Me and My Shadow

It’s been a hard couple of days at our house. Yesterday morning I found one of our cats dead. I won’t go into the details of how it happened, except to say that it’s one of those times when you dwell on the things that, if you had done them differently, would have changed everything.

Shadow was Mike’s favorite of all our cats. He lived in this neighborhood before we did (Mike liked to tell people that “he came with the house”), but chose to come and live with us. He would come in the house in the winter when it was cold, but very rarely did he stay for more than a few hours. In the summer he didn’t come in at all, and no amount of coaxing would get him to change his mind. But he always would come out and greet us when we came home, even climbing into the car for a welcome-home rub. If he happened to be around in the mornings when I left for work, he would walk partway down the hill with me, every few steps throwing himself to the ground in front of me for a tummy rub.

When I found Shadow yesterday morning, I called Mike, who was in the process of getting ready for work. And I will never forget the sight of my big, barrel-chested, bass-voiced, mustache-wearing husband cradling Shadow, sobbing like a baby, and not caring who saw him doing it. He loves his cat-kids. I heard someone say once that “real men don’t kiss cats.” Don’t you believe it.

It’s much too early to try to draw meaning from what happened to Shadow. I won’t even try. But a few months ago, one of the children in my congregation came to me after church and asked, “Do dogs and cats go to heaven when they die?” And I told him that I trusted God to take care of even the tiniest critters—it says so in the Bible (see the end of the book of Jonah, for example, as well as Matthew 10:29). I firmly believe that, when God makes all things new on the last day, that means all things, including animals. And if there aren’t any cats in heaven, I’m not going.

We’ll get through this. It’s not the first time, after all, that either of us has lost a pet. We know that God is with us, and that Shadow is in the care of the God who can be trusted to watch over all of his creatures. That helps.