Bereaved

Today I vacuumed my mother's floors, did four loads of laundry, emptied the trash, fed Seraphin the cat his last meal on earth, then ended the day by burying him.

There have been times in my past when people I cared about were taken from me because of unexpected circumstances. Simply, they disappeared from my life one day... An awful misunderstanding between two very close friends. A cutthroat power play in the workplace with collateral damage. But there was a reprieve: in the first case, I surreptitiously spotted the former associate—looking lonely and withdrawn—on board a subway train eight years after our acrimonious parting; and in the latter, a budding friendship continued long after the job had already ended.

Just like that. He was gone. I will never again see his furry face or feel him rub against my leg at my parents' doorway. My heart is bleeding, like the liquid redness oozing from his mouth.

What does it say about the value we ascribe to life in a civilization that is on the verge of deterioration? The careless and unnecessary loss of life diminishes us all. The hit-and-run driver didn't even stop. When I lived in pastoral New Hampshire, following a rainfall the country roads would team with wildlife…I always swerved to avoid hitting a stray animal—whether chipmunk or tiny frog. Why was this unwelcome stranger using our street as a thoroughfare? It is common enough to see dead mammals alongside the highways, but not in an established family neighborhood populated with children and pets.

The last time I saw Seraphin alive, he was enjoying a tendon I had placed in his food bowl from the stewed meat I braised for three hours just that morning. “Look at our baby,” I exclaimed to my mother who had walked me to the door. “Seraphin really enjoys his food.”

“Yes,” my mother slowly replied. “that cat always likes to eat.”

I headed out to complete my errands and when I returned less than an hour later before 3:30 p.m. he was gone. As I pulled into the driveway, I saw my husband by the fence, chatting on the phone about the family cat and whether or not anyone had seen him. “He was eating a while ago,” I answered. “All I have to do is call him and he’ll come running.” Ludicrously, in the surrealistic scene across the street, a ginger colored cat lay prostrate, its pink and neon green tags visible from the fur. My sister, brother-in-law and their children had driven past my parents’ home and saw a lifeless cat in front of our neighbor’s house. They called my husband to be sure Seraphin was safe. My rational mind had initially refused to make the connection that my intuition had instantly realized. I ran inside the house in my uncontrollable grief screaming. I couldn't return outside, even as my husband pleaded with me to keep my emotions in check. He kept asking for a shovel and a box, before another car could hit and disfigure our Seraphin’s body. How could he comprehend my grief? To him Seraphin was a stray cat that appeared one day and never left. He did not know that I was…Seraphin’s mother.

If I hadn't stopped by Kmart to look at the Martha Stewart turkey baster, I might have arrived home a little sooner and perhaps this slight alteration in the wrinkle of time would have saved Seraphin from fate. My mother had already set aside the leftovers for his evening meal. While I was away, Seraphin had finished the tidbit I lovingly fed him. One minute Seraphin was enjoying the sunlight as he bounced across the yard. An instant later, he was dead. If death had come elsewhere, in some alley or on another street, if he had never returned, we might have continued in ignorant bliss, thinking he had left home, found love, and started a family. But the reality is that blunt trauma had hit him on one side of his face, leaving a gash from which blood spurted in his head and bloodying his teeth and mouth. On the other side from where he landed, there were no such signs, he could have been sleeping in the middle of that busy street, rerouted that day through a family neighborhood because of the eminent domain taking of family homes to convert to commercial real estate less than two blocks away.

Whoever had done this deed had to have known that Seraphin had a family. He was too well-cared for, glossy, and was wearing pink and neon green tags that gave a contact telephone number and showed that his annual immunizations were current—proof that he was beloved, that he mattered to someone. He was snatched from an elderly couple, their small grandchildren, other family members, and me.

