/lit/ - Literature

>>19324023
"Canticle of Leibowitz" has a passage on cat death. My cat looked absolutely horrid after death. Emaciated with a festering cancerous ulcer. He was looking sicker than usual but I'd thought he would have lived longer. I remember twisting and turning one night thinking about him, I went out to talk to him about his life and tell him how he has accomplished everything he needed to and was always an object of my respect because he wasn't a pussy bitch who demanded pets but rather was a tough outdoor cat with a melancholy disposition who always stayed in the environs watching and following me at a distance. Anyways I starting feeling some sort of dread at night and I prayed God would end his life quickly in his sleep rather than slowly starving by refusing to eat or something when he got really bad (he was eating fine and well at the time). Anyways the next morning I saw him dead in the same place I talked to him. Puddle of saliva. Horridly stretched out without a spark of life. Washed and laved him thoroughly with water, removing all the encrusted filth from his cancer, then wrapped and buried him. It all seemed like chance to me that he died then and there. Of course, I saw ants crawling on him that day...never saw that before. So maybe that's when I knew he would go. But that dread I felt in my bed....I can't explain it. Neither God's instantaneous answering of the prayer. Death is ugly a dead body is very ugly.