew had scooped my bloody carcass off the pavement and into the bed of the truck of the Highway Dept., I had gone through the “magic” of transformation once more.

But for a select few wiccans, shamans and other mystics, all two-leggers remain blithely unaware that cats do in fact enjoy nine lives, in rapid succession, before finally reaching feline nirvana. Even cats don’t know what happens after that, for no one had ever returned to spread the glad tidings–or otherwise.

In the beginning…

“Ooh, isn’t she a sweet little thing?” gushed Aubrey, my first “owner,” so-called. Aubrey wasn’t the brightest bulb in the lamp; she couldn’t tell a girl cat from a boy cat, which is what I was–and still am.

“This is a male, Honey,” said Aubrey’s father, the vet. “He gets a little older, we’ll neuter him.”

At the time, in my overweening youth and ignorance, I didn’t know what that meant. Looking back, I see that going under the knife is all for the best. I’ve had the operation each time and been the better for it. Once, I lived for almost a year before the surgery, and was very unhappy: tense, oversexed, uptight. I got into fights incessantly, and all over a little pussy. What a waste of energy. That first time I had the operation at 3 months; it was October of 1964–the St. Louis Cardinals had just won the World Series. The other neighborhood cats soon lost interest in me, as both a companion and a competitor.

Doc Fenster, Aubrey’s father, had rescued me from a litter of 7; my brothers and sisters had been consigned to death by drowning at the hands of a farm hand assigned the dastardly task. At the last moment, Aubrey, visiting the farm with her father, interceded on my behalf and I was saved. Yay!

“You’ll have to take care of him, Honey,” the Doc told Aubrey. She readily agreed. After a few months of home care and following the surgery, I became the office cat and remained at the veterinary full time. It wasn’t a bad life: fawning animal lovers, interesting companions, plenty of treats. I became very proprietary and checked out every creature, four-legged and otherwise, who crossed the threshold. Aubrey had christened me Mr. Whiskers. Yeah, very original.

Aubrey, 6-years-old, was very attentive for the first five or six years, but eventually she entered junior high school and began running with a gang of friends and then discovered boys. After that, I saw little of my personal two-legger.

“Aubrey,” inquired Doc often, “did you feed Whiskers?”

“Aw, Dad, I got cheerleader practice,” she’d say.

“Cat’s gotta eat,” said Doc.

“Can’t Rita do it?” whined Aubrey, naming the vet’s assistant who became my newest best friend.

And so it went.

When I turned eleven, I began to feel miserable. I mewled and cried and carried on until Doc ran some tests and discovered the awful truth: I had liver cancer. Since that problem was out of Doc’s purview, he had to get another vet to consult. The other doc decided that the operation, which would be expensive, probably wouldn’t work. It was decided not to do the surgery.

They thought I was oblivious to the prognosis, but not so. Cats are keenly aware of their mortality; they know when their number comes up. Doc told Aubrey the sad news and she was beside herself with grief. She stroked my fur and I nuzzled her hand, just to rub it in a little that she had been ignoring me. She lost it and sobbed bitterly. Touche! I thought.

“Isn’t there anything you can do, Dad?” she blubbered.

Doc explained that there wasn’t and that to delay my ultimate fate would make me needlessly suffer. Aubrey skipped cheerleader practice that day, which I marked as a personal triumph. After Aubrey and Rita had said their tearful goodbyes, Doc shot me up with a long needle. Already in pain, I didn’t even feel it.

“Goodbye, Mr. Whiskers,” whispered my two-leggers, as my soul arced across the universe to be born anew.

The transformation is a bit difficult to explain, inasmuch as I’m a cat and not a scientist or a poet. Deep, sweeping expanses and heady heights and star-filled skies and all the rest. In the end, you are without form and without substance and you’re in the hands of God or something and he’s stroking your fur and telling you it will be alright and not to be afraid. And you’re not. You’re confident and safe and secure. Content. Then this ethereal entity places what must be your soul in the womb of another mother cat and sometime later you are born anew. It’s really quite wonderful and magical.

Birth happens. Wet and magical and abrupt. Sometimes the mother goes crazy and begins devouring her kittens; sometimes it’s the jealous tom. If you make it through the first couple of weeks, you’re practically home free, because you’re cute and cuddly and virtually irresistable to two-leggers.

So now I found myself on the floor on the woven rug in the living room of the fancy home in the gated community, being watched closely by feckless Felix and magnificent Marjorie. I could tell that the end was near–we always know–and I further knew that just two more phases in my life were in the offing. I did a little mental arithmetic and calculated that my compartmentalized existence had spanned almost 60 years, not bad for a cat.

I looked forward to meeting God again, but dying was always a bit of a buzz kill. All I knew about the future for sure was that I would be reborn. In every previous incarnation I had been born in the West, though I knew some cats who’d done time in Egypt, Jerusalem, even China. I sighed.

“Ooh, Felix,” said Marjorie, “I think he’s in pain.”

I was.

“Should we take him to the vet and have him put down?” she asked.

Felix snorted. “$150 to euthanize and cremate? Too expensive. I’ll put a round in his skull and then bury him in the back yard.”

“How can you be so callous?” asked Marjorie?

That’s what I wanted to know.

“Huh!” said Felix. “Next time, we’ll get a dog!”

“You go to the devil,” said Marjorie venomously.

Felix withdrew.

Marjorie held me close, nuzzled me. “What can I do for you, Dreadlocks?” she asked softly.

I suppose a new name is out of the question?

Marjorie’s slender fingers kneaded the flesh on the back of my neck, just the way we cats like it, and she bent her head and gently kissed my fur. Just then, I felt the release once again, the breathless sensation of soaring at great heights over great distances. I heard Marjorie’s voice cry out and then I was back in the arms of God.

Here I go again.