by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

New Orleans was very busy, both the city itself and my visiting my daughter there for ten days. What with two visits to French Quarter Fest, two Seders, digging up a couple of upstart trees in my baby's mama's back yard, keeping to my usual Herculean publishing schedule, and being available when my daughter had free time, there was quite a lot to do.

I remember my first encounter with the word "talisman." I might have been 15 and was reading Richard Braughtigan. He observed the red light out at the tip of the airplane's wing blinking like a talisman as he flew through the night. My daughter, S, is for me a magical charm, more powerfully so when we are physically together. My perspect shifts. Things ripen, or I become aware that they have ripened.

I am proud of our increasing ability to acknowledge and celebrate our intimacy. We've always been two peas in a pod, but we've gotten better at basking in our understanding and love. I've seen signs of my greater emotional receptivity (perhaps related to my lowering levels of testosterone) in my relationships with others. But the most obvious, dramatic measure is in my relationship with S. I'm less anxious, less occupied with my own trautmatic emotional history. I'm better able to enjoy the goodness that is available.

I got home from that brief Cajun visit late Friday night, two days ago, driven back through the very still, dark night from the airport in Léon. I arrived at 12:30 to a very sick cat. My downstairs neighbor, B, who had taken care of Fellini twice before, did not mentioned that he was ill. It was only the next morning, responding to my queries that she told me that Fellini had not been eating for a week.

It did not occur to me that a large part of the poor creature's listlessness could be due to dehydration, until alerted to that possibility by my daughter, whom I messaged that morning. I went out right away and bought the largest syringe I could. I should have gone home right away, I really wish I had, and immediately forced diluted yogurt (the electrolytes are key) into Fellini's mouth. It only would only have taken another quarter of an hour. But, much to my shame, not realizing how serious things were, I delayed for a pair of hours, returning only after a rather extended visit to the Saturday Market.

I don't get out much, and for someone who claims to be building a community platform (an ecosystem like Facebook, but local) that is a disadvantage. But while I was socializing and doing business, Fellini was dying.

When I did get home, I did force two syringes of the dilute yogurt into Fellini's mouth, more than half of which he swallowed as he lay too weak to protest on the hard tile floor. (At the end, he wouldn't stay on any soft bedding.)

For ten days before I left, along with his dry food, I had been feeding him chicken, not his usual tuna. The supply of chicken lasted for three or four days after I left. Given this, B, trying to feed him while I was away, at first thought his reluctance to eat was a combination of his sadness at my absence and his holding out for chicken, assumptions which I could have told her were false on both counts (he loved tuna), if she had only let me know. Still, leaving no stone unturned, on my way home from the Saturday Market, I stopped and bought a half of a chicken breast, which was already cooking while I was trying to rehydrate my flaccid cat.

Better times
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Ten minutes after the second, I administered a third syringe of liquids, and ten minutes after that, a fourth, which was too much. He spent his last energy vomiting up not quite half of what he had taken in. Then, with his belly still slightly convulsing, he stretched his front and hind legs, which twitched slightly when fully extended, in what I did not recognize as a death spasm, then relaxed. Getting up to turn down the pot of chicken on the stove, I left off caressing him. When I returned, not five minutes later, he had stopped breathing. His eyes, closed during this illness, were now wide open, staring forward.

English, mixing Latin and Germanic roots, has many more words than Spanish, which has only Latin, and a little bit of Arabic. "Savage" (from the Latin; "salvage" in Spanish) and "wild" (from the German) are good examples of the myriad of synonyms available to the English speaker. Fellini was both savage and wild, both fierce (a real assassin) and barely domesticated.

It's true that especially as he got older he liked laps, mine or my guests'. However, in a shining example of epigenetics, he never got over his street cat ancestory. Free to come and go at will (through a catdoor or window), he was yet ever-wary, never fully relaxed indoors.

Up on the roof of our old home in San Antonio, stretched out on the concrete, Fellini used some detached tree limbs as scratching posts. But here at our new home, rejecting every limb or old plank of wood I presented him with, he prefered to knead the leather couch that came with the place. Despite my clear, forcefully expressed disapproval, he persisted, leaving fields of tiny claw holes in the upholstery, that are only visible on close inspection. I had to cover most of the no doubt expensive couch's surfaces with long wooden boards and thick blankets or I would have been charged for the damage on leaving.

For the same reason, I had to keep a tiny rug (a decorative piece made for the top of a toilet tank) near at hand while I sat working because, before settling down onto my lap, he'd blissfully knead my upper thigh, the points of his claws passing right through my pants, sometimes drawing blood.

They say you get the cat that you deserve, and it's fair to observe that for most of my life my claws have also been too pointed, making it difficult for others to give me affection. As I confessed above, it has only been in these later years that I have really begun to get over my own wary, wild vigilance, and been able to better enjoy the ample (if imperfect) rewards of where and who I am.

