Chapter Eight

Love

This book does not entertain the notion that cats are incapable of loving people. You can find that argument made elsewhere.

Still, think about this. What are we doing, keeping this animal in our house?—loving this creature, whom, no matter how hard we try, no matter how many studies we study, we ultimately cannot understand? Sometimes, when I looked at Augusta drowsing in a chair, it seemed downright weird that she was there at all. In our life, I mean.

If weird connotes unusual, there is nothing weird about it. Somewhere between thirty-six million and forty-three million American households have at least one cat.¹ How many American pet cats in all, then? Seventy-four to ninety-six million.² The United Kingdom has eight million pet cats, France ten million. Italy, with a human population of sixty million, has nine million cats (that’s just the pets, excluding their millions of ferals).³

So it’s not weird to have a cat. One still sort of wonders why we do.

The psychiatrist Aaron Katcher maintains that pets “help preserve our mental and physical equilibrium,” and he has identified four kinds of “transaction” between us and our animal companions that bind us together deep in our beings: safety, intimacy, kinship, and constancy.4 Katcher’s signifiers are worth looking at one by one.

You can tell that Katcher is more of a dog guy when one of his first examples of the safety principle is that you can talk more easily to a stranger out walking a dog than to one who is out for a walk without a dog. The same, he observes, goes for someone out walking with a baby. Not many people walk their cats. What’s more, “Considering the almost universal proscriptions against touching strangers, it is important to note that one can touch the child or the dog as a means of greeting.” Even if somebody had succeeded in walking a cat, a head-on pet-the-cat approach would be a dubious proposition, though it might be a good conversation starter (unless the walker was batty, not entirely improbable). Nevertheless, when Katcher writes that people in “dyadic relationships”—he means couples—sometimes find that they can discuss difficult topics in a kind of “triangulation” by talking first to their pet and eventually through it, a cat comes readily to mind. “Animals,” he says, “make people safe for people.”

Victoria Voith, whose work we met earlier, writes insightfully about this sense of safety: “Human beings evolved in social groups that lived in close proximity with other animals.… The animals serve as mutually reciprocal sentinels for danger.… As long as the animals around us appear serene, ‘all is well.’ We can decrease our vigilance. Perhaps the presence of nonfrightened animals sends a message, critical in our evolutionary past, that there are no predators in the vicinity and it is safe.”⁵

Intimacy, by definition, says Katcher, combines talk and soft touch. Many people not only talk to their cats but confide in them. Just how many of us think the cats understand what we’re saying doesn’t seem to have been determined, but 92 percent of Voith’s study subjects believed their cats were at least attuned to their moods. “Pets,” she writes, “can generate a feeling of well-being, a feeling of being loved. Pets appear to miss us and to be happy to see us. They seek us out to be touched and, perhaps more importantly, to touch us and provide soft, warm, tactile contact with a living being.…”

Again focusing on dogs, Katcher made observations of intimacy most of which also apply accurately to cats: “The person directs his or her gaze at the dog.… The dog is stroked and talked to.… The person’s voice becomes softer.… The cadence of the owner’s speech changes, and fewer words are uttered per minute. A pseudodialogue is established by alternating questions and silences.… Blood pressure is lower.… There is a change in facial expression… a smoothing of the facial features, with the loss of signs of tension and the presence of a fixed smiling.…”

Quoting Katcher is a joy, for the sheer bloopy formality of his language—“dyadic relationships,” “a fixed smiling.” And now the ne plus ultra: “The presence of a dog in an experimental chamber, a veterinary clinic, or a home permits the study of intimacy without sex in the same way that the procedures of Masters and Johnson permitted the study of sex without intimacy.” Zing!

Aaron Katcher’s third “outcome of transactions between man and animal”—kinship—at first struck me as another eccentric choice of words. Then I remembered that 99 percent of Victoria Voith’s subjects considered their cats to be members of the family. That pretty much sums it up. Katcher presents an amusing sequence of examples, all dog, though you can substitute “cat” and they still work: “Family portraits when taken in a setting about the home tend to include the [cat]. The [cat] shares the parental bed and bedroom. The [cat] is fed and does not feed himself. The [cat] is permitted to display his anus and genitalia. His excretory functions are a subject of public concern, effort, and direct comment without embarrassment. He is talked to but is not expected to use words.… The manner of speech used toward the [cat] frequently resembles that used with small children… [the] lilting, simplified language of ‘motherese.’”

For Katcher’s fourth essential quality of animal companionship—constancy—he draws distinctions between children and pets. Again I substitute cat for dog: “Since he is not expected to become adult, there is no demand that the [cat] progress along an axis of intellectual, moral, or social achievement. The [cat] stays the same. He never grows up, never learns to talk, or how to care for himself, or how to wear clothes that hide his genitalia. He never learns shame.”

