what happens when we die 101

Our cat Billie died when Lily wasn’t quite three yet. She still talks about Billie a lot, and now that she’s four, she’s starting to understand death better. She used to ask when Billie would be back from the vet’s, and didn’t seem to quite understand why Billie wasn’t coming home.



A couple of weeks ago, she said, “Will we ever see Billie again?” I said, “Well, not in her cat body. She might come by to say hello as a butterfly or a toad or something else, but we probably won’t recognize her.” Lily thought about that and said, “I bet Billie will come back as an aphid.” Trying to imagine our gigantic black cat coming back as an aphid was a bit of a struggle for me. Later, Lily asked why Billie wouldn’t be in her cat body, and I said something like, “She learned as much as she could in her cat body, and she will learn more in her new body” (yes, totally oversimplified, but Lily is four, for crying out loud, and I knew she'd understand this because of her 10,000 viewings of The Lion King with all the circle of life stuff). Lily said, “So she doesn’t need her cat body any more.”



Then, a few nights ago, T and I were in the dining room and Lily was in her room singing to herself. T and I were talking and I wasn’t paying attention to Lily’s singing, and then I caught a snippet of the words: “. . . because she won’t need her caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat baaaaaaaaaaaaaah deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

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