The Karma of Cats

Karla McLaren

I never felt much like a human being when I was a little girl. Humans were loud and confusing, or silent and confusing, or violent and confusing, or pleasant but still confusing. Animals, on the other hand, were my best friends and my best teachers. They didn’t confuse me at all.

Throughout my life, cats in particular have shown up when I was in trouble and I couldn’t talk to other humans about it. Their empathy and companionship helped me survive pain, chaos, and loss—and their humor, feistiness, and love filled my life with delight.

Some people say that dogs are empathic while cats aren’t. That’s just silly talk. Cats are just as empathic as dogs. The difference is that dogs tend to be undiscriminating with their empathy, while cats tend to make decisions about who will receive their empathy.

If a cat sizes you up and finds you deserving, you’ll receive empathy that’s just as healing as dog empathy, and perhaps more so because it’s focused on you as an individual.

Two cats in particular taught me a great deal about empathy, emotions, and love. These are the stories of Tommy Tiger and Kiku the Miraculous Bonsai Kitty.

Tommy Tiger came into my life when I was three years old. I was dealing with an overwhelming and painful situation alone because my family didn’t yet know that I was being molested by the neighbor across the street. They knew that I was having trouble because I was angry and very hyperactive, and I had regular nightmares. The true cause of my behaviors would not have occurred to them. They did what they could to help me, but it wasn’t enough.

Every morning before nap time, my mom would send me out to the front yard to play with water. I would stand rigid and grasp the hose with all my strength and watch the water pour onto the lawn, hypnotized by the flow. In a way, I was releasing into the water—fear, tension, rage, hyperactivity, terror, despair—and down-regulating just enough to be able to nap.

My mom didn’t know that the front yard wasn’t a safe play space for me; it was in direct sight of my molester’s front windows. This daily water play was healing in its way, but also retraumatizing. Not just for me but for the poor lawn that I was drowning each morning.

One morning—I don’t know how long after the waterings began—a big, orange tabby cat I named Tommy Tiger peeked through the hedge on the side of our yard and plopped himself down near me. Near, but not too near the water. I don’t know how long it took for me to abandon the water play, but soon Tommy and I had a standing date before nap time.

He never missed it. He sat with me, groomed me, let me groom his long, silky fur, and taught me about the world. I could tell him anything, and he listened. I could feel anything, even emotions that humans couldn’t bear, and he stayed with me. He taught me what friendship and patience were, and he taught me about emotions in a way that I could understand.

I didn’t trust human emotions because people seemed mostly to lie about them or hide them. I couldn’t get a straight answer from humans about emotions, but Tommy always told the truth.

After months of daily Tommy time, when I was able to calibrate to his honest and accessible emotions and understand them, I could understand humans and their confusing ways a bit more easily.

Tommy stayed with me throughout the years I was being molested, until I was old enough to tell my older sister, who told our parents.

I don’t remember when our morning meetings ended. Perhaps it was when I grew out of naps. But I’ve never forgotten the exquisite, healing, and lifesaving cat empathy Tommy Tiger provided.

Kiku the Miraculous Bonsai Kitty came into my life on a gray and rainy day when I was in my thirties and my son was heading into a long and difficult mental illness. He was pushing me away, blaming me, and isolating himself, and my sense of myself as a mother was filled with recriminations and despair.

One wet November day as I was driving to the post office, I saw something gray and muddy scurry from the side of the road into a culvert. For some reason, I stopped to see what it was. It might have been a rat for all I knew, and it was raining, but I just felt that I should stop. I’m glad I did, because the scurrying thing was a tiny, shivering, drenched gray kitten, perhaps six or seven weeks old. Her eyes were nearly shut with a yellow crust, but she could see well enough to know I was there.

I could feel anything, even emotions that humans couldn’t bear, and he stayed with me.

She was frightened of me, and she ran into a drainpipe that went underneath the road to the other side. I ran across the road to wait for her to exit. She did, thinking she had gotten rid of me. As she began climbing out of the drainpipe, she saw me looming and tried to run, scared and furious, but I caught her as she squirmed and yowled.

I held her to my chest and wrapped my coat around her to warm her up, and said, “You need someone to take care of you.” She relaxed immediately and cuddled into me, and that was that. I took her to the vet, who cleaned her up, cleared the gunk from her eyes and nose, and found that she had beautiful blue-green eyes and every disease known to felinity. He gave her whatever vaccinations he could and sent her home to convalesce and likely die.

