COLUMN: A death in the family

From Joel Chasnoff's "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96 From Joel Chasnoff's "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96When a pet passes on, her grieving ownersFrom Joel Chasnoff's "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96When a pet passes on, her grieving ownersface numerous unexpected problems. From Joel Chasnoff's "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96When a pet passes on, her grieving ownersface numerous unexpected problems.The sign was posted on a telephone pole just outside of the Town Hall: "reward! missing since october 15: male dog, recently castrated, blind, missing right ear, walks with a limp. Answers to the name Lucky." My family has had at least one cat in the house ever since I can remember. When I was born, there was Piccolo, a small tabby cat who loved to roll around on the cement in front of our apartment. Unfortunately for Piccolo, the cement in front of our apartment was a six-lane freeway, so Piccolo never did make it past the road kill stage of feline development. After Piccolo came Pooky. Pooky was treated like one of the family from the start. She had her own bedroom, and, on every third Saturday night of the month, my dad would lend her the keys to our Studebaker. (Of course, cats don't drive. But, then again, my family never had a Studebaker.) Pooky used to sleep next to my bed every night, "protecting me," as my mother said, from nighttime harm. Pooky moved with us from one apartment in Chicago to the next and finally to our house in Evanston. She never asked for much. That's probably because she didn't know how to talk. But even so, she was a loyal cat, not one to impose upon her owners. Pooky had always been such a part of our lives that it came as quite a shock when she died on that cold January morning in 1985. She was 14 years old, which, in cat years, made her 98. Of course, in cat years, that meant she should've been Bat Mitzvahed when she was two-and-a-half. But I don't think Pooky was Jewish; certainly, she wasn't Orthodox. I was the one who discovered Pooky as she lay still beneath the dining room table. I didn't even know she had passed on when I first saw her. I poked Pooky with my Obi Wan Kenobe Star Wars figure. She didn't move. I tried with Han Solo, and when she still didn't react, I knew she had moved on to the big litter box in the sky. My father found the best shoebox we had. If we bent Pooky's tail and tucked it beneath her cold tummy, she would just fit inside. She looked cuter than a pair of brand new Nikes (hi-tops, of course). We went outside to the backyard -- just my mother, father, my two brothers, me and a small shovel. We intended to bury Pooky beneath the evergreen where she used to roll around in her own three-day-old urine. But my grandfather was already buried there, so we had to choose another spot. Instead, we decided upon the back corner of the yard, right beside the tulips. My father plunged the shovel into the ground once, twice? but on that cold January evening, the frozen earth wouldn't budge. This presented a problem. We had a dead cat in a shoebox and nowhere to put her, let alone the displaced shoes. Bring her inside, and she would surely decay. Leave her on the porch, and she would soon turn into a kitty fudgesicle. So we called the vet. "No problem," the vet told my mother. "Just bring Pooky in tomorrow, and we'll take care of her." "You're not going to cremate her!" said my mother with surprise. "Not my Pooky. My Uncle Emil, maybe, but not my Pooky!" "Of course not," the vet said. "We'll take care of everything." Apparently we were dealing with some sort of Mafia veterinarian, an animal doctor who had connections with mammals all over town. I went with my mother to the veterinarian's office the next morning. It was my job to carry Pooky, or, rather, the shoebox holding Pooky. The vet was more than happy to greet us; beneath his jovial demeanor I could tell that his heart had been hardened by countless kitty deaths, to the point where one more dead kitty just didn't matter anymore. He led us to a back room, the room that would house our kitty for the next four months. "This," the vet said, "is the freezer." "The freezer?" we asked. "The freezer," he confirmed. "The way I see it, our best bet is to keep Pooky frozen until May. By then, the ground will be soft and you'll be able to pop ol' Pooky right in." Neither my mother nor I were prepared for this. The idea of Pooky in cold storage just didn't appeal to either of us. But what could we do? We had no choice. And so, for all I knew, for the next four months our dead kitty lay quietly between a carton of Haagen-Dasz and a box of half-eaten Aunt Jemima waffles. Maybe we should have named her Lucky.