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I'm sorry. I was responding to the people who were afraid for their old cats. Of course, I wouldn't be anything but sorry for your loss. My apologies.
This was epic! Laughing so hard here …she’s up there hissing at everyone demanding wet food with gravy ❤️The Rainbow Bridge (for Your Cat) (New Yorker)
(potential pay-wall warning!)
EDIT: Copy/pasted below.
Just this side of Heaven is a place called the Rainbow Bridge.
When an animal that has been especially close to someone here dies, that pet goes to the Rainbow Bridge—even your cat! There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends where they can run and play together. There is also a dark closet for your cat to dart into, because, well, there are a lot of dead special friends running around. Kind of hectic and exposed out there in the meadows and hills.
In the back of the dark closet is a shelf, and on that shelf is the comfiest, coziest cat bed. But your cat will go to the other side of the shelf and burrow into the stacks of expensive sweaters—sweaters that cost a fortune to dry-clean—and after a while it’s, like, fuck it, the sweaters are the cat bed now.
And that’s O.K. at the Rainbow Bridge, where all the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor, just as we remember them in our dreams. Your cat, threatened by the presence of so many healthy, vigorous animals (even though, truly, they could not care less about him and barely noticed his arrival), will start marking every part of the Rainbow Bridge, until the meadows and hills have a sort of stale ammonia smell.
The animals are content (even your cat, mostly), except for one small thing: they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind. But then the day comes when an animal pauses and looks into the distance. His eager body quivers. Suddenly, he begins to run away from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.
You have been spotted. Well, not you. That’s more an example of what happens with the dogs. When you show up, you will look around at all the happy, healthy, former pets and think, Huh. Where’s my cat? And then you will catch the ammonia smell (remember when your house smelled like that?), and you will see the dark closet, and you will know. And you will joyously throw open the closet door and yell “Felix!” and he may look up. Maybe not. Probably not. And you will clap your hands and call for him, as you used to do before you were both, you know, dead, and he will remember that sound, and the excitement in your voice, and it will disgust him. Your unquenchable thirst. Your vulgar need. And he will yawn and stretch and extend a claw and pull on a cashmere thread—a loop he’s been working all day—until, gently (oh so gently; you love this little asshole!), you reach into the closet and lift him up and cover him in kisses.
And, as you scratch his ears the way he likes, and look once more into his trusting eyes, he bites your hand for NO GODDAM REASON YOU WERE JUST PETTING HIM, and you drop him, and he runs back into the closet, and he vomits on the sweaters, and you fish him out again and then you cross Rainbow Bridge togeth—
Nope. You were halfway across, and you stepped on a stick or something, and the noise freaked him out, and he raked your chest and leaped down and ran back to the closet.
You live in the meadow now. You and your cat. For eternity.
By Kirk J. Rudell
July 14, 2018
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