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Ten Days Ago, I Lost My Best Friend
There are two kinds of best friends a person can have in this lifetime: the human kind, with whom we share a loud world of common tastes and joys and dreams, and the animal kind, pets with whom we share a quiet world of secret pacts and play and empathy.
So far as I know, one isn’t more important the other—just as the brain is no greater than the heart; they simply play different roles. And if you’re lucky enough to have experienced the grace of both kinds, then you might also know that when one exits your life, it can feel exactly like waking up without a heart.
Ten days ago, I lost my best friend, Ichabod.
It’s a difficult task to get others to care about what’s meaningful to you—especially when it’s a skittish black cat. Still, I wanted to post this online, where things seem to last forever, because I think it’s a fitting place for the strange miracle that is our love for a pet.
See, it’s my opinion that real love is in its purest form in those hidden moments—a stolen glance, a contagious laugh, a tearful hug—that seem to slip between the cracks of everyday life. Oh, most people don’t recognize these fleeting interludes. But our pets do. When they lie next to us on the bed, when they follow us around the house for attention, when you take them for a romp in the sunlit yard and can almost feel the breath of freedom glowing in their eyes, you are sliding into these pockets of time (without even knowing it, maybe) where there exists a secret world only you two can know; where no one else can see your pet as you do.
Yes. A strange miracle indeed.
And like miracles, a person’s relationship with an animal is not based in reason. It’s not logical to name a rat, talk to a bird, or treat a dog like a member of the family. And it’s certainly not a rational thing for a grown man to wake up in the middle of the night, crying because he lost his cat. But the funny truth about life is that the real magic—the spice extracted from the shadowy underbelly of reason and rationality—is within these illogical things.
As children our world is 90% magic. We run on emotion and hope and the love of our parents. But as the years pass and responsibility piles onto heartache, the magic is groomed out of us. Deep down, we all know this. So we bring these lovely creatures into our homes to ensure that we hold onto some of those wonderfully irrational things. Pets make us reach out and touch life every day, bowling us over in the yard, cuddling in our laps, running and laughing, forcing us to make idiot bargains in the absence of compromise. Around them, we don’t think twice about acting silly and hysterical, vibrant and sappy. We stay in the present. We don’t overthink. And we don’t ask what they could do for us, because just being with them is enough.
By no means are these things essential for staying alive.
But they are, I believe, essential for being alive.
And this notion becomes all the more important when we’re reminded that life has a way of changing in an instant.
We like to think we know how long an animal will be in our lives, like how children pretend to know what they’ll do for a living when they grow up. But, always, life hits and redirects us. And once that awful die is cast, we can only take comfort in the knowledge that animals are much better at passing on than we are; they accept it graciously.
I’m convinced Ichabod knew his stay with me was coming to an end. It was almost as if he could hear Time, like the sound of sand thinning out in the neck of an hourglass. He spent those last few days clinging to my side, and as much as I want to erase the memory of that final hour, I can look back now and see a deeper knowing—an understanding of sorts that seems to dawn upon all animals as they near that hazy bridge to the great hereafter.
For four-and-a-half years, Ichabod sat at my desk and journeyed with me into all the scary, happy, and fantastic yarns I spun up and snipped away at. I learned to write with him…and now I feel lost. I find myself saying his name, waiting for him to run in and join me for the day’s work, but he doesn’t come. And my heart turns heavy and sick, and like a bad recoil start on a lawnmower, my imagination locks up before I can even get it running.
Just a week ago, it felt like we would go on forever, chasing shadows through the night, hitting sadness over the head with the magic of story and never looking back because there was always more adventure waiting up ahead. It doesn’t feel like things will get better. And, in a way, I don’t want it to, because then I might forget.
And forgetting would be the worst.
But that’s just fear talking...because I know if we truly love something, we never forget it. For we spend so many wonderful moments with our pets that there will undoubtedly come a time (no matter how long down the road) when we see or feel or smell something—an autumn breeze, a wood burning stove, a chalet loft, the glimmer of a lake—at a certain moment, in a certain way and our memory will produce a scene so vivid that it will be like our old pal is right there with us.
Still, none of this makes moving on any easier. None of this takes away the grief I feel right now. It doesn’t work that way. No; I can only wake up and start living in the same way Ich and I started.
I go.
I go and live.
I see the world and soak it all in—the good and the bad—smiling and driving, reading some good books and blasting some rock-and-roll, running forward with all the love a guy can muster and giving it to everyone who needs it.
Oh, and one last tidbit before I tie this up: Ichabod passed of the same illness that afflicts the main character in the novel we spent most of our time on (probably my first big book). I don’t know what that means—not entirely—but I’m sure it’s another glimpse of that ancient black cat magic that twinkled so brightly in his emerald-gem eyes and black-velvet fur.
Thus, it’s no surprise that he left us at the threshold of autumn, trotting proudly into that hallowed October country, where he can teach the phantoms and specters and whispering shadows all of the illogical love that he taught me.
As a Christian I believe we’re put in each other’s life for a reason, and I cannot fathom a God who would also put these beautiful creatures in our lives, with whom we share so much joy, and not have them remain a part of us, always.
But, even then, I needn’t worry. Ichabod will be here in every story and book I write. And books, like love, can last forever.
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