What Grief Can Teach

by Peter Biles

I picked up our new cat Felix from the local pet adoption agency in town (PAWS) when I was 15 years old. Our other cat, Tom, had just died in an accident, and my parents let me choose a new furry companion in the wake of the loss. Before you ask: Yes, I do like dogs. I’ve got nothing against a good old mini-Australian shepherd or a bounding Great Pyrenees. But Felix? Felix was a real friend.

At first, he was finicky, frightened, and preferred the jungle of the garage with its toolboxes and oily wrenches to the offered comforts of the indoors. We had to coop him up in there, or he would have bolted into the woods and frittered into the horizon on the other side of the conveyor belt. Soon, though, he eased into a situation of trust and comfort and dwelt in and out of the house for years and years afterward.

Last May, Felix died in an accident of his own during a tornado warning, and I laid him in a little grave in the old woods behind my parents’ house the morning afterward, when it was s…