An Ode to a Cat named Dylan and to All Fury Friends, Great and Small
A Brief One by Doug Draper
Posted July 8th, 2020 on Niagara At Large
Dylan Draper, sitting on the back of one of his favourite wing chairs
From the first time he first became a member of our family and home – in the early weeks of summer 1999 – Dylan had a habit of looking right into a person’s eyes.
Whoever in the room happened to be in the room talking, there this little white guy would be, looking up to make eye contact with whoever happened to be speaking at the moment.
Dylan seemed to know instinctively that a person’s eyes are the window to their soul, and as time with him marched on, I think he came to know me and my wife and daughter as much, if not more, than we knew our selves.
Like virtually all cats, Dylan was a professional at finding the most comfortable spots to rest.
In those eyes of his – one of them blue and one of them green – you could see a wisdom of the ages there. How many times I found myself saying, if he could only talk, how much I would learn from him, not that I didn’t learn a great deal from him about trust and friendship and love anyway.
Doing his cat in the window thing
Dylan lived on to be 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and he made all the way to his birth month of June last year to celebrate 20 years with pets and hugs and servings of some of favourite meat and catnip. Our minds were tossed between this foolish hope that maybe this wonderful cat will live forever and knowing that he was gifting us with borrowed time.
Then, in the early hours of July 8th, 2020, while sleeping at my side, as he so often did, that beautiful heart of his stopped, and we’ve been missing those wise eyes meeting ours ever since.
For all of you out there who are fortunate enough to have cats or dogs in your lives, enjoy every minute. What these wonderful animals give us more than matches what we give them.
Remembering Dylan – June 1919 to July 8th,2019
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Doug Draper, Niagara At Large
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all the animals have this wonderful majesty and so deserve the respect, compassion and love that you shared with Dylan. From the “Outermost House” this phrase says it all: “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” Henry Beston
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So sorry for your loss, Doug…thanks for sharing. And how very lovely that Dylan passed so peacefully, by your side, without suffering.
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Sorry for your loss of Dylan. Pets are important members of our families. When they pass they leave a hole in our hearts. While I believe cats have staff, I know we are happy to serve. Peace to you and yours.
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