“Killing a cat is nine years bad luck," my mother whispered. Consumed with commingled rage and a bottomless sorrow, I was motivated to run into the street and scrawl graffiti on the spattered pavement, “Who killed our cat?" I grieved for some hours, then I composed myself and decided instead to commemorate Seraphin’s life in the only way I knew how, by crafting in my masterful, visceral, gift for words an homage to a beloved family member and the love he inspired in a family that took him in, cared for him, and loved him as one of their own. In this way, I hope to bring Seraphin back to life.

A pet. A being. A life.

I was the one who found Seraphin. Following one of my regular visits to my parents’ house, I was preparing to leave when I heard a plaintive sound, like a terrified infant crying. It was the voice of a disembodied kitten, but we couldn’t see him in the shrubs and bushes of the foundation plantings. Eventually, we localized the pitch as coming from the engine of my parents’ seldom used car, a capacious Cadillac. The kitten had to have been small enough to pass through the tubing and compartments of the engine. I tried to tempt the animal to make an appearance by leaving food and fresh water next to the wheel well. He was either frightened—or once he scampered up he didn’t know how to climb back down—because the leftovers remained untouched. There was no way something that new could have made its way to our yard and sought shelter in a car engine. Someone had to have brought him here. Left him to the vagaries of fate. Why couldn’t his owner have rang our doorbell and asked us to take him in instead of abandoning him and fleeing like a thief? We wouldn’t have turned them away…that is not our custom.

Several weeks passed before the frail and skinny creature came to trust humans once again and was comfortable enough to venture near me. We knew he was still alive because the plates of food were completely eaten and we could often hear a rustling as he darted unseen among the shrubbery. In time, he showed himself—a beautiful and graceful kitten, slight in build, with golden fur touched by clear pinkness around the nose, mouth, and ears. Having quietly gained his trust, the kitten now lingered by the tire on the driver’s side and scampered up to eat from my hand.

My niece named him Serafin, after her best friend in school, Sera, or Serafina, who moved when her father was reassigned to another military posting. This told me that she missed Sera terribly, in a way she couldn’t yet articulate, and was trying to keep her friend in her life by giving the foundling her friend’s name. I changed the spelling to Seraphin, because of its approximation to “seraphim,” a member of the highest order of angels with a pink cherub’s head and wings in Renaissance paintings. Somehow, the spelling seemed right to me.

As the months passed, Seraphin imperceptibly grew from a foundling to a handsome and lusty cat. When my mother was exercising by doing yard work, he would stay by her side until she finished for the day. When unoccupied, he would sit in the driveway, a muscular watch cat. His first home was in a car engine, so Seraphin had no fear of cars. This observation filled me with dread. Often, I would see him underneath one of the numerous cars parked in the driveway to shade himself from the hot sun. I would start my car engine then peer underneath to be certain Seraphin was out of harm’s way. There seemed to be no need for this, however, since Seraphin would dart to safety as soon as he heard an engine start up.

In the winter, faced with below freezing temperatures, my husband constructed a new home for Seraphin. Recycling a medium size-moving box, Joseph cleverly constructed an insulated igloo using foam and an old blanket, with a small hole cut just large enough for Seraphin to crawl inside. My fondest memory of Seraphin is how he would stand outside my parents’ door, eagerly anticipating whatever leftovers I brought for him as a treat, aside from his daily fare of household leftovers and premium, shredded canned cat food, of which we had just purchased another month's supply. I lavished him with grilled sardines and steamed shrimp—he would expertly gulp down the head, bones, and shells like a snake. There was also mesquite smoked barbecue, shredded meat from a chicken carcass, the trimmings from gourmet dishes I regularly made from scratch. Now, each time I have entered my parents’ home, I experience a wave of sadness. I miss his expectant presence that always brought a smile to my heart. Although I wanted to touch him, as an outdoor cat, Seraphin harbored fleas and parasites that could spread through my garments to our indoor pets and the children. Instead, I would often bring my face to his level and make kissing sounds and gestures while I admonished him to wait until I unwrapped his treat, or I would rub his head with my toe.

