VITA MEMORIAL CEREMONY

On behalf of Jonas, I welcome you here today. We have come to remember and to celebrate the life of Vita, a prematurely born kitten. The life and the loss of that life occurred long ago but Vita has never been forgotten. Many animals have come into and gone out of Jonas’s life, but Vita was the first to leave . . . the first to cause the greatest unspeakable pain . . . the first to foretell that there would be other hurts from which it would be necessary to heal.

Without really knowing the actual sex of the kitten, Jonas always refers to Vita as “she.” Vita was the progeny of her mother Ziggy – named after Sigmund Freud before Ziggy had been properly identified as a female – and an unidentified suitor. There were actually four kittens born, but, after the first day, only Vita survived and her mother abandoned her. The name Vita was chosen because Jonas, was studying high school sophomore Latin. Vita means life, and Jonas took it upon himself to maintain the tiny spark of life in the newly born and abandoned kitten.

Using a cardboard box, the towels from the birthing container and a copper hurricane lamp from his bedroom, Jonas created an incubator. Before going off to school every morning, he fed Vita from a medicine dropper; he gave her milk mixed with baby vitamins; he did this when he came home and before he went to bed at night. The saving of this frail new life was solely his to do. Each time he performed this ritual, he stroked Vita and exhorted her to live, to hold on . . . to not give up. Nevertheless, one morning when Jonas went to care for Vita, she did not respond. With the tiny body in the palm of his hand, Jonas carried the kitten upstairs to his father who was sitting in his overstuffed chair in the corner of the living room.

He said, “Something is wrong with Vita. What’s wrong with her?”

His father answered, “I think she’s dead.”

Jonas asked, “What can I do about it?”

His father answered, “There is nothing you can do about it.”

Suddenly there was the reality of life laid bare. Life came and it went and there was nothing that Jonas could do about it. Life was not like studying Latin: if he received a low grade on a quiz, he could study harder and make it up on the next quiz. Vita had been abandoned by her mother and Vita’s siblings were gone; was that not a situation that could also be compensated? Jonas had assumed that if he took really good care of Vita, he would improve Vita’s options. Vita could live. Now Jonas was remembering that he had changed the bedding in Vita’s box. Vita could no longer smell her mother. Vita had realized that she was alone. Jonas had not fed her as often as her mother would have. Vita had starved. Vita was dead and it was Jonas’s fault. Vita was dead and there was nothing that Jonas could do about it. All of these considerations swept through Jonas’s mind in a split second and then he screamed and swung his fists at an assailant he could not see.

Following is a poem by Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth century German monk.

“Contemplation”

If I spent enough time

with the tiniest creature –

even a caterpillar –

I would never have to

prepare a sermon.

So full of God

is every creature.

Whenever we bring home a pet, we know that someday we will suffer the grief of losing that pet. The kitten, the puppy, the colt will all pass through their shorter-than-human life cycles, come to the end of them and then leave us. Nonetheless we persist in giving our hearts to these wonderful creations.

When Sparky the hamster, or Lulu the bulldog or Max the goldfish take their leave, we usually seek out another of their kind to care for, to love, to lose and to remember. Why do we do this? Perhaps it is because if we spend enough time with them – as Meister Eckhart suggests – we are better able to experience God through them, thus fostering a connection to all creation. Vita was Jonas’s first exposure to the complete cycle – to the complete connection.

Copyright February 12, 2020