Requiem for Three Cats
The three white, plastic boxes were nestled into a larger brown, cardboard box labeled “office” with a black Sharpie and stacked among hundreds of other cartons in a moving van, along with more than two decades worth of furniture, household goods, and memories. Why, I wondered, was I moving the ashes of three dead cats halfway across the country? DaisyBelle Riley, Mose and DaisyBelle left us one by one over a span of three years. I always thought we’d gather the kids and ceremoniously scatter their ashes beneath the branches of a towering evergreen just beyond the backyard fence. We’d say a few somber yet loving words, recall their idiosyncrasies, and retell the stories of how our feline companions first came into our home. But life intervened. It seemed as if the family was rarely all together anymore and, although I thought about it frequently, I never quite planned the memorial service. We moved West and the ashes of three Kansas cats sat in a closet in Los...