Three Things I Learned From My Cat

Three Things I Learned From My Cat

by Franklin Abbott

My cat came to me seven years ago through one of those people who sit outside in front of a Petsmart on Saturdays. They offer up rescued cats and dogs and seduce future owners by presenting the animals for petting and admiration. One of them who often set up outside the Snellville Petsmart was Wanda Tambow. Ms. Tambow lived out in the country near Monroe. What drew me to her is that she fostered both cats and little dogs. I lived with little dogs and we had lost our cat months before. I wasn't ready for a cat yet but got Ms. Tambow's card and several months later when the time was right, I gave her a call. We agreed to meet the following Saturday. 

When I arrived I parked and walked up to where Ms. Tambow had her cages. She said she had just the cat for me and produced a smoke colored cat with a striped tail, white paws, blue eyes and the face of a lynx. She told me his name was Simba. It is a popular belief that when you go to a shelter in search of a dog or a cat to adopt you should pay close attention to the animals that are happiest to see you. Simba (not his real name) was nonchalant. He hadn't made up his mind if this new human was going to be an improvement over Wanda Tambow. Ms. Tambow went into Petsmart with me and guided me to the proper litter and food for my new feline companion. I had a crate in the car, put the cat in the crate and drove back from Snellville to Stone Mountain where I lived at the time.

I introduced the new cat to my canine companions, Maria and Cornbread. Maria and Cornbread, a mother and son, had also been adopted from the sidewalk in front of another Petsmart and had been with me for eight years. Their foster mother had described them as daxihuahua's, part dachshund and part chihuahua. They had survived extreme trauma early in their lives and though they were sweet as pie they were also virtually untrainable. They were wary of the new cat. The previous cat had been on the ferocious side and had bossed them around. They would not have voted yes on a new cat thinking all cats bossy. The new cat was as nonchalant with them as he was with me. We all quickly adjusted to co-habitation. The cat became friendlier and the dogs less wary. As the sole human my attention was coveted at feeding time and the three of them took turns in my lap. After a few weeks it seemed like we had been together forever except for one thing. The cat wouldn't take a name.

He had rejected Simba and was equally indifferent to any of the names I suggested, no matter how cute or poetic. Push finally came to shove when he went to the vet. It just wouldn't do to sign him in as The Cat With No Name so I pulled the name Biscuit out of the air. Whenever we visited the vet, something he dreaded and protested all the way there, the receptionist would refer to him as my "baby" and usually say something solicitous intoning his faux-name Biscuit. It was our secret joke. Whenever this happened we would look at each other and wink in our own psychic way. We both knew he was no baby and he was no Biscuit.

Time passed and the four of us moved to a little house just outside of Decatur. Maria and Cornbread were old and within two years both had died. I was very sad and I sensed a little grief in the kitty (we had compromised; instead of a name he got a title, The Kitty). Now it was just the two of us and I had no intention of getting more dogs. Dogs are worth the trouble they make but it takes a long time to forget how much energy they demand, a prerequisite for thinking about replacing them. It seemed lonely for awhile and friends would ask if maybe I should get another cat to keep the kitty company. I did not think the kitty cared two hoots about getting another cat. I think he was fine with the status quo. He had me all to himself and I was a fairly reliable bringer of food and scratcher of head. The kitty required very little other than food, affection, a clean cat box and a view of the out of doors. He lived inside for most of his life. I built a screen porch for him a few years ago. I got to use it as well but he knew it was his.

I will tell you more about the kitty and how he left this world but I wanted to talk about three things he taught me. Three is an arbitrary number and I could doubtless add to the list but for now I will stick to the first three things that came to my mind when I decided to make them a topic for my talk at The First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta. I offer them here with a little elaboration.

