By Jan Chaffin March 9, 2021

My Mom died eight years ago yesterday and since then I’ve attempted to unpack the 50 plus boxes of mementos and heirlooms. Among them is a photograph of my Mom’s Mom taken by my cousin Loy. I decided to hang it above the pantry of my 1890’s house. It seemed like the right place for a photo of her holding a recently canned jar of white potatoes. She is standing in her own canning pantry lined with shelves of nutritious future meals in neatly ordered rows of glass jars. 

She is neither proud nor shy. She is capable, appreciative, kind and has the strongest arms I’ve ever seen! She is smiling and filled with grace. Her hair is drawn back into a functional bun and she is wearing oval wire rim bifocals. Her short-sleeved flowered smock has been lovingly hand-washed and well-worn. The sunlight from my kitchen window is fading her photograph and I’ve debated moving it. But it’s already getting too light and I have a more preserved scan on a thumb drive somewhere.

Her strong arms held eight healthy babies and raised them mostly on her own. Before her husband John passed away, she hitched a wagon to her horse every Friday and rode twenty miles from Arrowhead Mountain to fetch him from his job constructing some of UVa in Charlottesville. Every Sunday, she made the same trip to return him to his dorm. In between, she planted, harvested, canned and prepared food for her entire family.

I visited the Hurtt homestead with my cousin Betty after my Mom died. The property is no longer in our family, but we were able to wander around and peer into the separate stone, mortar and wood-crafted “cold” kitchen for canning as well as the main and outhouses. From photos and stories, I could imagine the entire family crawling into chilly beds with heated rocks and chamber pots.

My Mom adored her Mom. When the children had to split up after Grandpapa died, Mom went with Grandma to live in town. My Mom’s grace and beauty were admired by my Father, who lived next door. He immediately declared he was going to marry her someday. And so he did, before he went off to land on Omaha Beach during the WWII Normandy Invasion.

So much fades away. Family, friends, youth. Even though the photograph is fading, I smile whenever I glance up at her, because her arms give me strength. I am her daughter’s daughter and I too have strong arms.

By Jan Chaffin March 6, 2021

I buried my cat where he last spent time-beside my house, under a blue potato bush facing the ocean.

As with the deaths of all my pets, I agonized over his. Mostly because COVID and my cowardice conspired to cause him unnecessary suffering and even more because I wasn’t ready for him to go.

Nonetheless, for the past four months (I keep track of the days since burial-so far one hundred twenty) I’ve found immense comfort in tending to and sitting by his grave.

I placed a marble tile on top, a bronze angel on the window trim and a vase of purple roses by his flagstone headstone which I continue to replace as needed. A friend added an exquisite Day of the Dead cat effigy.

I sweep the flagstone path and trim branches of the pineapple guava tree. It has naturally grown into the shape of a little grotto where I’ve placed a plastic chair to stealthily sit and meditate (and drink beer).

I visit every day. My cat died November 6, 2020 and at first his grave was all dirt. Now it is early March 2021 and bright yellow buttercups and tall spring grass have grown all around. I imagine his remains somehow nourishing the soil. He  is in these bright blades of grass and tall yellow flowers…

Could it have been another way? Because it happened, was it supposed to happen? I’ll never know. He stopped eating. I called the new vet, emailed frantically three times, They emailed me back that the doctor has received my email and will respond when he has time. EIGHT days later, he calls. It is the day after I buried my cat.

Apparently a lot of people acquired pets during the COVID shelter in place. I felt so scared and confused. The vet had thought he was in fairly good shape just a month ago (“he purrs a lot”) and put him on all sorts of meds. Sigh. He was probably in much more pain than I knew. Way too late, the vet agreed he must have indeed had underlying cancer or another issue after all just as the first vet suspected ten months earlier.

I couldn’t imagine going through those lonely fearful months during lockdown and the fires without him. Maybe that’s what pets do. Hang around for their humans.

Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last ten months frantically trying to feed him after his cancer diagnosis. Maybe if I had kept him on the meds even after he started failing again the last time. Maybe he was asking me to take him to the vet when he seemed to rally and greet me at my car and even get in the back door.

Maybe I should have taken him to the dreaded ER when the vet went awol. Maybe the last day when he growled morning and night at my forced syringe feedings, maybe that was the time to throw in the towel.

Maybe I should have been OK with being forced to leave him unexpectedly for eight hours when the vet said it would just be an hour. Maybe the vet shouldn’t have agreed to take us on with so many new patients already. When he couldn’t call back for EIGHT days during my cat’s worst crisis. Maybe it was the worst time in modern history to be sick.

Maybe it was his time.

If I sit quietly near his grave, sometimes stretched right out in front of it in the glorious full sun, I see him sitting looking at me and the passersby with his big beautiful almond eyes. I feel his nose nuzzle my leg. I reach down and pet his furry neck with the fatty tumor on the right side. I palm his reactive back and stroke his tail with the single lump near its end. I see his unevenly white-pawed feet and gaze upon his magnificent splendor. A great cat. And sometimes he is right there with me. And always he is right there with me.

If I sit quietly under the canopies of the pineapple guava tree and the blue potato bushes, loud little flurries of birds perch on the branches above. They nibble, look at me, at everything, seeing millions more colors and details than I can, then spring aloft to another branch, another tree.  They make the most amazing sounds, the swoosh of branches as they spring back, the whirl of the flapping air as their wings stir up tiny tornados. Bees, ants, butterflies, squirrels… So much life at his gravesite. The irony is not lost on me. So much to mourn. So much to celebrate as I sit with him under the blue potato bush.

RIP Jeweled Prince Duke Giuliano Kuleano