I have been cornered and asked if anything makes me angry. I have been informed that “injustice,” “warlords,” and “senators” are not satisfactory answers. I have failed to demonstrate respectable rage against ex-husbands, health insurance companies, and baristas named Blaine. Actual canonized persons erupt in expletives every time I begin a sentence, “But we don’t know what they’re going through.” The feebleness of my fury is infuriating.
Scientists can call off the search party for my wrath. No MRI will be necessary to seek my lost livid. It takes just one action to scorch this marshmallow.
You need only wound my mother.
I realize I have just recruited the delegations of Professional Wrestling and Adolescent Boy to my side. But I do not speak of slurs, cheap shots, or anything so yellow as a “yo’ mama” joke. My mother is sufficiently celestial that not even the meanest dodgeball-heaving troll in the ninth grade could come up with something to insult. Delinquents too young for mustaches still get googly-eyed in her presence.
I am enraged with a far more powerful creature: a retired guidance counselor in age-appropriate linen pants.
My mother lunches with Aldene every month. They compare scars from decades of zookeeping middle schoolers. They pull out tuning forks to catch melodies beneath mud. They recap Frasier reruns. They agree that God is good, all the time. They drink wine.
Aldene gulps hundred-proof wrath unmingled with mercy.
My mother, who is seventy, arrived looking fifty, immediate cause for concern. My mother looks thirty-six with no makeup.
“Are you okay, sweetie?”
My mother poured forth. “Not really. Yesterday we had to put Max down.”
Liquid chocolate with whiskers, Max was eleven when my parents adopted him. He lived ten more years, forgetting his name, the way up the stairs, and every contour of reality except my parents’ love. Deaf as a teenager and loud as a grackle, Max stayed by my mother’s side every morning as she wrote poetry. He bore witness. He offered commentary. He offered flatulence. He offered reminders of a great mercy.
“I feel lost without him.” My mother does not cry in public. My mother cried in public.
I can only hope Aldene touched my mother’s hand before being possessed by the Father of Lies.
“Well, you do know that animals don’t have souls, right?”
“Come again?”
A waitress passed out as the room fogged with sulfur. “You know they won’t be in heaven?”
My mother tells me that she responded, simply, “Oh, Aldene.” She changed the subject. She saw tiny angels dip their toes in her Chardonnay, winking.
I am not winking. I am searching for discounts on nunchucks and trebuchets.
This is not a matter of one friend bungling another’s grief. We all do that. We are incapable of metabolizing death. It is the last mean kid who won’t back down. It is the shard that won’t make peace. We call it natural because we are liars who need to survive. We catch ourselves calling out names. We are not supposed to lose each other. We do not really believe we have lost each other. We touch fingertips across the veil. We say awkward, awful things. We have done this since Og first tried to comfort Lothar on the untimely passing of his favorite mammoth.
Aldene was not trying to comfort my mother. Aldene was repeating a lie that has hunted us since the beginning.
I could tell Aldene that the Hebrew word for soul, nephesh, is the same for priests and polliwogs. I could adduce historical-critical evidence that God is giddy to have made the hippopotamus. I could appeal to the Deity whose legal name is Love as all the proof we need that earth’s braids will hold in heaven. I could remind Aldene that I hold a ninety-credit Master of Divinity, although neither God nor I can say those three words without laughing.
I would rather introduce Aldene to Max.
First, I would rather hogtie Aldene and waterboard her with wasabi mayonnaise. I accept this might not serve my strategic interests.
Instead, I will take Aldene’s manicured hand and walk across the veil. Max will be waiting, his Neptune eyes pinwheeling with pleasure. Aldene is a living being, the only qualification Max needed to engage in Operation: Adoration. He will sketch infinity signs around her ankles, chortling commentary all along. He will throw himself to the cloud to offer his prized belly. Should she touch him, Max will expand heaven to accommodate his joy.
It is unlikely she will touch him.
Max will not mind. Max will rest his chin, as chiseled as Robert Redford’s, on Aldene’s Skecher. He will yowl Hosannas at sparrows. He will bear witness to the visible in service to the invisible, a poet’s deputy into the afterlife. He will put six-winged seraphs to shame when some lower cherub arrives with “bisque,” the gelatinous poultry beverage that, like Frasier reruns, shall persist in heaven. He will carry on doing what he did on earth, shedding thick awe.
I know what Aldene will say. “He is a cat. It is all instinct.”
I will not disagree. I will not succumb to the desire to cover her cardigan in spray-cheese. I will say, simply, “Yes. Capax Dei.”
Capax Dei is a cool thing that, like most cool things, we have convinced ourselves is our exclusive property. Literally "the capacity for God," we have defined it in a dozen dingus ways. We say it is language or problem-solving or art. We proceed like it is religious observance or dogma digestion or that uniquely human masonry that only makes gray walls.
But we have too much Capax Dei not to recognize Capax Dei. We know it is the incurable impulse to frolic. It is the “oh my goodness” that outruns intellect to the sunrise. It is the health that does not get sick of a husband’s face, or a threadbare sweater, or the same old moon. It is the inner toddler clapping just to know that there are baboons styling each other’s hair somewhere. It is the excitement we can’t exile no matter how many raspberries it blows at propriety. It is the water slide that God goes down first.
It is your great-uncle putting out a bowl of peanut butter pretzel nuggets for your visit. It is the old woman offering to dress as Glinda the Good Witch for older old women. It is the expectation that nothing loved is losable. It is greeting your stuffed animals every morning even though you are forty. It is greeting your grandfather every evening even though he does not respond. It is the “wheeee!” that outlives death. It is the knowledge that your person needs your presence if there is to be any poetry. It is the nagging sense that we can be anything we want to be except unloved.
It is the soul. It is Max’s fortissimo. It is going to surprise Aldene. It is going to surprise me. It is more furious than even my anger.
Angela Townsend is the development director at a cat sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. She is a Best of the Net nominee, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and Terrain, among others. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 34 years and laughs with her poet mother daily.
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