In 2001, I accompanied my friend NE to a veterinarian's office to have her cat, William, put down.  He had terminal cancer.  He had a tumor the size of a tennis ball under one of his arms.  NE and I had dated several years before.  We'd lived together, in fact, and lived together with Willie.  (That relationship had ended in 1998, but we'd remained very good friends.)  So Willie had been "our" cat for a time, but really, he was always NE's cat.  He was a good cat, though, and I loved him.

The vet hooked Willie up to an IV drip.  Willie didn't seem to understand, or care, what was going on.  His tumor seemed to cause him a lot of discomfort; he was focused on licking it, messing around with it, maybe wondering what it was and where it had come from.  The vet released into the IV a stream of some drug which, instantly, made Willie go to sleep.  Then he released another drug into the IV, which killed him.

He was alive, and then a second clicked past on a clock, and then he was not alive.  He was alive, and then a second clicked past on a clock, and then there was no "he."

His eyes were still open afterwards.  That seemed wrong to me.  I tried to close them but couldn't, so I covered them with a towel.

We left the vet's, which was on the Upper East Side.  We walked on Park Avenue in silence for a bit.  Then NE, who is not a religious person, said that she wanted to go to the Russian Orthodox church, a bit further up Park, to light a candle for Willie.  (NE's parents had emigrated from Russia in the late 1940s; the Russian church was her church.)

We went into the church.  NE got a candle from one of the nuns and lit it and put it on an altar with several other candles, and we sat there for a while.  As we left, one of the nuns asked whom the candle was for; the nun explained, in Russian, that later in the day, they would pray for the soul of the person who'd died.  NE wrote "William" on a slip of paper the nun gave her, not explaining to the nun that William was not a person.  And then we left the church.

Where do we go when we die?

Photo is of William, taken in the late 1990s.