I would take Seraphin to the veterinarian and feed him his daily meals, but he was considered to be my mother’s cat. That is, until this past summer when a startling incident created an emotional bond between us. In his young life, Seraphin had experienced much pain and discomfort. Perhaps as a precursor to his eventual fate, someone had taken a BB gun and left what looked like a large and bloody shotgun hole in his right hindquarter. He never cried or complained, and calmly tried to lick clean the area around the wound, so no one in our family thought to bring him to the clinic. In fact, the veterinarian herself thought Seraphin had scratched an abscess underneath his fur. She retracted her diagnosis weeks later when she noticed the perfectly round scar—undeniable evidence of the damage left by a BB pellet.

But horrified, I had taken it upon myself to find a box large enough to fit Seraphin inside, even as he tried to claw his way out. For two weeks, I drove to my parents’ house like clockwork twice a day, eight hours apart, to administer antibiotics by mouth to Seraphin. To make the medicine palatable, I would choose a savory morsel and stick the small pill inside, then hand feed it to Seraphin to be sure it was completely swallowed. Along the way, I took to refreshing his water bowl and sweeping any leaves or debris near his insulated igloo. We tried to create a nest for Seraphin by the back door, inside a shed, or elsewhere around the property, but he had made his home in the space between the Cadillac and the den, right alongside the sheltered doorway entrance beyond the carport. As a sign of his affection, I would sometimes find half-pawed, small birds and mice near the gated door.

After the BB gun incident, we wanted to contain Seraphin. I wanted to train him to stay within the confines of our fenced yard. If he would only stay inside this charmed circle, he would remain forever safe. Everything he needed was within its boundaries—food, shelter, comfort, and love. We thought about constructing a 6x8 cage at the back of the house. We also considered boarding him with family friends. They were landlords who rescued the cats their tenants left behind by building a small addition at the back of their house. Up to a dozen cats would laze in comfort. There was no room to scamper, they could only sit and became very fat cats. There was a heater to keep them warm in the winter, and they were given fresh food and water. In the morning, Uncle Arturo would sit inside the cat condo, with his cup of coffee and newspaper, surrounded by his beloved cats while his long-suffering wife, who loved him very much even as she was allergic to cats, would empty out the litter box each day. Neither option seemed viable, or would make Seraphin happy, so we instead had him neutered, assured by the vet that the procedure would somewhat diminish his wanderlust.

Two months ago, Seraphin’s death had been foretold to me in a lucid dream. In the dream, a man, my father, was speaking to me, telling me that Seraphin had been hit by a car, and that it was a painful death. At the time, I wondered whether to dismiss this knowledge as a manifestation of my fear: that this fate was inevitable for a cat that felt comfortable around vehicles. But perhaps it was my sixth sense preparing me for what was to come. I was terrified enough to revisit the options for keeping Seraphin contained, but I understood that, at heart, Seraphin was an alley cat. I was resigned to the probability, and the expectation, that he would be a part of my life for no more than 3, 4, or 5 years, and hopefully many more. But the average lifespan of a feral cat, if he makes it past kitten hood, is less than two years. Alley cats are likely to remain feral, unless a bond is established when the kitten is still a few weeks old. We were able to socialize Seraphin while he was still young, so that he learned to trust humans. He was about 18 months old at the time of his death.

I have no photographs of Seraphin. Now, he exists only in my mind and in my heart. I try to forget how I emptied an ornate document box, decorated in red and gold trim, with a golden palm tree on the cover. How I gently lifted Seraphin’s cold remains with rigor mortis setting in and placed him in a familiar curled position with his forepaws tucked under his chin. I try to forget the dried blood that my mother told me was not necessary to wash away, and the prayer I composed in my mind through my tears, for his soul and in gratitude for the gift of Seraphin’s presence in our lives, as my husband, a high tech guru, and my brother-in-law, a physician, mixed concrete with water for a slab. They placed the casket on top of the hardened slab, and then covered the hole made in the ground with more concrete. In my handwriting, I wrote a love note to our beloved cat, and when the surface was fixed, they placed fresh dirt and grass to level with the walkway.