Katcher also makes a couple of assertions about what he considers the proper nature of having a pet. “The tendency of children to make partial objects out of animals, by attributing to them extreme qualities of virtue or vice,” seems to Katcher to infect some grown-up pet owners. “This way of animating and personifying animals can fail to recognize the existence of the real animal. Moreover, it is frequently an expression of a highly narcissistic attachment, in which the affection and love attributed to the animal is, in reality, affection directed at the self.… Like the self, they are highly individualized, as stuffed animals or security blankets are individualized.… People who love animals in this fashion are more vulnerable to the loss of the animal and can experience intense depression following such loss.”

This stung. Was the depth of my grief over Augusta “an expression of a highly narcissistic attachment”? Was she no more than a projection of what I wished her to be? Then I read Katcher’s rosy alternative:

“There is, however, another way of being with animals.… It can recognize the reality of animals without split perception or narcissistic love. It recognizes the identity of the animal with his species.… This is the kind of relationship with animals that is shared by the farmer, and even by the hunter.… We have lost the notion that it is possible to love animals and see them die or sacrifice them in their time.… With a change in vision, and a change in position, man can stand outside of the individual cycle of any one dog and see the repetition of that cycle many times in his own existence.”

Whoa now, Aaron! I’m supposed to think of Augusta as livestock? Or as the hunter sees the deer—there’ll always be another one?

After a few deep breaths, I began to see some truth in both of Katcher’s extreme ideas. Of course we project our own needs onto the pets we love—we project our own needs onto the people we love, too. We project our own needs onto the movie stars and the works of art and the landscapes we love. And yes, yes, yes, we must remember—I guess I’ve been trying to make the point throughout this book—that these are animals with selves of their own, selves we can see into only dimly but must respect, and must try, rationally, to understand. In turn they will try to teach us the truth of themselves.

Not being much of a cat video fan, I tend to forget how many people find so many ways to turn their poor cats into something else. Are they making fools of the cats? No, because by the grace of God cats don’t seem to be equipped with the faculty of embarrassment. Are those people making fools of themselves? Possibly not that either, because to make a fool of yourself you’ve got to realize you’ve done it. I don’t get why somebody needs to dress a cat up as Santa Claus or a clown for the cat to be entertaining. Cats just are entertaining. And this is where I add a fifth essential element of the human-and-animal “transaction” to those proposed by Aaron Katcher: entertainment. They entertain us. And if we’re living up to our end of the bargain, we entertain them.

It’s a mutual obligation. Elizabeth was astonished when as soon as Augusta arrived in our life I said, “You have to play with her.” Elizabeth didn’t cotton to being told by anybody that she had to do anything, but it didn’t take long for her to realize that she would be richly recompensed. Is there anything on this earth more entertaining than a kitten? I suppose I’m easily amused, but I believe that for every minute I spent amusing that cat she amused me back fiftyfold. When she tootled along the upstairs banister with a twenty-foot free fall below her, then drew all four little black feet tight together and flew six horizontal feet to the bookcase, that was just… Supercat-cool. When she tangled herself up in a ribbon in the legs and stretchers of a chair and exploded out of it like Houdini, I thought it was a riot. When she put her front paws up on the rim of the toilet to watch the stream of my pee hit the water, we both found that most entertaining. When she sneaked onto the dining table and started trying to chew up the tulip leaves just to bother us, that was obnoxious, exactly as she intended, but also, as she probably didn’t intend, funny. I have a little rubber monkey that hangs by an elastic string from a file rack on my work table; when Augusta was hungry or bored, she would thrrrum the string and make the rubber monkey bounce, shattering my concentration. I know she thought that was funny. We used to play one of the dumbest games ever invented: She would sit on the kitchen counter and I would put a ballpoint pen beside her and she would knock it onto the floor; I would put it back; she would knock it down again; put it back, knock it down, put it back, knock it down, again and again—I don’t know how to tell you how much pleasure this gave both of us. I liked to watch her sleep, and when she cracked an eye to check that I was still there, I’m certain she liked that I was watching her sleep.

From consideration of the empathic pleasure that mutual entertainment provides, a sixth essential element of the human–cat relation begins to arise: love. We love our cats with a purity and grace not possible in our love of our spouses, our parents, or even our children. People are too complicated for love as simple as what we bear to our cats. It is not agápē, philēo, caritas, amor, or eros (roughly: selfless love, brotherly love, love of humankind, romantic love, and erotic love, respectively). I believe it has never been named. The kinship between our cats and ourselves reaches deep beneath consciousness, to a place before history, perhaps even before the development of the self-expressible human intellect. In its purity our love of our cat resembles an infant’s adoration of his or her mother, but it lacks that utter dependency. We do not want to relinquish it, God forbid! but it is nonetheless voluntary. It is devotional, like prayer, and like prayer it is met with silence. Our devotion is what gives cats their power.

