Hello, hello from lockdown.  Can we stop doing that? Our solidarity in lockdown... Today I'm talking to you about death; specifically, the death of an animal, more specifically still, my beloved pet cat, Morrissey. But I think many of the things

that I share may be relatable to death more generally. Though, of course, I'm not suggesting that my personal loss is as painful as your loss, particularly if we're comparing an animal to a human. But to speak about this on purely personal terms, I've never been more affected by a

death in my life. And I've been quite lucky. I mean, as a drug addict, I know lots of drug addicts that have died, and you become somewhat inured to the death of drug addicts. But both my parents are still alive, thank God, and I've never had

a death in the family. I've lost friends, of course, but the death of my beloved cat, Morrissey, it reached deep inside me and affected me viscerally. As his death was impending, I was away in another country. I'd do

whatever I could to delay and obviously, hopefully, prevent this death. But we know, don't we, that in the myths of life, we are in death. You know that death is coming; that every pet we have, every child we have, every grandparent we have, everything is due to die. The great earth

itself one day will be naught but a vast expanse of nebulous gases.  And do we rehearse this great event in every fatality that we experience? And perhaps could it be said, even every time we say goodbye? Morrissey was due to be

Put down due to renal failure, and to watch his slow senescence was a sad thing to endure. Because I suppose this cat, this cat Morrissey – my cat; I'd had him for 16 years. I got him when I lived in a one-room flat in Gospel Oak, North London.

And this cat traversed oceans with me and lived with me in maybe 10 or 15 houses. He was there on my lap when I watched myself as main stories on the news: "Dumb Russell Brand destroys the BBC." You know that, remember that crazy event? Or I remember when Ed Miliband was in

the house, the cat coiling up the stairs. I remember various people of notoriety and high public profile being in the house, and the cat coiling about. It's commonly understood that I went through a pretty hedonistic, epicurean lifestyle phase for a while, and Morrissey, my cat,

was the silent presence, ghosting about through that house, always there. And like with you with your pets, in the wordlessness there is a different kind of love, a deeper kind of connection. Look at my facility with language; I can talk, you can talk, we all have words at our disposal,

but in that perfect silence with the animal is a connection to, I would argue, something deeper. Why did we domesticate animals? Check out Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about the domestication of wolves. He tracks that quite beautifully from the Stone Age into connectivity

with wolves to our current domestication of dogs and the various breeds. Brilliant, brilliant to watch. Neil deGrasse Tyson, of course, a great guest on *Under the Skin*. If you're not subscribed to that, you probably should. But like what intrigues me is the totemic origins of

Pet keeping. Once we herded, corralled, and kept livestock in paddocks, we had a different relationship with nature. Once we grew crops in one place, we had dominion over the soil and over the beasts. Because prior to that, the hunter-gatherers that we were knew that

we were in constant symbiosis with our quarry, with the animals that we killed. And we painted them on cave walls and we wore their skins. The buffalo was made sacred and was the subject, of course, of buffalo dances, buffalo myths, buffalo stories. We knew that we were one

with the... And as slowly we became stripped and, by touch, gripped by time, industrialized, urbanized, placed in conurbations and concrete, comfortable prisons, we look to reach out and recreate our indigenous conditions where possible. The pet is totemic, a totem as in totem pole,

a representation of our connection to nature. And Morrissey became the god of myself, the god of my self-realization, the day... the occasion of who I am to become. Sacred, to consecrate, to not live the ordinary, normal life of chomping on chocolate or

staring at screens or standing in line or being on escalators and living the lives that they want you to, but to have some ordained connection, something deeper, something in nature. And when he died, I howled. I felt a cry come out of

me. I heard my own crying from inside my head, and I'd never heard that before. Now I heard myself cry as a man. And like anyone, I've been through tragedy and challenge and heartbreak and loss, but this noise, this noise that came out of me shocked me. The catharsis, the pain of

Even in his passing, he offered me a further act of friendship. The vet was due to come, and they say that death from renal failure is a difficult one; it seldom ends in cardiac arrest. Acts of quiet and gentle death, at least for those observing.

It leads more commonly to organ failure – that kind of death, you know. And Fitzpatrick, aka Supervet, the TV vet, animal genius, lunatic, and wonderful human being, explained to me that in the case of renal failure, the most likely outcome would be a kind of drowning.

Drowning, a breathless asphyxiation. For our man, I couldn't have that. For Morrissey, I wanted to keep him alive as long as possible, feeding him through a tube, keeping him in my room, watching him make the small journeys from our bed

to the litter tray, never eating food, everything some sort of smell I'll remember forever. Nutritious paste injected into a tube in his neck – skin under a collar thing that I didn't like seeing him wearing. He's such a dignified and cool cat; I didn't like to

see him strapped up like that. Not so bad as the cone – we all want to leave that alone – but tubes just seemed restrictive. They didn't like it. And I made my own, a thinner one, you know, like I just… it was sort of a thin one. This

happened during lockdown, so I got time to make little things. Did you hear that Roald Dahl once invented some sort of valve for the heart? Yeah, Roald Dahl, BFG. One of his kids got sick, and he went, 'Well, I couldn't make this thing good.'

Night. Like, and he made some sort of heart valve. What a mad genius that dude was! Me? I was pretty pleased to cut one of those stretchy bandage things. I actually... my wife, Laura, doesn't know I cut my... about my idea; my idea to do something.

