Prodigal

The church at midnight mass 24 Dec 2015. Looking like gingerbread by moonlight.

How quickly we have moved away from the hushed celebration of Christmas, whizzed past the Chinese New Year and now we are squat in the middle of a rather un-austere Lent.

 

The acclimatisation from east coast to west coast takes its toll differently on each one of us, predominately in the availability of choices, and whilst we were all enrapt within ourselves, we overlooked the totem truth that what we are to each other matters more than what we can get out of the place we are situated in.

Antonio. So named was this kitten of a stray when he walked in,
 reasons being obvious

 

Eleven days of anguish visited us when Antonio took his late night walk on the 18th last month and failed to turn up at his usual spot at the front door the morning after.

 

Such agony over a pet, and the unimaginable horror over anyone's loss of a loved one formed the chromatography of emotions and memories that flogged our minds, such that the passing of another great life from my own, that of my grandmother, ran in somewhat muted parallel while we hoped and lost hope over Antonio. The fact is, I know what my grandmother's troubled life did to her, and this eternal rest was given in such timeliness at her laudable age of 92, to nobody better deserving within my little circle of kith and kin. I found more peace in being resigned to her going than the void of not knowing what happened to that infuriating but sweet feline. How true it is then that closure is a means to coping with, while not mitigating the sting of, loss.

 

My grandmother, the grand matriarch on my mother's side of the family, passed into the great beyond on the 17th of February, after a very brief struggle for breath, having survived a failing heart from as far back as 2008. With her departure, went also the only ally I ever had on my mother's side of the family. She may have needed someone better sighted than herself for the passage ahead, and took Antonio along with her as a seeing eye cat. The timing thereof seemed logical.

 

Or perhaps, as Brenda would put it in her irreverently macabre way, that Granny had already begun interceding for her grandson without so much as a siesta upon reaching the other shores. She would be in the know from her current seat, that the rosaries I offered during the nightly prayers for her over the week were rife with entreaties for Antonio rather than for her soul, which I knew had already found a good place in paradise. At least that would explain the utterly bizarre manner in which one week after Granny's funeral, Antonio meowed indignantly outside our bedroom window on the roof ledge no less, at 0300 Sunday morning. Just the night before, not four hours back did we toast the cat replete with a deserved eulogy, and awakened by an unbelievably familiar voice, we both literally leapt out of bed to reel him in through the window. Presented for proof before the court comprising our well awakened children, there were tears of relief and joy.

 

Life sucks. We really ought to be glad when it doesn't. And utterly jubilant when she beams at us.

Thank you, Grandma.