The Strangeness of Grief

Illustration by Pablo Amargo

In this beautiful short story V. S. Naipaul reckons with the different forms of loss. It left me sobbing.

"But with cats, so brief is their span, every sign of vigor invariably comes with a foreshadowing of decay. Cats, they say, have nine lives, and even in those early days Augustus began to expend his lives. His very first life would have been when, only a few days old, he was thrown away in a dustbin. His second, in our house, was when, having no tutor, no cat he might imitate, he ate or began to eat a mole, and poisoned himself. Feeling death approaching, he ran away from the house, in order to die in the dignity of solitude. This was new to me. I knew it only from a fading memory of French poetry from the sixth form: in the poem by Vigny, this was how the wolf suffered and died, without speaking. It was extraordinary to have this poetic grandeur replicated by little Augustus, so small, so young, and on my own doorstep, so to speak."

Read more: The New Yorker