We had an ‘outdoor cat’ named Isabella. My mother never got it right; always calling her Isabel instead, confusing her with the youngest daughter of a family friend.

Isabella lived for a good eighteen years. Wiry little thing—slim, and nasty, with sharp, mangled teeth. She walked into our home, ate her meal, and slipped out just as quickly. She was a ghost in the corner of your eye. I had always said she’d sleep on our graves.

One day, however, she tucked herself underneath the wheel of my car. In the past, if she were underneath, she’d scatter from the engine roaring to life. I’d wait about a minute, check to see if she scurried out, then move out of my parking space.

She didn’t move that day.

I drove forward, feeling my car bump over something, and as dread pooled in the pit of my stomach, I launched myself out of the drivers’ side. The engine rumbled behind me as I slipped around the vehicle, checking the ground.

I expected to see guts splattered on the pavement, green eyes bulging out of an angular face I had seen slip in and out of my living room for years. A slinky tail broken in three places. All the worst images one could imagine.

But fully intact, as if nothing happened, Isabella laid there, gasping against the hot pavement under a Floridian summer sun, just as she did for eighteen years. I threw myself onto the ground beside her, stroked her as I sobbed my apologies, and waited until the gasping stopped.

Her fur was scraggly and unpleasant, flea-bitten skin rough underneath my fingertips. I had always been fearful of contamination, but for once, thoughts of disease and plague didn’t concern me. I only cared to comfort the creature who had been too weak to scatter from underneath the tire of my car.

I called my dad in tears when she died. I told him what happened, confessed my guilt, and my dad comforted me, telling me, “Amelia, if she didn’t move away when you turned on the car, she was already dying.“

But why was it my car? Don’t cats find a private place to die in? Why did it have to be under my tire? Why did I have to be the one to see another animal die?

Precious passed in my arms, too weak to move her back legs in the living room. Forest choked in the passenger seat, drowning in his own lungs as I tried to drive him to the vet. Lucky seized in the backseat within the same month, weak and brittle in his old age. Noodle gasped in my palms, worms in her bloated belly.

Why did I have to etch another guilt-ridden name into my sternum, each rib now a dedicated memorial? Am I being punished, and what for? My only crime is an unwanted existence, but why is the removal of other innocent beings my penance?

It was my mother—the woman who rarely says a kind word to me—that told me, “I don’t think it’s a punishment. I think animals just know you’re a safe person to die with, and they won’t be alone and afraid with you.“

But remember, I ruined her life by being born.

I’m a monster, but a safe haven. I’m cruel, but I’m kind. I’m cold, but I’m funny. I’m stern, but I’m too sensitive. Which is it?

Who am I?

Am I a kind person which helpless animals gravitate to for love, care, and companionship at their most vulnerable, or am I the heartless daughter who doesn’t love her mother? I really don’t know anymore, and I can’t imagine where I’d begin to find the answer.

Hey, by the way, did you know that the name Isabella means ‘god is my oath?’

Well then, if I am a god to the animals I bury, I will live out the rest of my days as the benevolent being they prayed for, so one day they might greet me again when it’s time for them to bury me.