It's an interesting phrase. He, meaning a male being who, at one point, was living. Passed, implying that there was movement. Away, a place, somewhere out there, completely ambiguous.
It's a phrase that is meant to make death seem less harsh, to soften the blow when telling your kids that you won't be going to Grandma's for Christmas this year. Although the fact that they're not gonna have to go to Grandma's for Christmas this year may be all the softening of the blow they need.
Something didn't seem right while playing in the backyard one day.
"Mother, what happened to the cat?"
"It probably ran away."
I was worried. It's a big world out there, especially for a cat and especially for a cat that was never too shy about displaying its lackadaisical attitude towards living. He often took cars driving up the street as a personal affront and rather than running away from an oncoming car like most animals, he would stay there, sitting in the road. He would not move, daring those drivers to keep going, to see who would last longer. The cat always won. The driver would stop, honk the horn, and eventually, after cursing the cat and wishing its soul to hell, would get out of the car. Only then, after witnessing the frustrated human inconvenience himself, would the cat move, slowly lumbering to the side of the road.
I walked the streets of my neighborhood, calling out his name. Prince, Prince, come home Prince.
But I garnered no response. Neighbors had not seen him, and from what I could gather from the neighborhood dogs, neither had they. My stomach churned with the unpleasant feeling that something terrible had happened to Prince. He had been in fights before and in one particularly nasty scrap had come home with his throat slit and bleeding. My mother took on the role of Veterinarian, citing her experience of sewing ripped pants and a lack of desire to pay a ridiculous amount of money, as grounds for operating on the poor animal. She saved his life, but not his voice-box. From thereon out he sounded more like an old woman who had smoked her whole life rather than a cat meowing.
It was his sense of entitlement that most worried me while I thought he was lost. Like a true prince, he roamed where pleased, slept when he wanted to, and if he didn't want you to touch him, he let you know it. Surely some animal bigger and faster than Prince, had grown tired of his stuck up ways and decided to teach him a lesson. But that was merely speculation. In my heart there was still hope.
I implored my Father for help in the search. I asked him to help me print flyers with Prince's picture in hopes that some old woman had found him and was trying desperately to find his owner. My Father seemed reluctant when I made my request. At the time I took it as typical of my Dad, the realist that he was, to think that the most likely explanation for Prince's absence was that he had died somehow and that any attempt at searching was futile. Looking back I should have realized that even if this was how he felt, he would no doubt have indulged my pleading in order to soften the fear I held within, that only a greater knowledge of certain events would prevent my father from taking the action I had requested. But I was young and did not easily pick up on these sort of nuances in my Dad's behavior.
Eventually the truth was revealed.
One morning before school my younger sister and I were lobbying my mother hard for an increase in vigilance from the the family in our search for poor, lost Prince. My mother closed her eyes.
"Listen" she said, "I need to tell you something."
From there came the story about how two weeks earlier Prince had stumbled into the front yard while we were at school. He meowed his gravely meow and threw up on the sidewalk. My mother found him and took him to the Vet. Upon inspection the doctor discovered that Prince had ingested anti-freeze that someone's had leaked in the driveway.
There were two options, preform an extremely expensive operation that gave Prince a 50% chance of living, or, well, the one my mother chose.
"He passed away." she said.
The only purpose that euphemism served was to give me a few extra seconds in which I was still unsure of Prince's fate. Reality sunk in. Tears welled up behind my eyes. It was sad. It was innocent. We held a funeral in the backyard. There was no body, the clinic had cremated it. Everyone said a few things about Prince. I couldn't think anything adequate to say about an animal that meant more to me than most of the real people I knew. So I said nothing.
Years later, in my senior english class we read the play Hamlet. Spoiler alert, someone dies, and it's Hamlet, killed by a sword laced with deadly poison. As he is dying, his best friend Horatio holds him in his arms and in a final goodbye simply says, "Good night sweet prince".
I whispered the words under my breath, goodnight, sweet Prince. The last vestiges of childhood and innocence finally escaping.
Finally at rest.
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