Whatever Befall

It’s after ten o’oclock at night, and my friend calls. We’re new friends, sharing carpooling duties for our daughters’ summer swim team in the mornings. Still, it’s a little late for a carpool phone call. She asks if I’m already in bed, and I laugh. Our friends, Sanders and Denise and their two children are staying with us, and our son has a friend staying the night. In the boys’ fifteen year-old enthusiasm, they’ve just challenged Denise and me to a game of euchre. So, I laugh, “We’re nowhere close to bed.”

“Michelle, I think I just hit your cat. Is your cat black?”

For years, I have laughed about knowing only two jokes. One joke starts with a man running over a cat out in the country, knocking at the door of the nearby farmhouse, and saying, “Ma’am I think I just ran over your cat.” For a split second, the joke comes to mind. I quickly push it away, lower my voice, and step outside.

“Yes, she’s black.”

“Michelle, I’m so sorry.”

I’m thinking there’s another black cat in the neighborhood. Thinking that if it’s ours, we can make an emergency vet run. A woman stands at the end of our driveway with her small dog on a leash. “Is it your cat?” she asks.

“I think so. Where is she? Is she still alive?”

“No, definitely not, I’m so sorry.”

Our house sits surrounded by trees on a corner in our suburban neighborhood. I make my way past our mailbox, then down around the corner. Using my cell phone as a flashlight, I throw the beam along the curb. My initial hope, that I would find her injured, but fixable, curled up by a tree, is gone. I am just hoping that she’s not flattened on the pavement like the squirrels that stain our neighborhood streets this summer.

I find her, lying on her side against the curb. Even in the dark, I see the pool of blood around her head. I see the white fur along her stomach.

As I walk back towards the house, the lady with the small dog, offers apologies, again. I’ve never seen her in the neighborhood before this night.  I appreciate that she is there, a witness.

 I call my friend back to confirm, and I reassure her that it’s ok, that this will be hard, but we’ll get through it. I ask her to pray, especially for my daughter, Anna, who is twelve. The cat goes to sleep with her at night.

I step into the house, and Denise is there, my visiting friend. The teenage boys are there too, gearing up for the card game. I take Denise’s arm, and simply say, “Come.”

We’ve had the cat for six years. Before moving to our house on the corner, we lived in Nice, France, in a small city apartment. The kids clamored for a pet. A dog was out of the question, but we could do a cat. I checked online sites and found an ad from a Spanish woman moving overseas who couldn’t bring along her much-loved three-year-old cats. They were pampered cats, who had already lived in three countries. We agreed to take one.

Negra arrived with her Spanish owner in a convertible.  She had her own black canvas kit with combs and brushes and lotion. She had higher quality grooming gear than I did. She even had her own passport; pets need them to travel in the European Union. Her owner gave advice, told about how Negra was more like a dog than a cat, running to the door to greet her when she came home from work everyday. She cried as she drove away.

Negra, or La Negrita, as her owner called her, was shiny black and regal, except for her white belly, which flopped back and forth when she walked. She adjusted to us easily, and didn’t seem to mind when we didn’t brush her regularly or feed her top quality food. She was aggressively friendly, jumping up into unsuspecting laps and headbutting us until she got attention.

When we moved back to the U.S., I didn’t want the loss of our family pet to make the move any harder for the kids. They were leaving all they knew behind, bringing the family pet along would make the transition less painful.

Denise and I step out onto the porch, and I tell her. Her hand goes to her mouth, her eyes shine with tears. We bring Scott out, telling Anna, who is curious about why the  adults are standing in the driveway, that it’s just an adult powwow. It’s well past ten, and she needs to get to bed. She has trouble sleeping anyway; there’s no way we can tell her tonight. In low voices we talk through how and when to tell the children as we do what is required. What do we put the body in? Should I clean up the blood? Do we tell Justin tonight?

Scott carries the cat to the garage in a bag, we layer newspaper in a large blue bin, and he places her in. It’s important that she look peaceful, so he tries it again. She’ll look like she’s sleeping on her side, except for the smear of blood on the newspaper under her head. I take a large plastic pitcher of water out to the street, twice, pouring the water over the blood before it stains the pavement. Rain is in the forecast in the next few days, but not soon enough.

When I was a kid, about ten, we lived in Texas. There I had a cat, named Tabitha. One morning, I awoke to her staring at me, intently, as a dry, fuzzy kitten mewed at me knees. She had chosen my bed as her safe place to birth her kitten. Months later, my parents were packing up our U-Haul; we were moving to Ohio.

The truck was packed up, and it was time to go. And we couldn’t find the cat; she had slipped out. We drove around the neighborhood, we called for her, but finally, we had to leave. I wept for hours, silently, in the cab of the U-Haul as we drove north through the night.

I was willing to spend money to move Negra with us to the U.S. I wanted to spare my children, especially my ten year-old daughter, the trauma of leaving behind a beloved pet. I wanted her to be able to hold onto the cat as she grieved the life she was leaving behind. I wanted the cat to die of old age, when the kids were out of the house. When her death would be a brief sadness, a matter-of-fact phone call, and a sharing of cat stories.

Instead, here is my son, falling to the floor on his knees, weeping, in the dining room where we tell him. Here I lie in bed at one in the morning, unable to stop my tears. Here is my daughter, weeping in the morning, choosing the corner of the house a few feet away from her bedroom window as the burial site. And Negra, wrapped in a pink and red IKEA blanket, is buried with her cat toy, an empty tin of cat food, a flower, and a five-by-seven picture of our family, taken during a visit to Paris months before we moved to Fort Wayne. 

 “Be Thou My Vision”, plays through my mind. As we stand around the grave, sharing our memories of Negra, I resist the urge to sing it. She’s only a cat. You don’t sing hymns at a cat’s funeral. But it plays in my head.

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;

naught be all else to me, save that thou art;

thou my best thought, by day or by night,

waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

 Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true Word;

I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord;

thou my soul’s shelter, and thou my high tower;

raise thou me heavenward, O Power of my power…

High King of Heaven, my victory won,


May I reach Heaven’s joys, O bright Heav’n’s Sun!

Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,

still be my vision, O Ruler of all.

The move from France to the U.S. was not too painful for the kids. They have loved the house, having a dog, the schools. Maybe they would have been fine if we had left the cat behind. Maybe I would have been fine. Maybe that kind of leaving would have been better than a fresh grave outside the house. Maybe my effort to protect them backfired.

Whatever befall.

Life befalls. I plan and protect. I pray for wisdom and protection. But my kids’ hearts aren’t safe. Neither is mine. Despite our best efforts, they will be broken, time and time again. Negra’s grave, with Anna’s large gravestone pushed into the mound of dirt, marks this home, still new to us. It marks us.