ONE: When In Doubt Chill

Cats sleep a lot so they can focus on calories and the acquisition of calories. They know how to conserve energy for what is important and so they remain tranquil most of the time. The kitty had several places he liked to chill. On a chair on the porch in clement weather, on the bed, on what I thought was my chair in my office and on one of two chairs in the living room. He could tell the difference in temperature by half a degree and so his place of repose was always the warmest or the coolest depending on the season and his mood. When he slept he was rarely in a deep sleep and usually in what appeared to be something between reverie and meditation. He could go from 0 to 60 in a heartbeat if need be. When he was alert he was hyper-alert and when he was resting he had no worries.

I learned from him that if something is not occurring right here right now that it just might be unimportant. As a human I spend a great deal of time in my head worrying about the past or worrying about the future. I ruminate over what has or could happen. I come up with elaborate and sometimes torturous theories about the why's and why not's of life. The kitty would chill like an old monk wrung dry of worry through years of meditation. He was here and now and if here and now were fine the kitty was fine.

Several years ago I visited my old friend Nuumo in Ghana. It had been twenty-five years since we had seen each other and Nuumo was turning 50 and that is a big deal in Ghana. I stayed with Nuumo and his wife Princess who lived with nine of his ten children in a compound about 15 miles north of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Nuumo is an important person in his tribe the Ga. The Ga constitute millions of Ghanaians who live in and around Accra on Ghana's Atlantic Coast. Nuumo is their High Priest and is respected and deferred to wherever he goes. I had no agenda for my visit other than to attend his celebration and spend time with him and his family. Two of his children are named after me. There is a four year old Franklin and a fifteen year old Franklin. Lest that seem confusing they are most often called by their African nicknames. Everyone had several names that were spoken aloud and likely names that were not. Although English was widely spoken and everyone could communicate with me, Ga was the language of everyday life. Everyone conversed in Ga, joked in Ga and argued in Ga. Ga is a complicated language with no English equivalents. I could not even learn to say hello in Ga. Forms of address and greeting seemed super complicated and my ability to parrot them back was laughable.

Almost every day Nuumo would, sometime after breakfast, call to me and say "let's go." We would get in his SUV and go a dozen different places before getting back in the late hours of the evening. He would sometimes tell me our itinerary but often that changed for reasons I could not discern. We spent a lot of time zooming through traffic or with Nuumo fuming about how stupid other motorists were if they did not get out of his way. When we got to where we were going I might be waiting in the car for him for some time. I might know why but usually didn't. Nuumo speaks basic English but thinks in Ga and not knowing Ga I couldn't even speculate on his logic. After a few days I developed the practice of becoming ambient. Wherever I was, I just allowed myself to be. And when I simply allowed myself to be, whatever was bothering me stopped bothering me so much. If I was hot a breeze would stir. If I was bored an interesting distraction would present itself. If I was tired then my body simply set itself to rest. Amazing things would happen every day, things I could never have planned for or imagined. When I set aside both my agenda and my frustration I was surprised like a child seeing a balloon or eating ice cream for the first time. I didn't think at the time where this inspiration came from but in retrospect I had been living with a master of the ambient for a number of years.

TWO: Ask For What You Want

Cats are routine oriented creatures. The kitty would wake me one hour after daylight so I could perform the service of filling his cat bowl. He would go into Snooze Alarm mode and come back every 15 minutes and meow again if I had been to

o  lazy to heed his first alarm. My friend Edi's cat Boots was even more clever. Back in the days when we all had telephones Boots would knock the receiver off the hook and the phone would then emit a loud unpleasing series of bleeps that Edi would have to heed and get up to do Boots' bidding. Cats know how to get what they want. 

I never sensed any hesitation or resentment in my cat's requests. If he wanted something he wanted it. He didn't say please or thank you, he didn't offer an apology or a rationale, a request was a request and it was repeated until he got what he wanted or went into chill mode. Being relentless would have been a waste of energy. Chilling was his fallback position but it should never be taken as a sign of resignation. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it and that was his position. Period. 

