Early Thursday morning, somewhere between 3am and 4am, I thought Jake was with me.

We’ve been locking Aang and Cloud out of the bedroom at night because they just. will. not. stop. I’m a very light sleeper and I wake up early for work. Constant nocturnal interruptions were beginning to tell on me. I like cuddling with kitties at night, so I’m hoping they’ll calm down as they grow up, but right now, they’re still getting plenty of interaction with us during the day and they have each other so I don’t feel bad keeping them out.

Usually we give them a trial run. I go to bed earlier than Dean most nights, so I’ll read for a few minutes before I turn out the lights and Dean will play video games in the other room. Last night I fell asleep, but woke up a few minutes later to the sound of kittens sproinging the doorstop in the bedroom. I pushed them out of the room to be with their dad for a while before he went to bed and shut the door completely.

I woke up feeling a cat by my feet. My first subconscious assumption was that the kittens had been behaving, so Dean let them stay in the room. The cat moved from my feet to my head and I rolled to the side like I used to do with Jake to cuddle. But there was no cat. Aang and Cloud do not let us cuddle the way Jake and I used to, at least not unless they’re very very sleepy. Once I realized that nothing was there, I stayed on my side, a little more conscious, thinking that I should have known that the kittens do not travel that slowly and I thought of Jake and how we used to cuddle. I heard purring behind me.

Oh, maybe it’s Aang, I thought, and rolled over to the other side to look at the nightstand where Aang likes to go and knock my glasses onto the floor, drink from my water glass, and turn on the touch sensitive lamp. (He’s very good at turning on touch sensitive lighting.) I figured once I faced him I would hear him knock something over, purr more loudly or climb onto my head. None of that happened, the purring was fading, but I held it in my mind, playing it back to myself. It wasn’t the same purring the kittens make. (They both even sound slightly different from each other when they purr.) It was deeper. It was a Jake purr.

I opened my eyes and for an instant, thought I saw a cat-shape by my pillow. I pushed myself up onto my elbow. No cat shape. No kittens. No Jake. Nothing. Now I was facing his shrine. I wondered if he had come to say hello and if he found the memorial area adequate. I worried that he was unhappy about the kittens. No. He had been purring. Is he okay with the kittens then?

I rolled onto my back and reached out a hand to touch Dean. He was dead asleep and I wasn’t trying to wake him, but the contact always makes me feel better when I wake up in the middle of the night. I played the purring back in my mind again, thinking of Jake. Wondering if he had come to visit, or if I was just dreaming.

I have an ex boyfriend who would have dismissed this entire episode and probably given me condescending ‘practical’ reasons for everything I experienced. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have said anything to him about it or even written this entry if he were still in my life. He was so derisive about anything remotely spiritual that even years later it’s difficult not to hear him scoffing in the back of my mind.

Jake has been on my mind a lot lately. My Facebook memories include him 99.9% of the time. Wednesday’s memories were particularly Jake-heavy. In one, I called him my right arm, with a photo of him laying next to me with his head in my right hand. I’m not sure what stage of grief/healing I am in regarding Jake, but at first I replayed our last moments together constantly because I didn’t want to forget them even though they were extremely painful. Now my brain shies away from those memories and tries to steer me toward less significant ones. General cuddling. Letting me hug him at night like he was a teddy bear. The way he woke me up by rubbing his face on my chin. How he blew his nose on everything in the winter. The way he looked at me. Little idiosyncrasies that made him Jake.

Aang and Cloud are completely different personalities and so happy and full of joy. We love them both so much and it’s fun to learn new things about how they’re different from each other and how they’re similar. It’s impossible not to remember Jake while we watch them grow. I took a bubble bath Wednesday evening and they were enthralled. Cloud kept trying to test the bubbles to see if they were a weight-bearing substance. I couldn’t help but remember when Jake was a kitten and how he used to be amazed whenever I took a bath. He would knock things into the tub to see what happened to them. He would try and grab at my finger or the handle of a razor held just below the surface and be surprised at his wet paw every time.

I know that Jake was not physically with me Wednesday night. His body is gone. It’s impossible. I will not claim to know what became of his spirit and I will argue with anyone who claims that animals have no spirit. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. And yes, Jake has filled my head and my heart recently, even as I love and cuddle my new kittens, who occupy a completely different place in my heart all their own. Maybe the entire ‘visit’ was happening inside my head.

And realistically, it probably was all happening inside my head. But why on earth should that mean it was not real?

Spirits and Dreams