I was around to the Steve Jobs of the project, like, 'Hey, why don't we have, like, iPhones?' Okay, right, yeah, good, get out of my way! But um, so we, like, made that thing and put it on him, and that gave him sort of some comfort. But I realize...

you know, something about death when I was a younger man. A man that talked a lot... in my own life, I felt a lot of pain and sadness and self-destruction. Death was somehow explosive, not slow, or withering erosion. To die in the continuous form means the sort of

retraction of life. Now he can't walk to the litter tray; now he can't hop up onto the bed. A sort of slow closing down till he's just still on a cushion most of the time. And when a few things happened that would compromise his

dignity, my missus goes, 'We've got to make the phone call.' I couldn't take the theater of it, you know? The theater of the ding-dong, the vet's here, the scythe-bearing super-vet about to administer tickets for the final journey. I couldn't

take it. But, you know, as a pet owner – which seems like a kind of reductive term for what I felt was an osmosis between me and him – it's self-realization. When I found that cat, when that cat found me, when I was just a kid... 27, but just a kid.

And now I'm a father with two daughters. I'm a man grounded in who I am, and a significant part of that was not just his catalytic presence, but what I learned from caring for him. Due to, you know...

I'm from his elegant manner and from his beautiful way. So I was like, okay, yeah, we'll make the phone call. Made the phone call. I'll come at 8:00 after the kids are in bed, I said to them. And so I just spent the rest of the afternoon in

the room with the cat, waiting and watching, texting people that I've known for a long time, like, "Oh, you know, Mas, yeah, he's on the way out." And got sort of messages and memories from people that loved him. And then, like, while I was

doing that, I sort of noticed his little paws, like a couple of twitches. I noticed a couple of sort of minor little gasps. And I'm noticing even now the beautiful blue tip on the tree behind me in the reflection right there. And I noticed that what they give you is

it kind of 5G in a connectivity to the sacred. The neglected and forgotten sacred can be found in your connection to the animal. You can find yourself, or your relationship to an animal, and through any form of love and through, you know, connection to nature. This

disconnection from nature that we're having time to contemplate and reflect on now—that nature, if indeed nature it is, has bitten back in microbial swarms. So he, yeah, I looked at him and his little, bare ribcage from various operations and procedures stopped.

Shifting. I never saw any sign of pain or distress. I was told to expect those, and it was that that made me make the eventual phone call. Never saw anything; no whimper or tortured noise. I wouldn't be able to stand that; I would have pressed

the... you know, you for...  Nazi... a hotline button as soon as there was any indication of that. I looked at him and he was gone, and the first thing I thought was relief. And his final act of friendship to me was to pass in a

manner that spared me the horror of his own demise. Spared me that. But conversations... if we had to do it, we had to do it. It was the right thing to do, wasn't it? Relieved me of all of that in one final, honoring

me and the Misses... like, I went downstairs, told her. She showed the kids my mad toddler trick stuff. My four-year-old says some profound, prophetic things.  She looks at my face; she'd never seen me cry. Looks at me sort of like a mystery, you

know. My other daughter, she's too young to... you know, everything to her is an innocent delirium. And then I showed them. They go stiff fast, these animals, man. We took out that tube; that was a rough moment, to snip and pull that out. I showed the

other animals. Bare looks of wonder. Our other cat, Jericho, aware of what death is on some deep, wordless level; the level of instinct and gut and evolution. Then we did the burial, and it was beautiful and sacred, and we lit candles and we said

Prayers and the ritual performed its function, and the death seeped into me. Death seeped into me. There can be a disembodiment to death and to loss, a refusal of trauma, a breaking of the path, a breaking of the line, a breaking of the

connection. But due to the spiritual lessons I have been given, and I'm aware that at this time in particular, many of you will be dealing with the loss of human beings that are integral to you, that you deeply, dearly loved. Losing people too soon—it always

seemed too soon—and you might think, 'Wow, this is a long eulogy for a cat,' but to me, he was more than that. To me, he was what is love other than an acknowledgment of oneness, an acknowledgment of union? I feel for you there's as I would feel for

me. I would—I don't want anything bad to happen to you. I want to protect you. I'm prepared to give up something of mine in order that you succeed. Like I heard, the only demonstration of love is sacrifice; all else is but affection. That's so good

in it. It's not mine. And yeah, and I'm through that love, through that love there is connection, there is interconnectivity. And but through the pain of the loss, a deeper kind of connection, a sort of solidifying of our family. Phew! At through our improvised funeral amidst

the candles in our garden, with our other cat coiling around, we were able to process, realize, and experience the death and somehow embody it. So, whilst it's very sad, because that cat, he was always there, man. That cat's been through everything with me. He's given me everything that you

needed to give me, and I hope that when I like you, unless I die first, I can endure the death of everybody else. But I'm able to apply the lessons taught to me, given to me by the death of my dear cat, Morrissey. And I hope that any of you

that are suffering loss, whether it's due to the pandemic or just due to the everyday inevitability of that painful severance of death and loss, that you are able, in your own way, to find what's sacred in it. And through the sacred

discover that there is a oneness that underscores all rites and, in my view, is the crucible of all creation. So there is never an ending or a separation; merely new notes are played in the great ongoing symphony of existence in which we all play our parts.

My Cat Died.

My Cat Died.