I grew up in a large Victorian, red-brick house built in 1888. Bats would swoop through open transom windows over our bedroom doors at night. Birds would get in the chimney. We’d hear them fluttering. We’d open the fireplace doors so they could fly out the open door. We had a pool in our backyard. We buried drowned mice in little margarine containers in the backyard garden.

When I was four, my brother and I got two barn kittens. A tuxedo we named Captain Morgan after the previous cat who my dad found hit by a car. The other was a beautiful orange tabby my uncle had named Edward, since orange cats are usually male. I renamed him Mary-Edward. After a few years, Mary-Edward began spraying all over the house. She became an outdoor cat and eventually disappeared.

*****

One of my earliest memories is from my great-grandma’s funeral when I was four. I expected a big show — my great-grandmother floating up out of the coffin to heaven. But she just lay there, as if asleep, remaining in her infinite bed. At the internment, everyone seemed oblivious to this horrible fact: My great-grandmother was still in the coffin, lid closed, propped above her dug grave. I inherited her mother’s wooden spool bed. I later learned that meant bedframe. At the time, I had the feeling it also meant her mattress and that somehow she or her essence was buried inside. I slept close to the edge.

*****

“God is all around you,” our minister said. I looked. I peeked. I glanced out of the corner of my eye at my grandfather with his thick, white hair. I felt under the pew with my boots. The man was wrong. God wasn’t there. I continued to look for the next year. I saw hard evidence of tooth fairies and Easter bunnies, but God was illusive.

I liked to hear my parents singing in the choir, like earthly angels in polyester gowns: “May God hold you in the palm of His hand.” The traditional Gaelic blessing weighed on me. I searched for the lines from God’s palm in cracked sidewalks, rushing rivers, tea stains on mugs, old sidewalk chalk. God’s palm was a greater mystery than telephones or light switches. I felt trapped inside this unknowable and invisible palm.

*****

My mother’s dad used to tune the large pipe-organ at the same church. When my mom was fifteen, he died from heart failure. He was in his forties. Fifteen seemed pretty old to me when I was young. As I grew closer to that age, it seemed much too young. My mom’s sister performed CPR. She was twenty-two.

My father’s father died when I was in grade three. I don’t remember him ever talking, but he was a great fisherman, recovering alcoholic and always had a toothpick in his mouth. I worried it would get stuck in his throat. While standing in the receiving line at his wake and introducing the family members in line, my grandmother finally gestured towards my grandfather lying in his casket and said, “And you remember Norm…” It was the first time I’d seen my father cry. It was his first funeral. He was thirty-seven.

When I learned my mother’s mother had died, I was twelve. I had just come home from school. My mom was forty, which seemed at the time to be a reasonable age to have one’s mother die. We took in her black orphan cat, Annie. Captain Morgan wasn’t happy, so he hid in the basement rafters for months. Annie always tried to go back to my Granny’s house and one day didn’t return.

Around this time, we lost many found family members, immigrants who had settled without other family members nearby. My dad thought having my brother and me attend their many funerals growing up would make things easier for us, since he had found his first funeral as an adult so difficult. But the inevitable and natural course of death will never feel normal. Another adopted black barn cat, Cuddles, would lose all her fur and eventually have to be put down.

*****

My father’s mother would scold other cottages who would try to save baby loons from snapping turtles, claiming this was the cycle of life. When she was eighty, she planted her own memorial tree at the cottage her father had built. The tiny pine refused to grow and we said that it was because she wasn’t going anywhere either. When she turned eighty-nine, she hosted her ninetieth birthday — just in case. When my grandma turned ninety, we had a second large celebration at the church. Even the mayor came.

Captain Morgan outlived all the other cats. My mom finally had to drive him to the vet to be put down, while he cried, “mNeOOOw!” the whole way. After that I brought in a stray, black kitten, full of fleas, which I painstakingly washed and combed out, but he wasn’t allow to stay. I returned him to where I found him.

My grandma had escaped death many times. When she was ninety-five, she suffered a massive heart-attack she said felt like indigestion. My parents and aunts and uncles stood on the tarmac waving goodbye to her for what they assumed was the last time as the helicopter took her up. She received a stent, was feeling great and ready to come home the next day. When I asked her how the helicopter ride was, she said it was terrible. She couldn’t see anything out the window.

When my grandma turned ninety-nine, we took her to the cottage for her birthday. The memorial tree was the same height as her. When she died the next summer, we were all in shock. She didn’t have a fake one-hundredth birthday party. Now the church has been sold and demolished. They started with the steeple. We have three indoor cats — a large, orange tabby, a little black Cheshire cat, and a new kitten we call the Captain.