As the priest said at my Mom and Dad’s funeral, “There is nothing good about death.” And as Peter Gethers quoted in this book, The Cat Who’ll Live Forever: The Final Adventures of Norton, the Perfect Cat, and His Imperfect Human, “the only thing wrong with our pets is they don’t live as long as we do.”
I knew this was about Norton’s last years and his death. Even though I enjoyed the previous books, The Cat Who Went to Paris and A Cat Abroad, I avoided reading The Cat Who’ll Live Forever until this week. I don’t know what prompted me to read it now, but I am glad I did.
You see, Peter Gethers loves Norton. All through The Cat Who’ll Live Forever Mr. Gethers marvels at how his cat touched people’s lives, how they recognized he was so special. What Mr. Gethers does not seem to realize is that we saw Norton as special because Peter Gethers made him special to us.
True, none of my cats could come to a fancy restaurant with me and not end up on the table with their noses in the butter. And I wouldn’t want any of them to walk miles with me down the beach. But each of them had their own wonderful habits that made them incredibly special – and loved.
Cleo was intensely loyal to me, slept on my pillow, sat on my lap. And she treated Dave like a galley slave. Plus she knew, absolutely without any question, that the only reason he didn’t open the sliding glass door in the winter to let her in was because he was stupid, not because it was all iced up.
Freddy was the sweetest, most loving little cat. He sat on my lap and slept on Dave’s face.
Lucky picked up where Freddy left off, mellow, even tempered, sweet and so loving, soft and kind. Oscar had his life’s mission to remove every ornament from the tree, even if it meant inching out on the tips of tiny branches to knock them down.
What Peter Gethers did with Norton is what I have not done with my cats. He wrote about him. He had a smart, sweet and loving cat with a lot of personality and he showed everyone just what a cat can do, how much love they give, how smart they are. We see in Norton what we see in our own cats, except magnified. Peter Gethers shows us Norton and reminds us that love is wonderful and essential.
Reading about Norton’s death made me cry all over again. For Norton. For Cleo. For Freddy. For Lucky. For Oscar. For the other cats we’ve had, even those who weren’t my cats but were family members. But most of all I cried because it is true. The only thing wrong with our pets is they don’t live long enough. And there is nothing good about death.
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