"When Brandi, the cat, died"

By Janet Chancellor

     When Brandi, the cat, died, I dug a hole and buried her in the back yard of the house I lived in then, and, coincidentally, live in again.

     In the last 25 years the house has been rented to numerous tenants, and now I can’t remember exactly where Brandi is buried.  I think of her sometimes when I’m pulling weeds, or planting vegetables.

     Brandi died suddenly. The neighbor’s dog got loose.  He ran into our backyard, grabbed Brandi by the neck and shook her.  I’m not sure if the dog broke her neck, or if she had a heart attack.  I do remember howling out loud.  I remember that the neighbors actually put their dog down and bought me a yellow rose bush, which I also can’t find in the now overgrown backyard. Tenants!

     I put Brandi in a shoe box and buried her in the backyard.  When I finished, I had an impulse to dig her back up – to check on her one more time, to make sure she wasn’t just sleeping.

     I loved Brandi.  She was an inside-outside cat growing up in our small, safe, peaceful town.  I had no fear of leaving the unscreened window in my bedroom open so Brandi could jump through it --in and out, in and out-- during the night.  

     This lasted until my three year old niece, Jessica, spent the night at our house.  She was afraid of the open window. She is the same niece who, a year and a half earlier, had told me about God.  

     Jessica was visiting my office– I guess I was “babysitting” her although she spent more time with us, my daughter and I, than she did at her own home--when I asked her, “Do you know about God?”

     She said, “Yes.”

     I said, “He is so good to us.”

     She said, “You call God He?”

     I said, “Well, Mother/Father God.”

And then she answered with words I will never forget, “God is Central.”

     I couldn’t respond.  I was dumb-founded, literally.  Earlier that morning I had taken a Polaroid of Jessie climbing onto a folding chair trying to pull herself up.  She was balancing on the tip of one shiny black shoe, trying to reach her knee up to the chair’s padded seat. I wrote on the back of the photo: “Jessica, not quite two,” and the words, “God is Central.” 

     And so, eighteen months later, when Jessica wanted me to close the open window, I didn’t ask any questions or try to convince her otherwise.  I didn’t explain Brandi’s midnight routine. I merely closed the window.

     When she was nine, I showed Jessie the photo I had taken of her climbing onto the office chair.  I told her about that day seven years earlier… 

     And she asked me, “What does Central mean?”