Filigree & Shadow

I’ve nothing to sell you, this is a story about my maternal grandmother. You’re welcome.

When you’re a young woman growing up in Rochester, New York, and you’re raised in a devout Catholic household, you attend Catholic school. Such was the fate for Mildred, my grandmother. She was a good – not exceptional – student who followed instructions, completed her homework, and dutifully prayed to Sweet Baby Jesus, His Mother Mary, the Holy Spirit (cosplaying as a dove), all the saints as required, and especially Big Daddy. It would almost be impossible to find fault with Mildred, except for one trait: she hated cleaning the chickens for mealtime.

Nowadays, one only has to trot to their local market for chicken that’s been scalded and plucked – remember, kids: a chicken gets plucked; brows get tweezed – entrails removed, the carcass dressed and broken into commercial cuts, and then portioned for sale. But in Mildred’s day? Every student had their turn at cleaning the chicken for meals, and this was something she hated to do. Not because she loved animals, far from it—in her later years, she was convinced she could feed her dogs (plural) chicken bones despite us begging her not to do that. Why the animal shelters kept letting her adopt one dog after another is still a mystery, but I digress.

Mildred simply found the entire process repugnant. Her workaround for cleaning the chicken was to roam the neighbourhood around the school, asking random housewives to do the deed for her.

“But James,” you ask, “but James. Did she really roam the streets with a dead chicken in her hands?” Yes. Yes she did. Until a housewife rang the school and reported Mildred to the Mother Superior. When it was once again Mildred’s time to clean the chicken, the Reverend Mother (and Baby Jesus) stood over Mildred as she sobbed uncontrollably, cleaning what would later be lunch.

And now you know why you can’t break a nun. Or a grandmother that truly saw and did some s**t. And that is also why she looked at me on her couch as we watched her favourite show Jeopardy, and said, “I’d rather live next to a homosexual than a rapist,” then exhaled her cigarette. I was fifteen.

It just so happened that we found you and your brother waiting for someone to adopt you at the animal shelter. That was thirteen years ago. You were meant to be with us for at least another thirteen more. You have lost muscle and fat, your spine tangible under your fur. The ultrasound showed us your abdomen full of liquid, the mass cell tumor in your spleen. A liminal space to deliver news that made us fall into strange chairs, our elbows on knees and our palms on our eyes as the tears kept coming. We are strangers in a strange land, and the doctor could only say “Sorry” as we wept.

The doctors are not convinced you could survive anaesthesia. If you were strong enough to endure a splenectomy, “survival beyond 2 months is unlikely.” Where is Bastet to rid you of this illness? Where is Mephistopheles to make a bargain for your life? How can there be a God who chooses to take you from us, to strip us of beauty and purity when cruelty and torment are allowed to exist?

My beautiful Jóna. I wish I knew how much time we have left together. I wish it was always. I am sorry for all the ways I failed you. I am sorry for not knowing you were in pain. I am sorry I took advantage of every day we had together. I am sorry I could not save you.

I wear you on my skin. My shoulders show the history of your nails every time you purred into my ears. There are not enough minutes in the day where I can press my nose into your fur and breathe you in. You smell like home. I can kiss your head and tell you “I love you” for the first time, every time.

Here I write your existence into a world of ones and zeroes. 16.7 million colours to show your beauty in photos. 25 million bytes to record the sound of your purr for fifteen seconds. I would build data centres on every moon in our galaxy if it meant I could preserve every moment of you.

If there is another place after this, I hope you are there with Vinnie, waiting for us. If this is all there is, in all of the universe, I am forever grateful that we made our way to each other and got to spend our lives with you. We are blessed to know such unconditional love, especially in a world that is in such deficit of it.

Oh, my love.