After the Fire

It's been almost seven years since the fire. Sometimes it seems like it was just yesterday. Sometimes it feels a lifetime ago and an ocean away. I don't jump anymore when the firetrucks come. I don't panic when I see a building on fire. The physical responses have changed. The emotional ones have subsided, but not gone away.

Sometimes I think about her, my aunt, and wonder not what could have been--the reality of her life was that this kind of dramatic, explosive death was part of the path she walked. But I think of her now with more compassion and more empathy--feelings, tools, gifts I wish I could've had earlier, I wish I could've given while she was alive.

She was complicated. And it was and is hard to know if she ever felt truly loved. I suspect there were times that she did. But I also think those times were fleeting. It's no wonder, I guess, that she adopted cats. Not quite a crazy cat lady, but close. I don't remember a time when she didn't have cats. And when I was little, her love for cats was second to only one thing--her love for me. So I suppose I can rest in that--we loved each other, for a time, when I was young. And maybe that helped.

I curl up, these winter days, with my own cats. They purr and my anxiety about money, about tuck pointing for my old church building, about what comes next--that anxiety is assuaged for a bit. They are good companions. And my heart is bigger for them. And so I get it--why my aunt always had them, why they made the best and closest friends for her.

The morning after the fire, my mom and I went to look at what remained. The stuffing from the sofa, a tattered copy of Gone with the Wind, a plaster bird, covered in gold paint, and a tiny tacky statue of two cats curled up together, that live among my things, covered in soot, precious beyond words. We looked for the remains of "Lil Girl," her cat. We never found her. Mom holds out hope that she got out and in the days and weeks that followed, my mom tried to find her, to bring her into her own home, to welcome that part of my aunt that was the icon of her love. Lil Girl was never found.

I confess, I hope, that Lil Girl died with my aunt in the fire, not because I want for a cat to have died, but because I like to think, unrealistic as it may be, that my aunt died asleep, with a cat nearby, purring. I like to think that she died, knowing she was loved. Unlikely? Yes. But it's the image I hold onto, all these years, after the fire.