"Billy the Kit" - 2000-2012

by Salman Hameed

I have mentioned Billy the Kit (Urdu speakers should put an added emphasis on the two "Ls" in Billy) couple of times on Irtiqa. Just this past week we detected a big inoperable tumor under his tongue. He had always been healthy and led an active life. Now he is permanently a part of the White Rose Garden in Brattleboro, Vermont. I got him from an animal shelter in Las Cruces, New Mexico and, a few months later, drove across the US to western Massachusetts. He was my first pet and I just didn't realize how much these pets become a part of you. I know he was a cat - and that he didn't know anything about death. But I find it intriguing/perplexing that this loss has gone into a peculiar grief component (dedicated for non-humans) that I didn't really know that it existed. Well...almost all of the atoms in Billy's body were formed in the Big Bang and in the stars, and now they have been recycled back into our planet. So good bye to this celestial cat :)

Just this past December, the New Yorker published this fantastic poem by Franz Wright:

On the Death of a Cat

In life, death

was nothing

to you: I am

willing to wager

my soul that it

simply never occurrred

to your nightmareless

mind, while sleep

was everything

(see it raised

to an infinite

power and perfection)--no death

in you then, so now

how even less. Dear stealth

of innocence

licked polished

to an evil

luster, little

milk fang, whiskered

night

friend--

go.

- Franz Wright