Of Cats, Historians, and Gardeners

Michael O'Brien

Let me try a preface in the two ways.	1
One warm, rainy, English afternoon, I was sitting in my college room and thinking about death. My cat had just died. He had grown very old, straggly, weak, and much dependent. In his last days, he had taken to crying out in the night, and I had become used to getting up, seeking him out, and putting him on the pillow next to my head, where it had been his custom to sleep when younger. It did not seem to help, at least not him. Nineteen years is old for a cat, so it was not unexpected. Still, loss is loss. As it happened, as the rain beat against the high window that looks out on the chapel, I was beginning to write about a death elsewhere, to be included in this book on politics and the rituals of mourning in Alamance County, North Carolina, in the 1830s. I had recently been sent an unexpected manuscript, the diary of a young woman whose husband had been drowned in a freshet, a disaster that she herself had survived, if only just. For ten months, she kept anguished, detailed records of what happened, how she felt, how death was negotiated. It was all there, sharp and unremitting. The body ("wrinkled and bloated"), the laying out ("Aunt Betty came"), the prayers ("Oh Lord, our help in ages past"), the taking of the baby to the body ("Sally did not understand"), the poverty that followed ("I asked Mr Jones to help with the pigs, but he said he was busy"), her thinking about widowhood and its unexpected freedom ("the bed is empty, which is sometimes a pleasure"). Somehow, it helped in understanding the diary of Jemima O'Rourke that Georg (named when I was young and Hegelian) had just died, that it was raining. The implications were not simple. In ancient Egypt, the death of Georg would have been more important than the drowning of David O'Rourke, for a cat was divine. In medieval Bosnia, cats were killed and buried in small oak coffins placed inside those of their newly deceased masters and carried clockwise around the church. (Dissidents did it counterclockwise, and there had been a small war over it in 1327.) So I began to see not only how death is cultural, but also how we privilege a man's death in ways specific to time and place. Then I noticed, obscurely placed in the diary, a discussion of the death of a cow called Phyllida. (She had fallen off a bank and crushed a goat.) When I had first looked at the manuscript, my eye had slid over the incident. But now I saw how hierarchy was working in Jemima's imagination. How we understand death in nature, too, is cultural. Only a few days earlier, the college had been obliged to slaughter one of the deer in the Deer Park because it showed symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease, and the death had prompted me to wonder why Bert, the college gardener, who had recently had a bad cold, was permitted to live . . .	2
One could run on in this vein for quite a while. Let me try it again.	. . .