We said goodbye to our beloved Sparkle Princess last week. After the birth of my children, the allure of pets faded for me in a big way. My children were (more than) enough; I couldn’t summon even the mental energy needed to consider feeding and cleaning up after another needy mouth. Thus, no pets since the birth of my youngest (my son, now going on five).
With my daughter turning nine last year, though, my wife and I were running out of excuses for not letting her have a pet. The fact that her brother was still only three at the time was irrelevant to her. All she knew and cared about is that we made her put “Buddy,” the baby turtle she and her friend found and wanted to share as a pet, back in the neighborhood pond. This leads me directly to the advent of Sparkle Princess.
It all started with a migraine. My wife gets them, and after a miserable night’s sleep one Friday, she took the kids for a drive so that she could bathe in the cool breeze of the morning air through the open car windows. I don’t know why I didn’t go; I usually do. If I had gone, though, we probably wouldn’t have gone to PetSmart, which they did. At PetSmart they saw a wide variety of irresistibly cute and adoptable animals. When they returned home, my wife had “the talk” with me. The talk about why we should get a cat as our first family pet.
A cat!? This genuinely floored me. None of our recent pet conversations had mentioned cats. Though I’m more of a dog person, I like cats, too. Still, I’d been thinking we might get my daughter a fish or some other pet that would require less assistance from me than I imagined a cat would require; you know, in the litter box department. Plus, they tend to throw up in inconvenient places. This was a serious talk, though, I could tell. I hedged, saying, “Why don’t we pray about it?”
So we prayed. God promises to give wisdom to those who ask (James 1:5), so we asked. Should we adopt a cat as a pet? Was that the right pet for us? When should this happen? These were our requests. Now, I knew with certainty that there would be an answer to these prayers, but I was pretty sure that I would be able to discover the will of God over the course of several weeks or months. Perhaps over the course of an entire year, if I played my cards right. Everyone was pleased: my wife’s headache was much better, my daughter was excited by the prospect of getting a pet, and I felt a bit smug at having conciliated my daughter in a way that wouldn’t require any immediate action on my part.
The next day being Sunday, we went to church. Before services started, while I was on my way to the breakfast snacks after dropping my kids off at Children’s Church, Mr. F., a member of our church, greeted me and handed me a piece of paper.
On the paper was the picture of a cat that his daughter had to find a home for. Immediately. Moreover, it was an older cat who was accustomed to living with rambunctious toddlers. As Paul the Apostle told King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. Four hours later, Sparkle Princess (their name for this cat) was installed as our family pet.
Naturally, I felt rushed into this momentous decision. But, I must declare to you what a blessing Sparkle Princess was to our family. She was truly an amazing cat. First of all, she was a majestic looking creature. She had what I called the “white undercarriage gene” - her entire belly and chest were white, terminating in a tiny point of white at the tip of her chin. Her black fur angled in neatly at her white chest, making a perfect dinner jacket pattern, so she was always ready for a classy meal.
This was a cat without pretension; she clearly loved humans. She was around us constantly. She made no move to resist my daughter cradling her, paws up, like a baby, and carrying her all over the house. When we had a Thanksgiving celebration last year, with 9 strangers (to Sparkle) at our house (my family from California), there she was, weaving her way through everyone. On a separate occasion, my Father-in-law, not a noted cat lover, marveled at Sparkle’s lack of timidity around strangers.
Being a dignified old lady cat, Sparkle wasn’t much for playing like a kitten. But, she did have this plastic spider ring (one of those $0.01 halloween throwaways some people hand out in lieu of candy) that she’d randomly bat around on the floor for a minute or two before losing interest. She attained even greater respect and love from my kids when she caught and ate a mosquito wasp. Bug Cruncher, they dubbed her.
Speaking of dubbing, this cat had a lot of names. I’m a nicknamer, and my kids have picked up on this, too. Since Sparkle Princess was also famed for her loud meowing, which often sounded like she was saying “hello,” I gave her the moniker Meow Machine. Some others:
Farkle (because once, in a rush, I had asked my daughter if she had fed the cat by asking, “Have you sped Farkle?”)
Spakrle (rhymes with Mackerel, see below, because my daughter wrote a note to the cat and transposed the “r” and “k” in Sparkle’s name. From Spakrle, we shortened it to Spak. Also Spak Attack - a favorite of my son’s)
Mackerel (because I iterated on from “Spakrle” and this of course was occasionally shortened to Mak)
Many more
Bottom line, I don’t mind admitting to you that I loved this cat. She was such a blessing to our family, and in the tenderness of these moments of remembering, I think it’s important to thank God for bringing her to my family (and to me). She brought joy and fun to our home. She taught us (a little) responsibility. In short, she is a reminder, gladly received, of the goodness of God and His desire to bless us. He has in fact given us “all things richly to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17), even Tuxedo Cats that meow a lot.
I can’t speak of my thankfulness for the gift of Sparkle without also declaring what a cheat death is, and how unnatural it is, no matter how much we think that it is just “a part of life”. She was the same cat on the last day of her life as she had been in the fullness of her life. On her last day with us, when I put my face close to hers and said “cat” in the breathy, deliberate way I often did, she played her part and gave me a last weak and squeaky meow back as she had done hundreds of times since we’d had her. Her essence, her soul, were unaffected by her weakened condition. Her body failed her, not her personality.
I don’t have a systematic theology about an eternal state for animals. If someone has created one, I would tend to distrust it. But, I do believe we’re likely to know Sparkle in some way when we ourselves are with the Lord in eternity. In Romans 8:22, Paul wrote that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now,” and that we humans join the rest of creation in awaiting the redemption of our bodies. Jesus also reminds us that our Heavenly Father is aware of every Sparrow that falls to the earth, and the context is of God’s tender care and concern for His creation.
I’m not certain of the specifics of animals and eternal life. But, I do know that God despises death. It is a corruption and a mocker. Thankfully, He was not content to let death have the last word. In the book of Acts, Peter declares to the Jews that though Christ had been betrayed and put to death, He was raised from the dead because it was not possible for Him to be held by death. Peter declared to them that the same promise was for the very people who contributed to His death, and also to all the people who would come after, including us.
So yes, I am thankful for the gift of Sparkle Princess. I’m thankful for the direct answer to our prayers. I’m thankful for the joy she sparked in our home. But, I’m more thankful for the reminder, provided by our receiving and now losing Sparkle, of the unbeatable promise that, through the dedicated and unrelenting love of God and the obedience of His Son, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.”