Fun fact: People in ancient Egypt would shave off their eyebrows when grieving for the family cat that died.
“Hi, my name is Stevie, and I’m an addict.”
“Hi, Stevie,” the room replied.
I inhaled deeply, and from the podium in the most matter-of-fact voice I could muster, I explained, “I started shooting heroin when I was twenty-one because my cat Spencer died.”
The room burst into hysterical laughter. I did not expect that. This wasn’t a joke any more than the tracks on my arms were.
At thirty days clean after a brutal five-year addiction, I was too raw to appreciate how hilarious this was to a room full of veteran ex-addicts who knew, even if I didn’t, that shooting heroin because a cat dies isn’t what “normal” people do. According to the unspoken wisdom of the room, I shot heroin because I suffered from the disease of addiction — and that’s just what addicts do.
What the good people in the room were missing, however, was that Spencer had everything to do with why I shot heroin. Spencer was my hero, and the love she showed me was unconditional. Looking out from the eyes of my small self, she was who I wanted to be when I grew up: brave, defiant, tender, loving and wild.
On the way home from the pound where we adopted Spencer, Mom held the new kitty on her lap and told my sister and me that in a past life, when she was Cleopatra, Spencer had been her cat. As Mom regaled us with the details of her and Spencer’s shared history of nobility and power, the two-pound, flea-ridden fur ball peed all over Her Majesty’s lap. My sister and I didn’t dare laugh but, inside, a deep admiration swelled in our hearts.
In the years to come, when either Mom or Dad hit Spencer or flung her off the deck so that her tiny body slammed against the side yard fence and slithered down into the trash cans, she didn’t run away and abandon me, as I often feared she would. Instead, she would sneak back in the house later that evening to poop in Dad’s shoe or pee on Mom’s pillow, before slinking into my room to sleep. Unlike me, Spencer wasn’t diminished by the abuse. She never cowered or played nice to win their love. It was as if my parents’ rage was something that occasionally spilled over into her world, in which case she’d promptly exact revenge, but then carry on with her daily routine.
Spencer wasn’t defined by the bad things that happened to her.
I wished that I could be brazen and fierce like her — that when I was smacked or slammed or choked, I too would retaliate and fight back like a person who wasn’t afraid, ashamed, and secretly longing for acceptance. But I didn’t even raise a hand in my own defense.
I was pathetic; Spencer was strong.
And yet, at night, once tucked into the safety of my bed, she nursed on my baby blanky well into adulthood, belying her toughness with a vulnerability which made me love her even more.
On my eighteenth birthday, as I moved out of my parents’ house with a black eye and some matching trash bags full of clothes, Spencer moved out, too. Unbeknownst to me, when I failed to come home that night, she saw no reason to return either. Two months later, my mother left a message on my answering machine saying my cat was dead.
Devastated, I drove to my parents’ street at a time when I knew they wouldn’t be home and parked in the cul-de-sac in front of the baseball field where Spencer liked to hunt. I stood outside the car with my face pressed against the tall, chain-link fence and cried a blur of hot tears while making the kissing sounds I hoped would beckon her soul. After five minutes, ever cognizant of my parents’ house a half-block away, I turned to go home.
Just before I got into my car, however, I looked back one last time to pucker a final farewell.
And then I saw it: a tiny brown speck streaking across the field. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Spencer! She climbed through the fence where I’d stood just a minute before. Then, from a solid eight feet away, she leapt directly onto my chest, landing with a deafening purr.
I felt loved beyond measure.
I took Spencer home to my new house, where she settled in perfectly. I worried she’d miss hunting in the fields by my parents’ house, but she didn’t seem to mind the sedentary life of living with a college student who studied and worked all the time. The formerly lithe huntress even put on a few pounds, lending her a more matronly gait as she sauntered about the house.
Now if the story ended here — happily-ever-after — I don’t know if I’d still be a brave, defiant, tender, loving and wild woman. I don’t know if I would have been standing on a podium at age twenty-six, sharing my story with a room full of strangers.
I explained to the good people of the room that while I raced for three years between college, work, and home, doing my best to be perfect in every way, and while Spencer stretched out on the couch, undoubtedly doing her best to be perfect in every way, dark secrets were festering inside us both.
In Spencer, cancer was slowly eating her alive; in me, it was resentment.
As I waited for the vet to come back with the results, Spencer, all fur and bones, hid behind my neck and beneath my hair. My hero was terrified.
“Her insides are riddled with disease. I’ll have to do an exploratory to see if there’s anything we can do,” he said.
Spencer never made it off the operating table, and I wasn’t there to scratch beneath her chin and make the kissing sounds she liked.
When the vet told me she was dead, the already thin thread that tethered me to my better self broke.
I couldn’t save her — my hero — ravaged, hiding in my hair, terrified and gone forever. I was writhing in pain, unable to sit with it — unable to be alone with it. I needed out of my skin! I wanted so badly to be strong like her, and I tried, but the harder I raged, the farther I fell down the rabbit hole.
“And now I’m here,” I said as I stepped off the podium, exhausted.
As I walked back to my seat, the room clapped as loudly as they’d laughed, and voices from all over said, “Welcome.”
One woman pulled me close to her chest.
“Honey,” she said, “Spencer was strong because she had you to come home to. And now you have us.”
~Stevie Trujillo
