We laid our old friend Estes the Cat to rest this afternoon. We buried him in the southeast corner of the property, the place we designated when we bought the place as the future pet cemetery. Estes is its first occupant. He was ten years old and had suffered from chronic renal failure, a not-uncommon and always terminal condition in aging cats. This morning, when he was unable to even leave the cage we’d set up as his “kitty ICU”, the vet said it was time to put him to sleep.
We had adopted Estes in 1997 when we moved to Oregon. He was our then-15-year-old son’s pet, and Aaron named the cat after his favorite place in Colorado. They were inseparable whenever Aaron was home. When my career imploded a few months later and I moved back to Colorado, my wife decided to stay in Oregon so our son could finish the school year. During the turmoil and marital strife that ensued over the following year, Estes was her constant companion. He would occasionally climb onto her lap, drape his paws over her shoulders and hug her, as if he knew it was what she needed. When Aaron left home and later went into the Navy, Estes and my wife consoled each other by sitting on the sofa, him on her lap, watching television.
It was cold and windy and the ground was frozen today when I brought Estes back from the vet’s office. I had to work two hours with pick and shovel to carve out a grave two feet deep and two feet square for his final resting place. I had built a small coffin of wood scraps in my shop (they were scraps of the finest wood to be had, of course – oak, maple and walnut – but scraps nonetheless) and my wife carried him in the little coffin to the gravesite. Daisy, the yellow Labrador retriever, represented the household’s pet contingent – Cocoa the Yorkie and Ebony the feral black cat, both begged off because of weather. We asked Daisy if she wanted to say a few words at the gravesite, but she only sniffed at the box in the hole and then went to romp in the snowdrifts nearby. We figured that was a fitting eulogy.
