When I look into the eyes of an animal I do not see an animal. I see a living being. I see a friend. I feel a soul.
~A.D. Williams
It was Halloween night. Witches, ghosts, goblins, and Darth Vader were trekking from door to door asking for treats. The phone rang; it was my friend Lilly, whose five-year-old son has autism.
“Hey, would it be okay if I brought James to your house to trick or treat? This is his favorite holiday, and he’s all dressed up in his costume, but he can’t go just anywhere, only to homes where he knows people.”
“Of course,” I told my friend. I knew that her son didn’t do well with strangers or crowds, and though I’d been to his home many times, he had never been to mine.
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang, and I opened it to find James standing there in his costume.
“Trick or treat,” he whispered. I dumped a large handful of candy into his bag.
“Can we come inside?” Lilly asked. “We already visited all our neighbors. This is our last stop.”
I opened the door wide and invited them inside. James took two steps and froze, staring at my orange tabby cat, Lox. I glanced at Lilly. “What’s up?”
“Because of his dad’s allergy to cats, he hasn’t been around them much, or really at all.”
We watched as James stepped into the room with all the caution of a secret agent scoping out a possibly dangerous environment. Lox stayed still and didn’t take his eyes off James. James plopped down on the rug and lowered his head to the cat’s level. Lilly and I moved over to the couch and began chatting about the mundane events of our week. Every few minutes, Lilly looked over her shoulder to watch her son, who sat mesmerized by Lox. If one of them cocked his head sideways, the other one mirrored the movement.
Tears began welling in Lilly’s eyes. She reached up and wiped away a stray tear. “In his whole life,” she said, “James has never looked anyone in the eye. Not me, not his dad. No one. It’s part of his autism.” She pointed to Lox and James. “Since he walked in here, he hasn’t stopped looking Lox in the eye. And Lox hasn’t stopped looking at him. I’ve never seen a cat do that.”
I explained that Lox was a nurse cat, and had been since the day we brought him home as a kitten. He sensed when someone was ill or injured or needed a loving paw. I couldn’t explain it, but Lox knew with uncanny insight when someone was hurting or ill. He wouldn’t leave the person’s side until he or she was fully recuperated. I’m not sure he knew what to do with James, so he did what he knew best. He mimicked James and stayed with him until Lilly took James home a half-hour after the stare-a-thon began.
Lox was one of the most extraordinary cats I’d ever known. He was social almost to a fault. Whereas other cats would vanish when company visited, he preferred to be in the middle of the conversation. At every meal, he politely sat on a dining chair, watching us eat, never begging or intruding. He simply wanted to be with us.
We also witnessed Lox fall in love. We took in a stray mother cat and her kittens that someone had dumped in our neighborhood. The mother was thin and exhausted, and the kittens were hungry. Lox and Shayna (the name we gave her) bonded immediately. To give her time to rest, Lox would babysit the little ones several times a day while Shayna retreated to another part of the house. It was astonishing to watch the vast empathy Lox displayed for everyone, including animals he didn’t know. Eventually, we found homes for the kittens, and Shayna stayed with us. She and Lox became inseparable. I don’t think they spent five minutes apart until she passed away a few years later. I’d never seen an animal grieve before, but grieve he did, sleeping only in the places where she slept, eating little, if at all. He mourned like a human.
But it wasn’t just animals he cared for and nursed. When my husband was recovering from shoulder surgery, Lox lay next to the injured shoulder, placing a paw lightly on the bandages, providing warmth.
A few years later, I suffered a near-fatal pulmonary embolism that required I spend several days in the hospital. I returned home to a fretting cat. As soon as I lay down on the bed, he was right next to me. He snuggled between my arm and upper body, with his head resting gently on my chest. Somehow, he knew that his body evoked a healing effect, something unexplainable, a sort of spiritual nourishment. Every hour or so, he would lift his head and look into my eyes, softly stroking my cheek with his soft paw. I could only interpret it as his way of checking on me. I would nod and tell him I was going to be okay. He would hunker back down and begin purring, lulling me back to sleep.
For weeks, he nursed me, and I slowly recovered. But as I recovered, Lox began his decline into terminal kidney failure. Lox had been in kidney insufficiency for a year, and he’d been doing well, or so we thought. Then, all of a sudden, his health turned, and he was dying before our eyes.
I wasn’t allowed to cry as Lox entered his final days. The doctors had warned me against any activity, emotional or physical, that could cause the embolism to dislodge and travel back up into my heart or plunge into my lung, which could result in instant death. My dear, sweet cat was dying, and all I could do was grieve silently.
Finally, after watching Lox suffer over a weekend, we called the vet’s office on a Monday morning and said it was time to bring him in. They prepped him and placed him on my lap. We kissed him and told him goodbye. In moments, he was gone. All the tears I had not shed gushed out. I didn’t care what that embolism did. I’d lost my sweet kitty, my nurse kitty, an extraordinary little being that had made the world a better place through his simple acts of nurturing. He saved me, and he saved countless others, and I was heartbroken that I couldn’t save him.
~Jeffree Wyn Itrich