As a human I am always torn about what I want. I learned about disappointment as a child. I didn't always get what I wanted and I internalized feeling bad about wanting things. I think this is common for children. None of us grew up in the Garden of Eden. When the umbilical cord was severed wants had to be negotiated. Unlike cats we started to think that we were bad for wanting what we wanted and certainly pissing off the giants had its consequences. A few of us became completely self-centered/narcissistic as a defense, not only did we want, we deserved. What we wanted was ours. Most of us went in the other direction and either resolved to be self-sufficient and never want anything from anyone or to become helpless and believe that help will never arrive or be enough. The cat was devoid of these neuroses. He just wanted what he wanted and saw no reason not to ask and if need be to ask again and again.

Humans are also affected by hierarchy. Cats are certainly aware of power and who has it and who doesn't and this informs their strategy. But they view it like an obstacle to be overcome or gone around. It has nothing to do with their dignity or their expectations. We humans get caught up in differences of race, gender, age, ability, religion and countless other distinctions. Some of us are insufferably privileged and others survive on everyone else's leftovers. This is never just but has been widely practiced for all of our human existence. My cat never showed any indication he thought I was superior to him. Ours was a relationship of negotiation and the playing field in his mind was level. We have no word in English for undercat because they don't exist. We humans still struggle with knowing that no one is better or worse than anyone else. On a personal level that understanding is essential to finding your heart's desire. There is no up or down to it. It is central.

THREE: It Is Okay To Have Your Heart Broken

So the kitty and I lived together as devoted companions for a number of years and nothing much changed after the porch was completed for the kitty's pleasure. Humans would visit and often gather for parties. The kitty always participated choosing a lap and then another or often to sit in his own chair in the circle where he held court. The pattern of human activity changed when I moved my psychotherapy practice to my home and my clients would come to visit. Only a few needed our space to be cat-free and the kitty obliged by staying in my office or on his porch. Some clients were cat lovers and the kitty loved them best often sitting next to them for most of the session. Others sought his attention by telling him he was such a pretty kitty and he was. He knew it and a human repeating it did not make it more or less so. Dogs can go through special training to assist in the therapy of humans. A well-trained therapy dog can be a marvelous helper as dogs worship people and have a way of breaking through most of our bad moods. There is no such thing as a therapy cat. But that is not to say that cat's aren't therapeutic. There is an aspect of suffering where the sufferer takes the whole world personally. The therapeutic gift the kitty imparted to one and all regardless of their suffering, was as far as he was concerned, it wasn't about them. There is much relief in knowing that and cats teach us about our relative unimportance very quickly.

The kitty and I parted just over a month ago. I had gone out for an appointment in mid-morning and when I returned mid-afternoon I noticed that the kitty hadn't eaten any of his food. I found him in one of his spots and picked him up as I often did and while we communed I walked into the kitchen and put him down beside his bowl. He immediately retreated to the bedroom closet dragging one of his feet behind him. I was extremely perplexed and called the vet. They said I should bring him in a couple of hours when the on-call vet could see him. I asked my friend and neighbor Lorraine to help me get him in his crate. On his way from the closet to the crate the gravity of being held upright emptied his bladder. Sweet Lorraine took care of the mess as I got the kitty into the crate and off we went to the vet.

We had not met the on-call vet or the vet tech before. They were both young women who were genuine in their concern. After examining the kitty the vet told me that his condition was either neurological or a blood clot and that I should see a specialist. It was after 5 on a Friday afternoon and the specialist was way across town at a specialty emergency clinic. I asked the vet the question that neither of us was happy for me to ask. And what would the specialist do? There wasn't a good answer. I asked if there might be a remote possibility that it was just a sprain and she said maybe. I said I wasn't ready to . . . And she said she would give the kitty a cortisone shot and a pain killer and I could see how he was in the morning. After the shots I took him home. He did not want to sit with me on the porch. He wanted to sit in the closet where it was quiet and still. I brought him food which he nibbled and water which he sipped. I sat with him for a long time while the medicines were taking affect and for an hour or so he seemed his old self purring when I petted him. I went to bed but slept lightly. I got up to check on him and he was so still I thought he died. He didn't. In the morning he was sitting in the same spot. I took him to his litter box and he urinated a few drops. I took him back to his quiet spot. The life had gone out of him. I prepared myself to take him back to the vet.