You might ask yourself: “What kind of person sees the meaning of existence in the shortened life cycle of an outdoor cat?” I will give you the answer: I am someone who transfigures daily or overlooked rituals and details to give transcendence and permanence to the stream of life. All of life is, to me, art—that elusive, emotional or sensory connection that allows us to appreciate beauty as a portal to the harmony, balance, and rhythm in the universe, and our own relation to this eternal mystery.

When we hand-pick people and other living beings to let into our lives, it is a vulnerable act. You are exchanging a part of yourself that you can never get back. To lose the beloved is to forfeit a piece of your soul. There are those who, after episodes in their lives—sometimes precious and memorable, other times damaging—move on without a thought about a past connection. The chapters of life, to people like these, are expendable, throwaway. Then there are others, like myself, for whom this mindset is incomprehensible: the very gift of life is to be honored, commemorated, no matter how seemingly insignificant. This to me is the ultimate litmus test of the kind of world we choose to live in. Seraphin was taken from us too soon, but in the all too short time he was mine, this abandoned kitten who grew into a magnificent cat inspired me with his loyalty, his fortitude, and his full, sensory, appreciation for the simple comforts of a well-lived life.

My Life In an Obama Administration, Part I

The political momentum has shifted back and forth in the seven weeks leading to November 4. The bump following the convention brought a sense of renewal to the Republican party—and suggested a promising conservative talk show career for Sarah Palin post-election. The deepening financial and housing crises, which reared its head for much of the past two years, finally exploded into a full-scale, global, economic meltdown. Independents and disaffected voters began to make up their minds.

And this week’s coup de grâce: former Secretary of State and army general Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama—which effectively undermined his long-time friend John McCain even as it boosted Obama’s foreign policy credentials and qualifications for becoming commander-in-chief. My husband and I were watching Powell’s interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday when we suddenly had an inkling that an important endorsement was about to be announced. "He has both style and substance. I think he is a transformational figure," summed up Powell’s influential blessing.

I suppose that now seems a good time to begin to speculate about my life and role at the dawn of the Obama era, but it’s still two weeks to go until the presidential election, and much can still go wrong. All I need do is recall what appeared to be a slam-dunk outcome a mere eight years ago when the winner of the popular vote by almost a half million votes lost the election by 5 electoral votes, with 1 abstention.

Al Gore obsessed about his loss at the 2005 Webby Awards. His pithy, 5-word haiku, acceptance speech? “Please don’t recount this vote.” Two years later, Gore’s winning of both the Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award as an eloquent voice on the dangers of global warming might have seemed compensation enough for his eked-out election loss (I truly empathize...I once lost an election for high school student body president by 1 vote and, like the good citizen I was and continue to be, I actually returned the extra ballot I was given! A few years later, I was elected in a landslide to the Board of Trustees of the largest university in the Ivy League and became a finalist for Glamour magazine’s Top Ten College Women in the country).

If a Republican were destined for the White House in 2000, that president should have been John McCain instead of George W. Bush. But McCain’s time has passed, and his series of questionable decisions and actions—from the improperly vetted elevation of Sarah Palin as his running mate, to his showcasing of “everyman” Joe the Plumber (an unlicensed plumber who owes back taxes)—to the puzzling photograph of him at the end of the last presidential debate (in a decidedly un-presidential caricature of the Hunchback of Notre Dame lumbering behind Barack Obama) simply washed away any benefit of the doubt that I and many other leftist-leaning, pro-military friends in Oklahoma may have extended to a war hero and former prisoner of war in Viet Nam.

