"The Pope's End"
The following is an excerpt from the book The Emperor's Children, and for some reason, it just really hit me:
"But Marina, once in her own bed, beneath her own duvet, couldn't sleep for thinking about it, about the kitten she'd been given (instead of a horse, her parents had joked: more on the scale of their lives) and had marveled over, its spastic steps and zealous pounces, its questing tongue upon her hand. She'd abandoned the Pope for college, and for years thereafter of living elsewhere, had taken the cat for granted when she came home to visit, a sleek nudge at her calf, a warm muff at her knees, the broad yawns and the haughty incline of that elegant head. And by the time Marina had come back to live the year before, the cat was an invalid eyesore, scrawny, patchy, yowling, and, of course, vomiting, the relentless sour smell of it, and while Marina had occasionally been roused to pity she'd felt largely, with the brutality of the young, contempt for the animal's diminishing, and revulsion at her habits. A tear or two welled up in Marina's eyes and moistened her pillowcase, but she couldn't truthfully have said whether this was born of sorrow for the Pope's loss, or a sadness for herself at her actual callousness in the face of death, or indeed--and maybe this was the root of it--whether her tears, shed only now, were an indulgence licensed by the Pope but referring, in their quiet woe, to her earlier despair, to the burdens she still had inexorably to confront, while the cat, still and free and cushioned by the finest goose down, by the ironed Irish linen, had found repose."
"But Marina, once in her own bed, beneath her own duvet, couldn't sleep for thinking about it, about the kitten she'd been given (instead of a horse, her parents had joked: more on the scale of their lives) and had marveled over, its spastic steps and zealous pounces, its questing tongue upon her hand. She'd abandoned the Pope for college, and for years thereafter of living elsewhere, had taken the cat for granted when she came home to visit, a sleek nudge at her calf, a warm muff at her knees, the broad yawns and the haughty incline of that elegant head. And by the time Marina had come back to live the year before, the cat was an invalid eyesore, scrawny, patchy, yowling, and, of course, vomiting, the relentless sour smell of it, and while Marina had occasionally been roused to pity she'd felt largely, with the brutality of the young, contempt for the animal's diminishing, and revulsion at her habits. A tear or two welled up in Marina's eyes and moistened her pillowcase, but she couldn't truthfully have said whether this was born of sorrow for the Pope's loss, or a sadness for herself at her actual callousness in the face of death, or indeed--and maybe this was the root of it--whether her tears, shed only now, were an indulgence licensed by the Pope but referring, in their quiet woe, to her earlier despair, to the burdens she still had inexorably to confront, while the cat, still and free and cushioned by the finest goose down, by the ironed Irish linen, had found repose."