The kitty did not protest the usual way with loud meows as we drove the short distance back to the vet. We were taken to the euthanasia room. I had been there before with Cornbread. Much to my relief one of the vets I knew, one who had seen the kitty previously, was the vet on-call that Saturday. Dr. Adam Calcutt is a youthful, handsome forty year old vet with an English accent. If he were a couple of decades older he could play the vet on those BBC dramas that unfold in small country towns. He took the kitty for a final exam and confirmed that he had a blood clot in his groin, a condition that came on suddenly and that there was no good remedy for. He told me I was doing the right thing and asked if I wished to be present. I did. He gave two injections and the kitty passed gently. He lifted the kitty's body and I stood. We leaned into a hug, him holding the cat and me barely holding my tears. We should treat each other this kindly I said. He nodded and told me to take care, that he was sorry for my loss. I left by the side door and when I got to my car I wept.

Like most humans I have spent much of my life protecting my heart so it wouldn't be broken. We all have our hearts broken when we are children. It has to happen just as sure as a little chick must break the egg to hatch. Our hearts are broken in order to push us to look for life beyond our nest. It is in the job description of our parents to be the agents of our heart break try as they may to protect us. We survive and become more autonomous as we grow through childhood. We can cross the street, ride the bus and maybe even go off to our grandparents' homes or sleep-away camp. The hormonal tides of puberty push us once more to seek someone to share our heart with. That same person, the one who saves us from our loneliness, will break our heart again. Sometimes they don't mean to and sometimes they do. We never fully recover. We look for another to unbreak our heart, to make it all better and that person, no matter how wonderful is doomed to fail. None of us can fix anyone else and broken hearts cannot be unbroken.

Since his death the kitty has come to me only once in a dream. I dreamed of a cracking noise like something was trying to get into the room. It wasn't a noise I'd hear if someone were trying to get into the house. It was a peculiar sound like breaking pottery. And then I felt the kitty jump on the bed. I felt his fur next to my leg even though my leg was under the covers. And then I woke up. It felt real but I knew it was a dream. I wasn't scared or sad. I was just there and I was okay.

Our animal friends live lives of a more limited span than us. We often know them from the time they are puppies and kittens all they through their old age where they lose the

ir  sight and their hearing and become wizened and arthritic. Mostly they don't survive us. We are the ones who care for them and help them die. And we are the ones that grieve. Grief is part of our survival kit. It helps us survive our losses. The tears and the anger are necessary stages that allow us to move on. A broken heart lives on in us because we need it to keep beating. 

Losing an animal companion can provoke a terrible grief. It is quick and overwhelming. It is rarely complicated. When we lose another human we almost always have lingering questions, thoughts unspoken, wishes that won't come true. Losing the kitty so suddenly in the middle of what his normal life would have been was a terrible shock. My heart once again was broken. I wasn't at all prepared for it. Like most of life's big events it came out of the blue. It reminded me that with great love comes great risk. Everything we love we lose. My paternal grandmother, Nana, lost her husband my grandfather when she was 88. They had been married for seventy years. She survived another thirteen. She told me it never stopped hurting. She said she just made the best of it. What else, she sighed, could she do.

There is a difference in the love we feel for our fellow humans and the love we feel for our animal companions. One augments the other. Human love is so complicated. We are story telling creatures always in search of explanations. Our animal friends are mostly in the here and now where the beginning and the end of the story is in the present moment. We learn from them more than they learn from us. We learn that nature itself has intelligence and so much to offer if we just tune in. We learn about excitement and serenity, desire and fulfillment and we learn we are more than our losses. 

May 8, 2017

Midway Woods

two wonderful poems about cats, one by Marge Piercy and the other by Margaret Atwood appear on the Poetry Foundation's website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69899

This story is written from notes for my talk on May 7th at the First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta www.firstexistentialist.org