Diana was a very respected lady in the apartment building where I’ve lived for years. We had a family acquaintance and would often visit each other’s homes.

Diana left this life quite suddenly and at a very young age. She was only 57 years old. Three weeks ago, on a Sunday afternoon, she left her house to take a walk in one of the parks in our city, which lies around a lake. Poor Diana left on her own two feet and returned on the stretcher of an ambulance.

While walking through the park, she suffered a sudden heart attack and died on one of the park’s pathways, near a plum tree.

I wasn’t in the city when it happened, so I couldn’t attend her funeral. Instead, I went to her house afterward. I found only her husband, Spiro. Their children, a son and a daughter, had already performed all the funeral rites and returned to their homes—her son in the Netherlands and her daughter in Canada.

As I was speaking with Spiro, the house cat, Pisua, came near and rubbed against my legs. “Poor cat,” said Spiro, “he’s sad. For the first three or four days, he hid in the wardrobe, among Diana’s clothes, and wouldn’t come out—not even to drink water or eat food.” Apparently, Spiro told me, the cat had seen the entire scene when they brought the lifeless body home in the ambulance, when they placed her in the coffin, and so on. It seemed as if the cat, too, was mourning the loss of the lady of the house.

In the days that followed, the image of the grieving cat stayed with me—the way he hid in the wardrobe, among Diana’s clothes.

But perhaps it wasn’t exactly grief, I thought to myself. The poor cat, frightened when he saw his owner lying in a coffin, must have felt uncertain and scared, and in search of safety, he chose a closed, enclosed space.

There is said that cats are deeply connected to their territory, often perceiving it as essential for their sense of safety and existence. Maybe Diana’s scent among the clothes, in one way or another, created in the cat’s brain the feeling that she hadn’t left, but was still present there, in the wardrobe.

But perhaps it goes deeper, I thought, and I recalled the belief that cats are among the animals that understand humans best—they feel the emotions and sentiments of those they are close to and with whom they have a special bond.

That last thought seemed a bit exaggerated to me, and I remembered Hachiko, the famous dog from the movie of the same name, who kept waiting for his owner even years after he had died. People say, not without reason, that the dog is the most loyal animal and the most inclined to serve humans. Still, I reasoned, Hachiko is a fictional character, even though at the beginning of the film it says it’s based on a true story. To make the film more compelling and emotional, it’s possible the creators exaggerated the dog’s loyalty after his master’s death.

But maybe the exaggeration isn’t that great, I reconsidered, as I recalled another dog—Argos, Odysseus’ dog—who is the only one to recognize his master when he returns after twenty years of war and wandering. Worn out from neglect, the dog died just moments after confirming that his master was alive and had come back.

Argos’s loyalty to his master contrasts sharply with the other characters, especially the many suitors who aimed to usurp the throne, steal Penelope, and kill his son, Telemachus. It’s no coincidence that scholars note the language used in the poem to describe Argos’s death resembles the language used for the death of noble warriors.

It’s hard to say whether animals, including Diana’s cat, actually mourn. Skeptics might be right in saying that such beliefs are rooted in humans’ anthropomorphic tendencies—in other words, the tendency to interpret every noble trait in animals as something borrowed from humans. But perhaps we can say with some certainty that some animals, even without knowing what mourning is, feel the absence of their four-legged companions—and even of their two-legged masters—with sadness.

Surely, they don’t know the word “mourning,” and they don’t understand human customs and conventions, but they seem to experience the void left by death. And if that’s true, then the phrase “In the beginning was the Word” should be replaced with “In the beginning was the feeling.”