Mister.

Tonight my cat Mister passed away.

While my boyfriend and I were eating dinner, my mother called.

Impromptu calls are normally do not offer any good news, and this call wasn’t any different.

When I heard her voice for the first time, it was shaky and broken.

She explained to me through tears that the family was at the vet.  Mister had become completely lethargic and immobile, and seemed to be in some pain.

I imagined our 17 year-old cat lying on the table with Mom, Dad, and Steven gathered frantically around him.

My family has always loved our animals with the deepest parts of our hearts, and Mister probably held our strongest devotion, because he was our first pet.

Dad was a supervisor of a processing cannery when I was young.  Often he would bring home treats – homemade tamales, children’s gifts, and tons of ketchup.

One day he brought home a big box with a kitten inside—a black and white mess with gold eyes who possessed the ability to make us all fall in love.  I remember begging mom to let him sleep with me every night.

One of my favorite memories is on one of those nights I placed him in bed with me.  I reached up to turn on my ceiling fan, and it made a loud whiiiir.  Suddenly the poor cat fell face first from fright back into his box on the floor.  Poor little traumatized Mister.

And so I sat, reminiscing, choked up with tears in the corner of a restaurant while my childhood pet and friend was dying on a table without me there.

Mom put her phone up to his ear for me, “I love you, Mister.  I’m sorry I’m not there,” I said, trying not to sob.  “You were a good cat.”

“I love you,” I whispered again. “You were a good cat.”

I was in pain and panic because the night previous to this my boyfriend told me there is no Heaven for animals.

I don’t know what made me ask him, but I know immediately that I regretted it.  Every childhood pet, every piece of love I had ever known was suddenly nonexistent?  They weren’t in Heaven?  My heart broke upon hearing that, and it certainly didn’t make tonight any easier.

There has to be a pet Heaven.  There has to be something for the precious, precious treasures that God has given us.  They must know something of God’s love, too?  I can’t imagine them not having a soul.  Just being a “consciousness.”

They cry, they hurt, they can be happy, they can love—how can there be no Heaven for them?

I prayed enormously to God last night that my boyfriend is wrong.  I prayed while sitting on the phone, distressed, and insane, Please God, please tell me You have a special place for my cat.  Please tell me that You are holding him right now and You love him.  Please love him.  Please love him.  Please love him.

Maybe I prayed for all the wrong things, I don’t know.  I do know that I prayed from the heart—more desperately than I have done in a long time.

I just can’t understand why there wouldn’t be a special place for them.

In What Dreams May Come, there is a flashback when the family is putting their pet to sleep.  The young girl isn’t happy at all.

“So you’re going to kill my dog?”

“Yes, I’m going to help her die.”

“Where will she go?”

“She’ll go where we all go…and how can that be bad?”

At the end of our evening, I asked my boyfriend, “Is my cat in Heaven?”

He hesitated, supposedly knowing the true answer.  “I can’t say that.”

“Then what can you say?” I urged.

“He’s in a better place,” which reminded me of that moment in the movie, where there was comfort in knowing that there was a place.

“There’s nothing in the Bible that specifically says animals don’t go to Heaven?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Then they could go to Heaven?”

“It’s possible.”

Tonight on a friend’s Facebook I read, “God orchestrates the impossible.”

So, if God makes all things possible, then all things are possible.

Mister is with Him now.  I believe that.  My heart won’t let me believe anything else.