Whether this is an inspirational or a cautionary tale, I can't decide. But with this question at the fore of our minds, I invite you to join the story of Dusty, my blue-eyed, white and grey-speckled cat of many years, in the last days of her life.
If perhaps lacking the wisdom of her many years, she nonetheless enjoyed the esteem of her fellows, 'ruling the roost' of the neighborhood strays who congregated behind my house. She was fat and lazy, like a white-furred Jabba the Hutt lounging at court. But she was benevolent; any cat was welcome to bask with her in the sun, and she quarreled only with those who ate more than their share of the food we left out for them. She was very much a cat of the people; no 'Fancy Feast' for Dusty, oh no—she preferred 'Alley Cat.' The cheap stuff. One could imagine her saying, with her proud, proletarian chin held aloft, "No thanks, I'll have it dry."
She had a good life, with all worldly things in abundance, and yet she wasn’t satisfied. She had been rambunctious in her youth. Man, in his hubris, had never devised a collar that Dusty hadn't managed to slink out of and discard behind the house where she supposed we'd never find it (and when eventually we did, we found no fewer than three of them in an unceremonious pile). She tolerated us, but didn't crave our attention as many cats do, and she refused to be merely a house cat. She preferred to be on the hunt, if not for socks from the laundry bin then for some woefully outmatched moth or spider she'd find in the yard and parade around the house as a trophy of her foreign conquests.
But to those fabled words of caution whispered in the ears of the great Roman conquerors—"All glory is fleeting"—she paid no heed. When, inevitably, the glory of the hunt came to elude Dusty in her later years, she longed to be on the prowl once more. "O," she meowed, "but to live again those halcyon days of my youth." Perhaps she dreamed in her many, many naps that she was a lioness on the savannah, the bane of the wildebeest. Lithe, fast, and deadly, like the fearsome cat-god Bast of Egyptian lore. And perhaps this is how she fancied herself that night when the raccoons came.
They had come before, of course. Many times. They were graceless creatures; ruthless, sharp-toothed scavengers with black, lifeless eyes, rummaging through the garbage cans for scraps—and helping themselves to what remained of the day's communal feast. Dusty, watching this from a safe perch atop a nearby car or fence, seethed. These were barbarians in her domain, eating her food. And worst of all, they fought viciously with the younger neighborhood cats who took the defense of the realm into their own paws. Many a time, the hisses and shrieks from these contests of blood, tooth, and claw awoke me from sleep, and many more a time did they haunt my dreams.
But on this night, she would tolerate no more wounds to her friends, nor to her dignity. Surely, Dusty must have known that she stood no chance. But perhaps, feeling her age, she knew also that she wasn't long for this world and that the sun wouldn’t shine on her forever. Perhaps she heeded, at long last, her memento mori and decided that this was her time. Whatever the case may be, in that moment when she reared up and pounced on those raccoons, I believe she was back on the savannah, a lioness defending her pride from hyenas. I believe this is how she would want to be remembered, and for it to be said of Dusty that she died gloriously in battle.
For Bobby and Rian, in memory of Dustcloud "Dusty" Piewacket Radisky III, 1995-2009.