Sharky died on the same day the pope died, and two days after Terri Schaivo was finally allowed to.

Even though, as the Dalai Lama says, we all suffer and are going to die someday, there never seems to be a good day to die.

As we slid him out of a shoe box into a hastily-dug hole out in the daisy garden under a dark sky and a pelting spring rain, I imagined that runty bag of cat bones drifting along in Bardo-land with the souls of Pope John Paul II and Terri Shaivo.  How evolved were those three souls? Would they be searching for a couple in love into whose embrace they would be born again?