Annual Memorial Service
My friend has to come up with something new and ancient to say every year. He was daft enough to found a cat sanctuary. Now accountants and sophomores show up on the first Saturday of June to throw rose petals while he reads the names of the fallen. They will not remember his opening remarks from last June, but they will know if his words come too easy.
Some years he tries too hard and surveys world religions for permission. The people who brushed the dead are not here to learn of common ground between Druid, Lenape, and Presbyterian eschatology. The people who scraped the litter boxes are here to dig their foam sneakers into soil that will receive their tears.
So he unhooks the carabiners that keep his pocked heart in place, and he throws it onto the Memorial Walkway, beating. The oldest bricks have faded, and no one can say if they read “Patches” or “Papa.” My friend decided he would only read the names of the year’s lost cats, not the donors or volunteers who died too. No one pretends this is more than 49% about cats.
My friend announces that we are a community of fools, small mammals who surrender too much to smaller mammals. Twenty years in, and he does not know what he founded. Other shelters save higher numbers. His sanctuary saves the unrepentant and wretched. He signed us all up to become wreckage the day he wrote the mission statement. We take the enraged and the incomplete. We pan for dignity among peridot eyes cloudy with age. His light brigade bypasses the adorable to retrieve a one-eyed geriatric from a sewer. He shakes the hourglass like a baby’s rattle over every arrival. Half arrive dying, then live years. Most get chosen, tearing the curtain of expectations and snapping the syllables of “unadoptable.”
They all die, and my friend reads their names. The volunteers will cry however he begins and ends. He looks at me repeatedly, and not because I sprinkle the ashes. Nobody remembers how I received this assignment. I fundraise here. I write inadequate eulogies for every cat. I have been strewing ashes over bricks and roses for seventeen years. My friend knows I remember every opening statement. He knows I will tell him he did well no matter what he says.
He reminds us we are shipwrecked. He tells the honor students and retired nurses that we could avoid the undertow if we were wiser, but we are not. I watch the economics professor who mops the lobby pick at his rose. I have seen this man rest his head on the hot white belly of a cat whose black tail looked like a joke: “pin the tail on the donkey” in feline form. They breathed together. She howled blasphemy on the days he did not come. He wailed like Jeremiah when Sky died. He is here for her name.
My friend is trying. He reminds us that this has been a brutal year. Twenty years in, it is inevitable that pillars fall. Sassafras had been here twelve years, Bilbo eighteen. They were more than friends, they were icons. My friend reminds us that “sanctuary” is a big fixer-upper house of a word. We will never be anything other than ramshackle.
He reminds the mourners that they may wield their roses as they see fit. Throw a petal for each name. Throw ten for the cat you miss most. Take the flower home and press it with the others. There isn’t one way.
His eyebrows are jittering like the “CH cats” in the lobby, twins born with a punch line where half their cerebellums belong. They are neither suffering nor walking. They catapult into laps as though this merits their full strength. They collapse into each other, entwined like otters. They will never use a litter box. They will probably be adopted and live years. My friend named them Mirth and Mercy. They mostly respond to “STOPPIT!” when they are licking electrical outlets or harassing the dowager Persian. Mirth is lean enough to negotiate the baby gate on my friend’s office. She trespasses to sleep beside the fading tabby under his desk.
We rely on my friend to fishtail between scatology and theology today. Irreverence is his nesting box. He will not read Galileo’s name without reminding us of the cat’s ebullient diarrhea. The college kid who changed Galileo’s diaper will soak her Nirvana t-shirt in tears. Then my friend will lurch us on detours. He will confess that he does not like when people say, “grief is the price we pay for love.” He will look at me, standing on the middle of the walkway. I am awkward as a lollipop at a funeral with the big urn that holds them all in my arms. “Grief is the price we pay for love.” I never say that, so he looks at me. He tells the assembly that it’s true, but he doesn’t like it, because it doesn’t help.
He reads the names, and the economist throws his full rose at the sound of Sky. The teenagers and the grandfathers shake my friend’s hand and go home. My palms are covered in ashes. I tell him he did well but got one thing wrong. His eyebrows jump into each other’s arms to brace themselves. I tell him it doesn’t help because it’s not true. Love does not operate a toll bridge. We are not completing transactions. We are curling into teaspoons, hurling ourselves like trebuchets against the order of things. We are shredding the armchair of arithmetic. We are the vanguard of fools trying to hustle the horizon. We will all be priceless together again.
My friend tells me I always say something like that. He doesn’t know if it helps. He will get back to me next year. He bites the head off his rose to be outrageous. I tell him Galileo would be proud.
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, and Terrain, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years and loves life affectionately.