The Sky's the Limit

Somehow, our tiny white protege's life has ebbed between last night and tonight. This morning when we took her from her bed she was scrambling in our hands and took a bit of her formula, though not enough to satisfy us that she wouldn't need another feeding midday which she did, with Ariel. This, after being in Ilana's and Jonathan's warm, loving clutches all morning. It was worth a few giggles to watch Jordan Tikki run amok in her box and flip and pitch herself forward and sideways, a little out of control but as if healthy and ready for some serious growing up. We really believed we had a future with her. These last three days have passed as languidly as three weeks.

But by this evening, she was drowsier than usual and by 8 or 9 when we were about to sit down to Shabbat dinner with our family and Joe's brother, Danny, his wife Lisa and their bairn, JT was lethargic. We tried another feeding and she could hardly lift her head to drink. It didn't take a close look to see her stomach had become concave.

It's well after midnight now and Ariel is upstairs keeping a vigil. We've been on the phone with a veterinary hotline, told we were doing everything right. As Joe, Ariel and I sat in her room and watched JT reach, shudder, and twitch, her mewing a plaintive, scratchy sound Ariel couldn't bear, thunder started. It was far away at first, scudding quickly closer until, within a few minutes, there was a terrific light show with hail that took a great limb down from Laura and Gabe's oak tree, the other side of our twin, onto their porch. It landed with a house-shaking crash that I thought was Ariel and Joe moving around upstairs in a panic. Some of the tree limb is on our shared third floor roof, a flat surface we all use if one of us is locked out of our house. We've always left our back third floor windows opened so that we could go upstairs in one another's homes, climb out the third floor window and steal into our own.

The lightning has moved off. I watched the flickering of it through our soon-to-be cut down willow in front of the house. This tree stands tall in the front yard, a long-haired lady, rather than the usual, by comparison stout, thick-trunked willows with dense, generously bowing limbs. Long before we arrived in our 90 year old home, our willow had grown straight up to adapt to the crowding of other trees over the decades. And as I watched the light surge and ebb through those branches, I knew the effect of this air borne energy was precisely, poetically matched to JT's struggle to live.

Thankfully, Ilana is asleep with her girl cousins, Malka and Avital, and Elan, 7, is alseep in Jonathan's room. When they went to bed, these four youngest children were aware that JT, her thin coat whiter today but not as downy as yesterday and now hardly covering her tiny jutting bones, was in distress. For the children visiting us, this household is at odds. When they come they always look forward to playing with their big cousins, Ariel and Jonathan, and with Ilana who is ideally matched to the girls' ages, 10 and 11. They love Norman, whom Elan called No-No when he was a baby. But they walked into a funereal mood that has deepened since they said goodnight.

Ilana takes a more philosophical approach to life after death, something I learned when I lost my brother, Colin, two years ago. After days and days, perhaps weeks of Ilana questioning me about what happens when a person dies, to which I could only give her my own truth, that the ones we love live in us afterward, she announced that heaven is inside us, not in the sky.

That night, I left her room feeling certain she was right. And tonight, with the fallen tree amplifying our anxiety and punctuating our grief over a briefly beloved pet, I feel certain, too, that tomorrow if JT isn't with us anymore, that if she chooses to, Ilana will be able to comfort her older sister as she did me.

(Jordan Tikki, born August 19, 2006, died August 26, 2006)