Dead Fucking Cat

If love has a habit, it may be this: to outlast our understanding of it. Not by conquering every dark moment but by remaining after the darkness has had its say. By enduring where it should have broken.

Love did not save my grandfather from PTSD, or from alcohol, or from the ways he left my grandmother to hold their babies and household together with grit and whatever strength she could find. But somehow the habit of love remained. Even when his mind wandered off to a far shore, some tender part of him still seemed to know the shape of their life together. Love’s habit, I suppose. In the end, I believe Clifford Shelby died faithful to Lorna in the deepest way a man can be faithful, and I believe she remained faithful to him too, all the way through.

I try to picture them young, coming alive in the stories my dad tells. I see a bright room, music going, a 1940s dance floor, the smell of gin - I’m not sure why I think of gin but I do - and the two of them stepping toward one another before either could know what life would ask of them. My grandmother wears red lipstick with smooth auburn hair, a smart handbag and patent leather shoes. My grandfather smooths his uniform, hair slicked, moviestar eyes smiling as he reaches for her gloved hand. I see them there, embracing whatever counted then as modern life, with its shine and speed and nervous hope. 

My grandpa was well liked, that much is clear from the momentos left from his time in the army. His fellow servicemen seemed to take to him. And yet reading the stacks of information carefully collected by my dad, I found myself newly struck by how small in stature my grandfather was. In my childhood memory he seemed like any grandfather, solid and sufficient and of a size to fill the world allotted him. But in reality he was little enough to fit in the belly turret of a metal warplane, little enough to be sent down into an icy, unpressurized bubble, strapped into the fetal position for hours while the sky broke open around him. I think of the noise of it, the roar of the engines and the crash of the explosions, his breath a white puff, the double plexiglass rattling against the metal frame while he aimed and fired, aimed and fired, aimed and fired. 

I think too of the boy he had been before any of that, orphaned and hungry throughout the great depression, and I wonder whether hunger had a hand in his smallness, whether want itself can shape a body. He had hoped to be a pilot, but that was not to be his place in the story. His place was lower down, tucked into the underbelly, hate tracking him from the earth and the air.

My dad told me that Grandpa was in the chow hall when Pearl Harbor was hit. Last year my sister and I went there and paid for a ticket to ride on the ferry, and I stood looking over the water trying to imagine him in Honolulu, moving through some of those same streets, seeing the same harbor, not yet knowing what would be required of him. I gazed with a hundred other tourists at the wall of names, the shadows of sunken ships beneath the shimmering water, little bubbles from the wreckage still finding their way to the surface. The world must have felt unsteady then, as if it had tilted and might never right itself again. Sometimes I think I feel the echoes of that in the world I see now.

My dad once told me his parents had saved every letter they ever wrote each other. I believed him, though it sounded like the kind of family legend that grows more improbable with time. Then one day he called me out of the blue and said, “You’ll never guess what I found.”

“What?” I said, expecting some small thing from my childhood, a crayon drawing, a photograph, one of those little relics that survive people and outlast memory by sheer stubbornness. Something delightful, I guessed.

“The letters,” he said. “The letters my parents wrote to each other.”

After my grandmother died, my dad had been cleaning out her house, finding here and there the little proofs of a life carefully tended: cards wrapped in red twine, trinkets, bits of paper saved for reasons that may once have been obvious and now felt holy in all their mystery. He told me that when his parents fought, my grandfather would sometimes shout out, “I’m going to burn all the letters,” and my grandmother would shout back, “Go ahead.” So my dad had assumed, over the years, especially through the hard stretches, that maybe some or all of them had indeed gone up in smoke. He had never seen them. He had only imagined them somewhere hiding in a back closet, tied with string or stacked in a box, diminished little by little by anger and time.

“I was cleaning out the garage,” he told me, “and I stuck a broom underneath a big wooden shelf and hit something. And guess what I found?”

“The letters?” I said.

“NO,” he said, and he was laughing now. “It was a dead fucking cat.”

He let that sit there.

“A dead fucking cat,” he said again. “Mummified. It had been there forever in that dry garage heat.” 

“Wow,” I said, because what else was there to say.

“A dead fucking cat,” he repeated, still astonished by the majesty of it, or maybe the horror.

“Okay,” I said. “I get it.”

My dad rarely cursed, and almost never like that. So I knew he was not just telling a story. He was reliving the weirdness of it. The Indiana Jones jumpscare of it.

“No,” he said. “It was behind the dead fucking cat in a big, wide metal box.”

And there they were. Neatly arranged by date, still tucked in their envelopes, letters written back and forth from the time my grandfather met my grandmother at a dance while he was in boot camp until just before he came home from flying all those missions. There is something almost unbearable to me in that image: all the longing between them outlasting the years that should have broken them, surviving grief and marriage and arguments and the slow drift of alzheimers, only to be lost behind the creepy guardianship of a feline mummy in a dusty Northern California garage. Somehow the words and the truth behind them endured, long after the darkness had its say. It really is love’s habit, I suppose. 

My dad chuckled, quieter this time, almost to himself.

“A cat. A dead fucking cat,” he said.