Cats Go to Heaven

lost and found

by Jeneen R. Garcia

to be published on 28 July 2007

As you can see, it has taken me awhile to get my thoughts together. It still feels strange to be writing this, never in my life imagining I would be writing this. But I found there was no other way to say what must be said, but through this overdue letter.

Letters--you always found a reason to write them. All throughout your life, you kept writing them, kept the ones that were written back in precious boxes that moved with you to wherever you made your home. Even when email became the popular choice, the impersonal fonts on a white screen did not diminish your eloquence and warmth.

I know, because that is how our friendship started, with an email about cats and words and mothers. Even when we lived less than five minutes away from each other, you would send off a letter in the middle of a drab work day to celebrate the afternoon light, or a new poem about the rain we loved.

Love. We talked about that, too. And shopping. How you “goforitgoforit in a big way, and soon the fever burns itself off,” while I, you said, “holdbackholdbackholdback until...until when nga ba?”

This courage of yours I have yet to grow into. While transience has made me fearful to call anything my own, you claimed an entire room in an unfamiliar city as your library, writing room, refuge. You did what you had to do with the conviction of the anointed, though frequently you expressed doubts about your abilities and your worth. As boldly as you painted your guitar and the doors of your house with cats and moons and words you loved, you had no qualms about naming yourself poet, artist, lover, dreamer. What does the future matter, your lived-in spaces seemed to say, when I have all this. Here. Now.

This is what I have now, on this side of eternity: it is a delicious afternoon outside, the kind that makes you want to lazily stretch your back like a cat on a tiled roof. The pines along the boulevard have been struck golden by a sun that clings longer than it should to this delectable day. Are you here, too? I am learning to see with your eyes.

A fiftyish woman talking to a white-haired European by the seawall for two hours now (the first date, maybe?). The strange arc of light over Siquijor on the horizon. A two-year old boy walking barefoot on the brick pavement, a sandal in each hand. The stench of brine faintly reeking of sewage. Rats scuttling over the rocks on the beach below. Two men with guitars serenading the fishball vendors with songs of God.

Above all, I wish for your courage to stare the world in the face--beauty and sadness and grotesquery and light--though your heart be constantly broken into fragments from being full, throbbing with the wonder and the weight of it all. To learn how to keep all the fragments close. To embrace everything--even the parts that hurt you--as if the world itself were on the brink of death.

May I rise up to the task of keeping my flame as fiery as yours.

For though many may say that, in the end, you succumbed to the darkness, we both know that darkness is simply another way to bask in the light. I may never know why you chose the less certain path, but I know God welcomes you back, with the same joy you have taught me to live and love with. As surely as the moon burns starkly through the night sky. As surely as summers end with rain. As surely as cats go to heaven.

To my soulsister Ana, who has taken on the last great adventure, barefoot as always.