What concerns me in 2008 is that the fate of the nation rests on 5 battleground states—Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada and their 76 electoral votes. The western states, Nevada and Colorado, have 5 and 9 electoral votes, respectively. A candidate could win 99% of the popular vote in Nevada, but in the winner-take-all electoral college only 5 votes would count toward electing the president. There has got to be a better formula for electing our president, which I will leave to policy wonks, elected officials, and high school debaters to sort out. In 1974-75, the national high school debate topic of the National Forensic League was the resolution, “Resolved: That the United States should significantly change the method of selecting presidential and vice-presidential candidates.” 34 years and 6 presidents later, no changes have been made.

You’d think a candidate with a 3-generation, family tradition of exceptional military service to the country would go down fighting and, indeed, McCain has refused to concede. But Barack Obama has shown himself to be a master of political warfare. His success in the 2008 campaign owes much to his lawyerly mindset that meticulously and thoroughly combs the margins—the fringes—for every possible advantage. If Obama had been a high school debater in 1974, he might have looked for ways to exploit the present system and optimize its loopholes. Who would have thought that the aggregate impact of caucuses and states with small electoral counts would make such a difference? This ingenious strategy explains how he won the Democratic Party nomination over an historic female candidate who was widely viewed as the inevitable Democratic nominee, and it is a strategy that has carried over to the general election.

This psychology of taking nothing for granted is the reason why Obama has remained steady and centered and why he will do nothing foolish in the remaining two weeks of the campaign. In his long-range planning, Obama has shown that he has been focused on the end game all along. Obama opted out of public funding so that he could continually renew his coffers by returning to small contributors. By tapping both traditional, major donors and small contributors reached in part through the internet, Obama has amassed a sizeable war chest, a record-shattering $150 million raised in September alone. Unlike John Kerry, who foolishly had $13 million left from his campaign 2004 and lost the election, Obama will raise and spend what he must to win the presidency.

What makes me hopeful about America’s future and the outcome of the election is the paradigm shift in younger voters who view Obama as an inspirational figure and transformative candidate. One of the students I mentor is an 18-year-old senior at a prep school near Boston voting in his first presidential election. Among many other accomplishments, Jerome Tse is the co-president of the Multicultural Students Association at the Noble & Greenough School. He and his classmates shared their thoughts on what this historic 2008 election means to them. The respondents of this Quick Poll are primarily, like myself, independent voters who may be affiliated with a political party; the lone Republican respondent plans to vote for Obama.

I’m posting Jerome’s reply in its entirety.

Jerome Tse, Senior at the Noble and Greenough High School:

1) Is this the first presidential election in which you will vote? Yes

2) Which candidate do you plan for vote for, and why? I plan to vote for Barack Obama for several reasons. I highly respect John McCain, but in my opinion, he has poor judgment and is too old. His policies are close to 95% the same as those of the Bush Administration, and everyone knows, this country is need of political and economic change. Barack Obama, despite not having as much experience as John McCain, has sound judgment, which will be especially important when it comes to making foreign policy decisions on America's situation in Iraq/Afghanistan and future threat, Iran. We need a leader whose first priority is negotiating peace with the enemy, but who is not afraid to take military action if needed. This is especially important regarding the Georgia/Russia conflict, which if handled over-aggressively, could lead to a third world war.

3) How do you plan to make your decision about whom to vote? What has made the difference in my selection for president were the candidates' motives for foreign policy. I like Barack Obama's opinion that we need to get out of Iraq and shift our focus on Afghanistan, the true center of terrorism, and negotiate with Pakistan, where bin Ladin is supposedly hiding. This kind of direct answer of what he is going to do attracted me, especially because his opinions are the same as mine in terms of foreign policy.

4) What concerns you most about the future? Barack Obama's inexperience. He has the right judgment, and I trust him for that. However, it is true that good leaders, especially presidents, need experience before they take over arguably the most powerful position in the world.

