Farewell Bender

Come see the new mobile-friendly website!

Something happened last night around 3:30 am. My girlfriend and I were sleeping peacefully under the covers, surrounded by our menagerie of two cats and a dog. Suddenly, Bender cried out, jumped from the bed, landed on the floor, and then he was gone. One moment he was there and the next he was gone.

When I say he was there, I am referring to my friend, the one who reminded me every evening to put food in his bowl and demanded attention any time I was busy. You could never deny that Bender was there. He was the friendliest, most obnoxious cat I ever knew.

When I say he was gone, I don’t mean he disappeared. The part of him that was blood and bones on the inside, flesh and orange fur on the outside was still there lying on the carpeted floor of our bedroom, but Bender was gone. As I picked his little head up and looked into his eyes, I could see that something was missing.

If we lived closer to the clinic where my girlfriend works as a veterinarian, she could have put him on kitty life support. She could have hooked him up to machines, pumped air into his lungs, moved blood through his veins and fed him through a tube. That would have kept his body alive, but I know that whatever it was that was missing would still have been gone.

I have written much lately about the purpose of life and the nature of God, but it was a very rotund 2-year old cat named Bender that really made it sink in. Life is more than a body breathing in and out. It is more than eating and eliminating waste, more than chasing bugs. Twelve hours ago I looked into Bender’s eyes and he was there. Six hours ago I looked again and he was gone. His eyes were there, still warm and moist as ever, but the spark of his soul was missing.

Some people say that when the body dies, life is over. They say that the soul is a concept fabricated by the wishful thinking of those who fear death and want to believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe in the soul because I am afraid to die. Life is far scarier to me than death. I believe because I sense something eternal within me, something that inhabits this blood and bones, flesh and fur body of mine, something very much like the spark that was in Bender’s eyes before he died.

I don’t know why some people look into the eyes of a friend and see only the physical part of what is there looking back. Bender had a personality, an air about him that was more than met the eye. He loved me and made sure I knew it at the most inconvenient times. I will miss him.

Tags: cat, death, pet, soul