When Death Finds The Gentle

As I wrote this, I was anxiously waiting for our son Barrett to come home. We had some sad news to tell him.

A little more than an hour before, we had found his cat, Peach, on the driveway. Peach had been hit by a car and would die within minutes. He had tried to run to the safety of the home that he loved but just couldn't make it. So there he fell.

When Barrett arrived, we went to the box where we had laid Peach so Barrett could see him one last time. Peach had been Barrett's faithful companion all through his teen years and had two purposes in life: to comfort and to entertain. He always wanted to be petted, but he did have preferences. He would easily abandon both my wife Mary and me to sit in Barrett's lap. Plastic grocery sacks were a never-ending source of delight. He would seek out an empty sack, stick his head through the hole in a handle, and drag the sack around the house. That always won him some praise.

Peach was surely the most gentle of animals, but death comes without respect to the gentle as well as the cruel. As he lay before us, he was obviously in pain and would sometimes cry out. We prayed that his suffering would be brief.

It was. His life ebbed quickly, and his distress lessened bit by bit. And at some indistinguishable moment, life had unwilling been overtaken once again by death. What a mysterious process death is, one that we will not understand this side of heaven. But the death of this simple creature is another reminder that in this age, death rules unchallenged.

In the last moments of Peach's life, he left us with a remembrance, a token of his acknowledgment of our commitments to him in his time of suffering. He had tried to raise his head but couldn't, so Mary held it up for him. It was then that she noticed his purring. She continued holding his head, stroking his ears, and speaking kindly to him until the purring stopped. And thus he departed, saying in his own way, "We've done our best for each other while we could; now it's time to go."

We buried Peach in the back yard along with many other pets that had preceded him in death. As we cried together in the dark, we were again reminded that relationships in this life are temporary. We must enjoy them while we have the chance, for the time will come when each is painfully severed.

We have many fond memories of Peach's seven years with us. We will miss him.

Copyright 1999 James McAlister

Printer friendly version

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Parallel Tracks Of Good And Bad

The late Ron Dunn, a preacher whom I highly esteem, coined a truism I frequently lean upon: Good and bad run along parallel tracks and often arrive about the same time. Though some had warned us, nothing could have prepared us for our first visit to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. From children to the aged, the outward devastation of pernicious disease on frail human bodies overloaded our senses. They are courageous souls in hand-to-hand combat with a vicious enemy of seemingly inexhaustible tenacity. But they press on. To cover the almost-inevitable baldness that cancer treatment wreaks, many select colorful head scarves or stylish wigs as banners for their individual battles. Calling cancer a bad thing is a gross and trivial understatement. But even amid their roiling seas of trouble, good persists in bobbing to the surface as cancer patients openly discuss both defeats and victories. Without a hint of bitterness, Mr. Boudreaux relates the loss of a leg and other traumati...
Read more

Learning With Ollie In The School Of Basics

Oliver Wickerham Gatchell wouldn't have stood for it. Nope. He was just too practical. As I saw him do many times, he would have risen up and demanded an accounting. I first encountered him in 1963. I was a college freshman, and he was a crusty, white-headed old engineer teaching the most basic entry-level course. Whispers from the older students warned us: Ollie Gatchell would strike fear in our hearts. And so he did, making that initial engineering course a baptism by fire. On the first day of class, he didn't bother introducing himself. Instead, he instantly solidified his reputation with a challenge: "OK, you prospective engineers. Let's see who can figure out how to get the lead into his pencil." Nobody could. Those mechanical pencils were easily fumbled, but we did learn how to use them--thanks to the demanding Ollie Gatchell. Knowing the necessity of discipline and order in engineering work, he despised inefficiency and imprecision. One class period found u...
Read more