Simon says

I was kneeling in front of the Fuji tree out in the orchard yesterday afternoon, weeding around the rocks and shells that mark where some of Tom’s ashes are buried. The Fuji is the biggest tree out there—not a dwarf like the other eight (our mistake), and right now, high spring, it looks like a gorgeous, green, shaggy umbrella dotted with white blossoms that are fading and falling as they make way for the fruitlets.

Weeding is a contemplative act, so, of course, I was contemplating. Maybe ten feet away, sitting the way cats sit, self-possessed, with legs neatly tucked under body, was Simon. I wondered what he was thinking. If he was thinking. I wondered if he knew Tom was under the tree. I wondered if he remembered Tom.

Do cats have memories? I don't mean remembering where their litter box is or remembering where home is if they are out exploring. I mean memories of people in their past. Simon, who during the day chased voles and eviscerated mice but who spent his nights dozing quietly on Tom’s long, outstretched legs, has outlived my husband by more than three years. Does he remember?

I think so.

Scent, voice, touch, presence—those sensory markers of a relationship…cats are highly attuned to these. As are we. I will never know what or how much Simon remembers, but it seems to me that he must carry some imprint of my husband, given that Tom was a central figure in his life; given that Tom was associated with affection, safety, routine; given the scent, the voice, the touch, the presence.

Simon watched me as I brushed dirt from the shells and rearranged the stones, as I stopped to look up into the branches. I went back to my weeding. Simon got up, stretched, and laid back down again, this time sprawled in a patch of dappled sunlight. There was something about his quiet attentiveness, the way he tracked my actions, how he did not do what cats do when they stretch out in dappled sunlight—take a nap.

In that moment, and now recalling that moment, it seemed to me that he might be feeling something, a whiff of a dream, an echo, a recognition without cognition. I don’t know.

But that cat and I…we had a moment.

Maybe, just maybe, what matters most is not whether Simon remembered in the human sense, but more that his body and spirit were shaped by Tom’s attention, his love—and that love, in some form, lives within him.

“The soul is the same in all living creatures,” wrote Hippocrates, “although the body of each is different.”