5) What is your political affiliation? Class year? Age? Republican, Senior, 18

6) Anything on which you care to elaborate or vent? John McCain could run into health problems in the near future, and if that were to be the case, Sarah Palin would take over as president. As a Republican, I respect Palin for what she has done as governor of Alaska, but she simply does not have the experience and has not proven to me yet that she has the right judgment when it comes to making economic, political, and military decisions for the United States.”

God Sent Us an Angel

God sent us an angel. That's what the preacher's wife told me when I saw her today. Yesterday, she had been sitting at a makeshift table wondering how she was going to get the zip codes to mail business announcements to the hospital at Ft. Sill. I overheard her and volunteered to deliver her menus to a contact at the military base.

She was grateful for my offer and seemed eager to hear more, so I found myself making suggestions that ranged from ambience, to color palette, to lessons in product consistency, gleaned from my avocation as an East Coast foodie who is passionate about flavors, tables, and presentations. This new business run by a preacher and his wife has some of the best pit barbecue in Texoma—the southwest Oklahoma-north Texas region—that I had ever tasted. During family get-togethers, the mesquite-smoked meats—beef, pork, chicken, and seafood—had been perfected, and now the entire clan was working together to try to make a success of it.

I placed a second take-out order, and then went home to spread the word about my new find. I e-mailed 50 friends and neighbors affiliated with the media, hospitals, schools, major car dealerships, real estate, and construction, including the owner and anchor of the ABC television affiliate. I hand-delivered a dozen menus. Even then I couldn't stop; I wrote a testimonial the Atkinsons could copy to place in their restaurant and use when soliciting catering jobs.

Today, I returned and saw how quickly the family had implemented my suggestions. Annette informed me that new faces had shown up during lunchtime. At a family powwow a few nights previously, they had discussed buying a television for customers to watch while waiting for their food; so it had surprised them when I presented the idea of making the small restaurant a place where customers could linger, by putting up a television and adding a family portrait of their clan at home enjoying barbecue. I told them not to slather the meat in sauce, but to offer sauce on the side, or to cover only the bottom half of the meat. "Customers want to taste the mesquite smoke, not cover its pungency."

"When you see young soldiers start to come in, that's a sign that you need to have more chicken wings on the menu." I told them. "People like chicken wings, and young soldiers either don't like to or can't cook. They'll come back if your place feels like home."

I was acquainted with young adults like these who had already been sent to Iraq and were being shipped out for their second tour. They were barely out of their teens and many were away from home for the first time in their lives, so cooking is the last thing on their collective minds.

It made me angry to hear of John Kerry's botched comments directed at George Bush, "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq." Despite their youth, these soldiers impressed me with their precocious maturity, their sense of responsibility and discipline. One veteran was a young woman, sent to Iraq as a nurse; she looked like she could have been a student in high school or college. High school students playing dress up as soldiers. Only, this is their reality.

I heard her voice continue, "You are an angel. We were talking about how God sent us an angel to help when you began giving us all this advice." I smiled. I, too, had felt an unseen hand in this affair. There I was waiting for my food order, when the sight of a motherly black woman worrying out loud in these tough economic times touched my heart.

"My husband Richard, he told me just be patient...God will provide. Then you appeared." I had sensed her distress. Otherwise, I might have just picked up my food and gone on my way. But God gives each and every one of us a gift of humanity, and mine is empathy. I couldn't turn away.

I gave the preacher's wife my personal e-mail address and told her she could contact me if needed. For sure, my family will hire them to cater our next function. Last week, my sister and her husband hosted a dinner for my brother-in-law, himself a veteran of the war in Iraq. If I had known of the Atkinsons' bbq business beforehand, we would have hired them and promoted their food to all in attendance. That was a missed opportunity. But something tells me the family won't need my help much longer...their work ethic and the quality of their food are already there. The word-of-mouth groundswell I set in motion has begun and now, customers just need to find them.