Across the street, a cat is sitting on a doorstep. It’s raining.
Yesterday, the neighbours were clustered together, talking, but I was taking an urgent call, and it was school pick-up time. Later we found out why.
Not having seen the lady opposite for a couple of days, another neighbour went to see her and there was no answer. Worried, she called the police, and they forced entry from the garden, and found she had died. Peacefully, from what we hear, but suddenly, although she’d been unwell and was old.
So the authorities did their thing and took her away, boarding up the broken back door, but leaving the cat flap working. Apparently there is almost no family, and the only relative anyone knows of lives hundreds of miles away.
And the people of the road, who form a small community, if not close in the way a Taiwanese road would be with equivalent residents, are left a little shocked and with mixed feelings.
And the cat? Who knows how a cat feels?
I went to talk to one of the neighbours, because as evening drew in we could see the cat beneath the front door opposite, sitting, waiting, and we didn’t like to think nobody cared.
The old lady had lived in that house for over eighty years, I’m told. Grew up in it, watched the world change from the same place, and was still sharply watching the human behaviour of the changing neighbours when I last spoke to her. As the most constant element of where we live, for everybody who arrived in the decades since, the sudden absence is hard to process.
There are ways in which it isn’t sad, of course.
A long life, active, engaged and capable to the very end. A peaceful slipping away with little trouble and no painful or fearful spiral towards it ahead of time. Alone, yes, but proudly and independently alone rather than lonely, self-contained, with no ambition but to be herself. And what better time to leave this world than just as the weather changes for the worse after a gloriously sunny spring week, with the flowers everywhere? Sometimes, I wonder if there is any tradition anywhere that holds that the afterlife is a never-ending extension of the last moment of life, in which case that passing must be as good as it gets.
Still, it’s a hole in the world, when a fixed piece of it gives way at last. And that is sad.
The neighbour is feeding the cat, she tells me, and the RSPCA have been informed and say they will come to take care of it.
As she tells me, the cat crosses the road and approaches us, but shies away from me as I turn to go.
And is still sitting on the doorstep today. Free to come and go from the house, fed, but choosing to sit on the doorstep.