With this new book, we’ve divided the chapters according to our interests and expertise, and then trade chapters and edit and add to each other’s stuff. We haven’t reached the trade chapters segment of this process yet. Right now, I, Trish, am working on the Animals Attuned chapter, which is about how animals often act as vehicles for spirit contact. In some ways, writing this chapter is an excavation, where I uncover experiences that happened long ago, but which remain so vivid in my memory it’s as if they happened yesterday. And this memory is about a one-eyed Himalayan cat I adopted from the animal control center in Tallahassee, Florida, when I was in graduate school.
I named him Demian, after the Herman Hesse book. He moved all over Florida with me. He endured my prepublication rants, rejoiced the day my first short story was purchased, celebrated with Rob and me when my first novel was bought in 1983. He was my feline buddy, he always had my back. Even on our road trips, he perched on the top of my seat in the car, his body spread out so that at least one of his paws rested against my shoulder.
When Rob and I got married, he and Demian were the only males in our household. Demian would sit in Rob’s lap as he wrote, would sleep on Rob’s side of the bed at night, would settle in his lap whenever he could. Rob nicknamed his Doolittle. He loved having another male in the house.
Around the time Doolittle hit fourteen, he developed kidney problems. The vet said we could opt for dialysis until a kidney became available, and that the transplant would have to take place in Atlanta, at a facility that did them. We brought Doolittle home, babied him for a few days, discussed our options. In the end, we didn’t want to subject him to all these medical procures and returned to the vet’s for the final injection.
Anyone who has owned a pet they have had to put down knows what this is like. There’s a moment when your beloved pet looks at you, stretches a paw to touch your arm, licks the back of your hand, locks eyes with you, and you know that he knows. You feel his consciousness touching yours and you’re choked up and want to scream, Stop the IV, stop this, stop this. But you don’t say a word. The animal makes some small, final sound. Sometimes you see the soul as it leaves the body, a pale wisp like smoke. Sometimes you just feel the soul’s departure. That’s how it was with Doolittle.
We buried him on the condo property somewhere, in a little shoebox. And here’s where it gets strange and wonderful. About four months after his death, I dreamed that I went downstairs into the kitchen to find something to eat, and Doolittle was at his bowl, chowing down. “Doolittle,” I exclaimed in the dream. “What’re you doing here? You’re dead.”
He raised his head and regarded me with that single clear blue eye. “Not really. And I’m coming back. You’ll know me.”
He was telling me that he was moving on, returning, preparing himself for whatever would come next in his scheme of things.
The next day, I scoured the newspaper for a kitten for sale. I took the dream Demian at his word, figured the rebirth had happened immediately, and came home with a beautiful tabby female kitten who was with us for a decade. But she was not Demian. He had lost his left eye before I adopted him, a cat fight, one vet said, where a claw had penetrated the retina and rendered him blind in that eye, which was there but covered with scar tissue that turned his eye a milky white.
Skip ahead several years. Megan is seven or eight. A friend has a Golden Retriever that needs a home. We adopt Jessie. I take her to the vet for her shots. The vet says, Your dog has scar tissue of some sort in her left eye. It doesn’t affect her vision, it’s just there and you should be aware of it. Physical evidence that goes from life to life is well documented in humans. There’s nothing about it in relation to animals. But I knew. I felt it. Jessie was Doolittle. We had her for eleven great years. In all, this animal soul was with us for 25 years. Every time I feed a stray cat or dog or bird, I ask, first, Hey, Doo, is it you?
I’m still waiting for a definitive answer. A bark, a meow, a tweet, a voice.
