RIP Dapper Dan

I got home the other day from grocery shopping — you know the kind we are used to doing now, mask on and six feet apart. Things went well until I got a call from my neighbor Amanda. “I’ve got very bad news,” she said. My heart froze. I said, “Nothing has happened to Dapper Dan, I hope?” But our beloved neighborhood cat that I gave lodging to had been hit by a car. He was gone.

Shock to the psyche:

Whatever adrenaline courses through ones’s life system, for me, it was shock rather than grief. I couldn’t fully imagine why and how it had happened. For me, he continued to be alive and well. Amanda was in tears, but I was struggling to take in this news that I could barely believe.

Dapper playing in my dreams:

Dapper kept appearing in my mind running after a leaf in the yard, leaping onto the railing around the porch and lying beside me on the wicker furniture. (Dapper was the kind of cat who would always come when you called him.) I tried to remember when I last saw him and how our interaction went. It was similar to what you imagine thinking about your last words to a best friend or a family member. Was I kind and was I compassionate? I have not slept much, but I do keep calling out to Dapper and he is running to me as if nothing has happened.

Dapper was one of a kind:

Power and mystery surround cats. They are both closely linked with humans and yet they move freely in their own world. This was Dapper Dan’s world — both free and dependent. Jung wrote a lot about the human psyche and its relationship to cats. There will be no replacing Dapper Dan. He was one of a kind, just as we all are one of a kind.

In Emily Dickinson’s short poem below she writes that love is not only boundless, but it is also central to our existence and prefigures it. Dapper Dan will always be remembered as a cat “well loved.”

Love is anterior to life
 
Love is anterior to life,  
  Posterior to death,  
Initial of creation, and  
  The exponent of breath.

Emily Dickinson