Brian Buries a Cat

The other day the cat died. It was a sad event for our family, but the cat was 18, and she kind of looked like an old stuffed animal that somebody had thrown up on and then left out in the yard for a few years. In other words, she'd seen better days.

When animals figure out they're going to die, they do whatever possible to avoid you, because they just want to go lie down and die, and it's hard to go lie down and die when little kids are dragging you around, and the dog thinks you're a squeaky toy.

Anyway, she initially decided to lay in the litter box and die, which seemed a little too unceremonious for my wife. After all, she had gotten the cat in high school, and the cat had become a welcome presence in the family. So my wife made up a shoebox with a towel in it, and the cat layed in there and died overnight.

After some tears were shed that early morning, we decided it would better to bury the cat before the kids woke up, instead of them seeing a dead cat laying in a shoebox. So we plopped the cat in a garbage bag, and set out by the light of the moon to dig a cat grave.

The first thing I noticed was that it was way colder than I had expected. The cat had died the night of the first freeze in Minnesota, so the ground was really hard. The second problem was that our backyard is full of trees, so therefore the underground part of our yard is full of tree roots. The third complication was that it was pitch dark. So here we are, holding a dead cat in a garbage bag, trying to dig through frozen, root filled ground in the dark. As you might imagine, this did not go well.

After about 20 minutes of getting consistently stymied by roots, hard ground, and the occasional rogue giant stone, we had dug out about 10 inches of earth. You couldn't even bury a gerbil in our hole. (Get it, bury a gerbil in our hole.) I looked at my wife, with sweat dripping off me, and said,

Me: This is fuckin' impossible, maybe we can just throw her in the garbage.

Her: No way!!!

But it seemed as though she was considering this, because eventually we went inside and began googling things like, "What to do with a dead cat." While she was googling I was secretly plotting out my sneakiest route down to the park by our house which had a garbage. I figured I'd sneak over there, fling the cat in the garbage, and run off, Mission Impossible style.

Eventually we found out that it was illegal to throw your dead cat away at the park garbage so we were kind of stuck, and I had to go back out to my tiny hole. The sun had started to come up by then so it was easier to see and the ground was not as frozen, and mercifully, after a lot of swearing, I managed to dig a big enough hole to fit a cat and a garbage bag, and nobody with a broken leg saw me, Rear Window style, and thought I was trying to bury my wife.

Things appeared to be back to normal, and luckily I must have buried the cat deep enough so dog noses can't smell her and dig her up (that would be traumatic).

Before I left the house that morning, I saw that my wife had left a Facebook post that said, "Good-bye to our dear sweet Mitzah kitty." (Side note: The cat's name was Mitzah. No one has any idea why, and the wife ain't talking. I always figured she had some boyfriend named "Bobby Mitzah" or something that she didn't want me to know about.) Anyway, she had posted this nice, semi-eulogy on Facebook, and I couldn't help but notice that 6 inches above in the Google toolbar search engine was the phrase "legality of throwing a dead animal in the trash." Good gravy. Circle of life indeed.