Originally, for the first year and a half of his life, Fellini had been my (now ex) girlfriend Veronica's cat. Then, right at the beginning of our relationship, ten tears ago, she and he moved in with me. When her son came back from summer vacation she moved out, but Fellini stayed with me, actually running back from her place.

Earlier yesterday afternoon, with Fellini not yet cold on the floor of the back bedroom, Veroniça called. After chatting about this and that for a while, I broke the news. She took it hard. There, on our video call, her eyes filled up with tears. But she was brave for me. After a short exchange about whether it was possible to close a dead cat's eyes, I positioned the phone so that she could see me placing Fellini's corpse into a white pillowcase, the act giving both her and me some comfort. Shortly after that, we said goodbye.

Physically exhausted and emotionally overwrought, with the door to the back bedroom closed, I lay down to nap. New Orleans had been very busy. I went to bed too late, woke too early and the day had been too exciting.

Before going to sleep I like to read a little. Now, reading short chapter by short chapter, I'm approaching the end of a long book, The Family Moskat by IB Singer. Lying down, I picked the book up off my night table where it had sat while I was in New Orleans. Actually, I had read a very little the night before, somewhat less than a chapter, not continuing because I was just too tired. Now, before napping, resuming where I left off, I read about a pair of lovers, introduced in the early pages of the book, 25 years earlier, who were also in bed, also about to sleep. Now both in their 60's, she tells him that a recent x-ray has revealed what is probably a cancerous growth on her spleen. He, affectionately calling her "little idiot," insists that not all tumors are cancer. She replies that she knows that this is her end. After a few moments of reflection, after a lifetime of companionship, he buries his face in her hair and cries. Reading that, I burst into tears myself.

I had teared up a little on the phone with Vero, my voice cracking once or twice. But there in bed, I had a proper sob, complete with hysterical gasping for air. A bit of wisdom I learned as a child from Fred Flinstone, once again proved true: "If you lie on your back and cry, tears will get in your ears." After a while, I calmed down, blew my nose, and fell asleep.

After a multi-hour nap, waking just as the sun was ready to set, I went across the street to Catalino's garden and scouted a place for Fellini's grave. After that, my nextdoor neighbors being out in front of their house, I took the opportunity to borrow a shovel from them without saying why: "You are going to dig up a treasure, eh?" It's what up north is called a "coal-shovel." With a flat, unpointed edge it's used here mostly for shoveling sand to mix concrete. Not made for digging, I hoped it would do the job.

The salmon sun setting over the Guanajuato Mountains, I went a for short bicycle ride, as I daily do for the health of body and mind. Then, as it got dark I got digging, working by the light on my phone. I could have waited for morning, but I don't have permission to bury bodies in the garden, and I didn't want to leave the corpse overnight in my apartment.

Using a hoe I found in the garden as a pick, the rocks uncovered being small and easily pried up with the shovel, the work proceeded more or less smoothly. The excavated earth eventually filled three plastic five-pails, handily available in the garden. Slight of build and 67 years old, I came close but managed not to overstrain my lower back. (A longer shovel handle would have been more ergonomically correct.)

When the grave was deep and wide enough (the process taking the best part of two hours) I went back to my apartment to fetch the dearly departed. His body already stiffening, inside his white linen shroud, it took a little coaxing, but he curled up nicely in the hole for his final rest. The earth poured from the buckets in on top of him, I covered the grave with a set of stones. This was to keep any scavenger from digging him up, but creating a burial monument made me feel positively Viking: "Yes, Death, you have won again. But we will make a structure over which your power will fail."

The couple downstairs was coming home just as I was coming in out of the night. They were very sympathetic when I told them that Fellini had died. But I wish B had been sympathetic earlier, and had told me when Fellini stopped eating, or, at least, when it was obvious that he was sick, so that I could have suggested rehydration. When I messaged B a couple of days earlier, Wednesday morning from New Orleans, asking her to water the inside plants, she wrote back, "No te preocupes," "Don't worry." She wet the plants, but let the cat dry out.

Maybe it's just me, but I would feel terrible if someone's cat died while I was supposedly caring for it. Maybe I'll say something to her, when my pain is not so fresh. Maybe (and this would be best) she'll apologize on her own.

It will be strange not to have Fellini greeting me in the morning and looking up expectantly when I come back home from an outing. I already miss my looking up from this computer to watch him come and go, balancing along the extended front metal wall (three double car doors and one for people), weaving his sure-footed way through its crown of coiled barbed wire. I feel robbed.

Goodbye, little buddy. I'm sorry.

Life, with certain glaring exceptions, is a story that we tell ourselves. So ends a chapter of my tale and the whole of Fellini's book.

Then, of course, in addition to this one loss, I meditate poignantly upon death in general. On the one hand, I'm sure that our consciousness is our soul, and that something as elegant as our mind is not just erased when our body gives out. On the other hand, I feel something infinitely precious, fragile and brief about this particular incarnation. Here come the tears, again.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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