Do Cats Go to Heaven?

I have a little old cat named Marigold. I found her as a stray when she was a kitten, in 2003. She’s got big green eyes, a peaceful inquiring presence, and soft mottled brown fur.

She’s 20 years old, 97 in human years. She doesn’t look that old, at least to my wishful-thinking eyes; she still seems sturdy and somewhat durable. But she sleeps a lot more than she used to. She doesn’t run around and yell upstairs the way she used to when she was gripped by the zoomies, as my partner calls those moments of cat madness. And I know she’s not going to be around forever. Every day, I worry about how sad I’ll feel when she dies.

My anticipatory grief about her passing has led me to the sorts of metaphysical questions I’ve been prone to since someone I couldn’t bear to let go of died suddenly in 1991. I made peace with that loss—the sudden astonishing disappearance from the world of my very-much-alive fiance—by wrestling with questions of life and death. I read everything I could find about the afterlife and eventually I arrived at the unshakable belief that he had to be somewhere, in some afterlife that doesn’t have to do with religion but might be explainable by contemporary physics, in some form recognizable as himself.

But that’s harder to do with a cat. Do cats go to heaven? It seems like a ridiculous question, but I couldn’t stop asking it. Marigold has lived with me for so long she’s like a piece of myself; she’s been a small, bright-eyed, totally aware, and alert fixture in my house for 20 years. And I love her, about as much as I love anyone or anything.

I kept looking at her, my little old beloved cat, and asking myself my metaphysical questions: Who or what is she really—this little creature who lives with me? Why is she in the world to begin with? What will happen to her when she dies?

I know the reasonable answer to arrive at: Marigold will only be alive for as long as she’s alive and when she’s gone she’ll be gone, that I’ll be gone too when I die, and there’s nothing for me to do but make peace with that. But that’s not the conclusion I came to.

At this moment, Marigold is curled up on a fuzzy green throw blanket at the bottom of the daybed I’m sitting on. She wakes up, creeps up beside me on the daybed, and climbs onto my chest. She perches there like a little sphynx, looking down at me while I look up at her.

I look at her large intelligent green eyes, regarding me from a few inches above, at the tiny wedges of her eyelashes, and at her pencil-eraser-colored nose. I think about how she has always had her own distinct little personality, her own traits and predilections: How she loves anything natural, rolls around on a radish slice that falls on the floor or a seedpod that comes in the door and sticks her nose to the open window, desperate to breathe fresh air; how she is deeply offended when someone accidentally steps on her, however lightly; how she has a strange taste for cornhusks and somehow magically knows when they come in the house. If I bring in fresh sweet corn from the farmer’s market, leave it on the kitchen floor in a tote bag, and turn around for a moment, I’ll find her rooting in the bag, chomping blissfully on the dry pale-green corn shucks. Mostly I think about what I see when I look into her eyes, which I’ve done so many times over the years it’s as if the sight has been absorbed into my unconscious: Some bright clear animal intelligence.

And I decide that maybe it’s not so crazy to wonder if something beyond nothingness will become of her after she dies. I ask myself my metaphysical questions again—who is she really and what is she doing in the world—and an answer comes to me: She’s a little spirit in a cat package. I don’t know where she’ll go or what will happen to her when she dies, but I’m pretty sure about this: She doesn’t need her package to exist.

My little spirit in a cat body stands up, wobbles a little, and jumps down onto the floor. She goes over to the cat food dish and eats a few bites of dry food. Then she jumps back up on the day bed, curls up at the bottom of it, and goes back to sleep.

Source: Image by Mary Allen