I took her with me to get cat food, kitty litter, and a litter tray, and when we got home I introduced her to my husband and son. They agreed immediately that this tiny little girl was ours. If you had met her, you would agree, too. We named her Kiku, which is Japanese for chrysanthemum (the flower for November).

I set up a comfortable kitty hospice for her that day. I made her a bed out of a box and some towels, and she ate some food, used her litter box, and put herself to bed. She knew right away what she was supposed to do; Kiku was astonishingly bright and self-reliant.

The next day, we began our ritual of Kiku lying on my chest and kneading me with her little paws, so much so that she eventually wore out a number of my shirts. I also taught her to play-fight, in case she was ever able to go outside (we had a number of outdoor cats—they were also strays who were at various levels of domestication).

Kiku was an amazing little being, very self-contained and self-trained, and she had a quick sense of humor. I taught her to fight by making a claw with my hand and holding it over her, saying menacingly, “The claw, the CLAW!!!” No matter what else she was doing, she’d begin growling and fighting fiercely, but never enough to truly hurt me.

She was also very empathic and responsive. She would come running from wherever she was if I called out in a singsong voice: “Kiku, I’m lo-o-o-o-o-nely.”

She became a family member immediately, and on a diet of love, fighting with the Claw, drinking the water from tuna cans (her favorite meal with kibble), and destroying my shirts, she got well. But she never grew any larger than a ten-week-old kitten (hence her “bonsai” status) and never put on much weight. She was always very slender, and her hair was thin and dry, but she wasn’t in pain as far as we could tell.

When we visited the vet, he would call Kiku a miracle and ask what amazing things we were doing to keep her alive. It was just love and attention, I think, and her desire to be with us that did the trick.

Kiku was an indoor cat because she had feline leukemia virus (among many other diseases) and because her slight build and thin coat didn’t offer her much protection. She could see the other cats outside, though, and she spent many bittersweet hours at the window, watching them and wishing she could be there.

Our most social stray, the sleek black Jax, would put his nose up to the window and say hello to her, and she would shiver with excitement; she loved him.

About eighteen months after Kiku arrived, she had been symptom free for long enough that I let Jax into the kitchen to meet her (he was fully vaccinated). Of course, he went directly to her food bowl, but I told him sharply, “Jax, no! That’s Kiku’s food.” Jax backed up and sat about six feet away from the food while Kiku watched him. Kiku walked to her bowl, delicately picked up one of her favorite X-shaped kibbles in her mouth, and turned and threw it to Jax with a toss of her head.

I laughed. How could I not? They had their own relationship. Jax ate the love offering and then ran off to scout around the house with Kiku scampering after him. It was a one-sided love affair but love nonetheless.

Kiku lived with us for three and a half years. She went missing one summer day when I was on the East Coast teaching for a week. She may have been looking for me, or she may have gone out for an adventure and gotten lost. When I got home, I looked everywhere for her. I asked Jax and the other cats where she was, but they didn’t know.

I looked under the house and in the sheds and the garage. I tramped through the brush and manzanitas outside our home. I crossed roads, went into backyards, and hiked down brush-filled hillsides, calling the whole time: “Kiku, I’m lo-o-o-o-o-nely.”

After a few hours of searching, I ended up on a hillside in an undergrowth of trees. I saw a gray blur speeding toward me, and I was so excited. A happy gray kitten jumped into my arms, but it wasn’t Kiku. It was another little girl who was so excited to play. I hugged her and loved her, and as I did, I felt the sharp difference between Kiku’s body and this healthy kitten’s.

Her hair was soft and thick like a bunny’s. Her eyes were moist and shining. Her muscles were pliant and plump, and she had what I could best describe as a “moistness” in her entire body that Kiku simply didn’t have. It was almost as if, in contrast, Kiku’s body was made of dried sinew, fragile bones, and brittle, yellowed paper.

This kitten’s presence felt like a goodbye message from Kiku. She had lived longer than anyone thought possible in her feisty bonsai body, and she had healed my broken mother’s heart with her immense empathy, humor, and love. This bendy, joyful, fluid kitten showed me that even though Kiku didn’t show any pain, she probably was in pain every day.

It could be that Kiku needed me to be gone so that she could take her final journey. I sat crying and laughing with this goofy gray girl for a while, and then I told her I had to go. Just like that, she gamboled and bounded down the hill to a nearby house, and I got up and walked home alone.

We never found Kiku’s body. I hope she found a quiet and safe place in which to hide and eventually die. I hope it didn’t take too long and that she didn’t feel too hungry or too lonely. And I hope she knew how grateful I was—and still am—for her miraculously healing cat empathy.