the ashman purrs

My friend A.'s Little Cat died today.  In brick tenement New York, sick and aging cats die in February: some curl up on their perches over rattling steam pipes and, like pre-war impresarios on the Black Sea, slowly dry up; others make valiant efforts to drink, eat and catbox, but finally their legs give out and they twitch with belabored breath in your arms until the end.  I've seen it happen again and again.

This city is a crappy place to have a pet die.  Most people I know are poor, car-less, and a million miles away from the backyard of anyone who could be induced into letting you bury your pet there.  The classic city options are the following:

• city disposal (i.e. the trash)
• veterinary disposal - the vet disposes of the body with a cremation service
• low-cost cremation - a cremation service gives you back a representative sample of ashes from a group cremation
• high-cost cremation - a cremation service gives you back the ashes of your actual pet
• high-end pet funeral
• illegal rogue burial in the city

I was coming home the other night and snapped this pic of a package on top of a trash can:

I love the little message (poor Dina!), but am disturbed by the strange contradictions that the message implies... Lovingly wrapped and tagged, Dina nevertheless awaits the cold hands of the ashman.  Will he utter a final prayer?  Will Dina's box glide smoothly past the crushing maw of the trash truck and work its way unharmed to the top of the heap (on a bed of dried flowers and New Yorkers)?  I rather imagine that Vinny the trash guy - who's probably seen worse on his Chinatown runs - will toss Dina in without a thought (union and sanitation department rules be damned... it's cold out, it's February) to be crushed with illegally-trashed florescent tubes, cabbage leaves and all the rest of our detritus.

Little Cat, thankfully, was buried this afternoon in Jonathan's backyard in Fort Lee, a brambly affair frequented by raccoons and other critters.

When my own Moxie died in February 2005, I was in no rush to make funerary plans.  There is something horrifying when the specialists come and pack away death in a bag (pet or loved-one), leaving you, half an hour later, sitting on your couch with no visible sign that things are different.  I personally need time to live with death, to ponder it in its implacable reality so that it doesn't seem simply like a fever dream.

At the time, I imagined me and my (then) roommate buying a shovel at the local hardware store and taking Moxie upstate on the bus.  We are such fish-out-of-water types when it comes to the NY hinterland that I saw us as a Beckettian Didi and Gogo couple tramping through the woods with our cat-filled cooler and shovel, trying not to look suspicious.  The laughs ensue.  This didn't happen, of course.  Life got strangely busy, and then he moved out to live with his girlfriend.

So what happened to your cat?  Indeed....