A few nights ago, I dreamed of our 20-year-old cat, Spot, whom we put down in August as kidney disease made her life ever more uncomfortable. It was the kind of nightmare that left me relieved to be awake again but also cast a cloud of melancholy over the rest of the day.

Spot and I came into each other’s lives when I met Monica Leah Bell in Baton Rouge, La., and knew that I loved her more deeply than any woman I’d ever met before. I had not considered myself a cat lover before meeting Monica, but I knew better than to ask that she choose between Spot and me. When Monica and I married in October 1988, I knew it was time to become a cat lover.

Spot was easy to love. She was a black-and-white shorthair, with mittenpaws in front. She was so affectionate that, for the first year of our marriage, I joked that Spot was a dog trapped in a cat’s body. But by 1990, Spot was helping me appreciate all cats on their own terms.

I dreamed of Spot only a few times in the next 12 years, and the dreams always were humorous. I dreamed that Spot had her own newspaper column, complete with her photo at the top, her head tilted in feline and journalistic curiosity.

I dreamed that we passed each other on a sidewalk in Baton Rouge, that I did not recognize her until she touched my ankle with her paw and meowed, and that we then retired to a bar, where a coterie of Spot’s admirers laughed and partied with her. (I thought of this dream as echoing, in that bizarre dream language, Jesus’ appearance to two disciples on the road to Emmaus.)

In the final year of her life, I dreamed that Spot was gathered with three men, and together they sang Streets of Laredo.

But a few days ago I dreamed that Spot was in my care, that she had been wounded and bloodied but was not dead. She lifted her head weakly. In this dream, I had to decide whether to put Spot down while Monica was away on a trip. I was about to weep with panic when I awoke.

I know why I had this dream: In the past few months, Spot’s absence has become a surprising spiritual struggle for me. Late at night, when Monica is asleep, I’m alone, and all is quiet, a voice has harassed me: “That cat is dead, and you’ll never see her again. Someday, maybe sooner than you realize, you’ll be dead, too. And that will be the end of it.”

These thoughts could not have been more surprising to me the first time they came to me. Throughout my life, I’ve believed with precious little doubt that heaven and hell are real places, as real as the city I live in now, and that I’ll go to one or the other. Since age 13, I’ve focused more on anticipating heaven, by the grace of God and by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

I held firm to this faith after my father’s death in 1992. I remember reading aloud from Romans 8 during my father’s funeral: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I remember thinking as I read it, “I really believe this, and it makes all the difference in this moment."

I still believe in heaven and hell and in God’s grace as expressed through Jesus’ death on the cross. But with Spot’s death, for whatever reason, I’m finding those beliefs challenged and stretched.

I agree with those Christians who have argued that our redemption rubs off, in essence, on our entire household. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has his senior devil complain that even the garden and the cat have been contaminated by a woman’s faith. But I do not insist on Spot’s presence for heaven to be heaven. I also remember the character in Lewis’ Great Divorce, who refused to step off a bus while it was stopped in heaven because she refused to be separated from her son for eternity.

Meanwhile, life is quieter in our home without Spot’s loud, welcoming meows.

Sometimes, if either of us has trouble sleeping, I’ll move to the bed where Spot spent her final day and where we put her down with the help of her compassionate vet. Spot’s ashes are in a small urn that we keep in our bedroom. Regardless of whether I ever see Spot again, I know she was a living expression of God’s love and of the unity that’s possible between two very different creatures.

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