There is a famous story in Islam that one day the prophet Muhammad’s favorite cat, Muezza, was asleep on the sleeve of his robe when the call to prayers came, and rather than disturb Muezza, Muhammad cut off the sleeve. When the Prophet returned, Muezza awoke and bowed down to him. (Cats do that.) Muhammad stroked Muezza’s head three times, granting to all cats seven lives and the ability always to land on their feet.6

If we need proof more tangible than what we know in our souls—perhaps more useful if you want to undertake arguments with doubters—there has been a good deal of research into the neurochemistry of attachment and love, showing, among other things, that one of the consistent markers of emotional attachment is an increase in the release of the hormone oxytocin by the hypothalamus.⁷ This has been familiar in the study of the human brain for years, and more recent research has shown that the same thing happens in the brains of cats in affectionate interaction with their human companions.⁸

The great psychologist Boris M. Levinson tried in the 1960s to establish that the depth of awareness between animals and children could be the basis for effective psychotherapy. At a meeting of the American Psychological Association, he was laughed at. The National Institutes of Mental Health turned down his application for funding. Twenty years later, however, he was able to write that “The field of animal–human relationships is now respected as a legitimate area of scientific investigation, [although] it is not yet a full-fledged discipline.” It was well on its way, in any case, and Levinson felt confident enough to say, “We may now be ready to translate into reality the myth of the golden age when animals and humans lived at peace with each other.”9 (He did not live to see it: In 1984, at the age of seventy-six, while at work in Brooklyn at the Blueberry Treatment Center for Seriously Disturbed Children, Levinson was felled by a heart attack.¹⁰)

Levinson’s signal contribution was his insistence that scientific methodology alone could never succeed in comprehending the complexity of the relationships between people and their animal companions. Research, he believed, must always allow for the “intuitive (the folk way) of studying the animal, the way used by the artist, poet, writer, plain people for generations,” because

our early ancestor regarded animals as rational beings and as partners in life.… There was an understanding of how an animal felt and a corresponding respect for the animal’s feelings and drives. Our early ancestors thought of animals as friends, knowing that, like themselves, animals loved, hated, grieved, and were supportive of each other. Early man thought of animals as having intimate thoughts and aspirations and also unseen powers and connections with nature that he did not possess.

“We were programmed to cooperate and live with animals,” writes the psychiatrist James A. Knight. “Today, we do not always see nature and animals as friends and partners, and this perceptual failure may be contributing to the widespread sense of alienation in our society..… The first gods of humans were animals, and these animal gods symbolized the elemental forces of nature.…

In many ways, humans have not changed over the last million years, and at some level of their awareness they still have a need to associate with animals.… This is one of the universals of the human psyche, and we see this universality in our dreams, folk tales, drawings, and relationships with animals. The vestiges that humans carry of their physical and psychological past break through at unguarded or strategic moments and are expressed in their symbols and myths.

To understand ourselves, we must understand the meaning of the animal in our conscious and unconscious minds and what influence this meaning had on the development of humankind.… The acceptance of the “animal soul” is the condition for wholeness and a fully lived life.11

In a world, and a life, characterized by constant change, by the craving for novelty, by anxious anticipation, the cat never changes. She is nature incarnate, in our house. In our heart.

Then our cats leave us and we are alone, in black emptiness. Sometimes you are divorced and the cat goes with the other. Sometimes they die in an accident. Rarely but not never, someone kills them on purpose. Sometimes they get sick and die young. Sometimes they just disappear. Most often they grow old, grow weak, perhaps contract an illness or a disability and are in pain, and you have them put to sleep. Sometimes you die first, and someone else takes them in, or doesn’t.

For those who can’t bear their cat’s death, there is faith in an afterlife. Someone, in the last twenty years or so, whose identity is still unknown, invented a transitional paradise for dead pets called the Rainbow Bridge, where they live again, happily, while waiting for their human companions to follow and pick them up so that they can move on then, together, to heaven. The Rainbow Bridge is most often encountered in the form of a poem, which, lacking an author and therefore a copyright, has spawned quite a few books. It can be seen in a number of forms as well on the internet. Here is an example: www.indigo.org/rainbowbridge_ver2.html.

For those of us less faithful, what survives our loss is only emptiness, not a void but a wound, a piece of you ripped out and not healing. The poet Christian Wiman writes—in this case of the loss of a human loved one, but in our case, of the death of a beloved cat, equally apt—

Somehow, even deep within extreme grief, the worst pain is knowing that your pain will pass.… Consequently, many people fight hard to keep their wound fresh, for in the wound, at least, is the loss, and in the loss the life you shared. Or so it seems. In truth the life you shared, because it was shared, was marked by joy, by light.… Excessive grief, the kind that paralyzes a person… does not honor the love that is its origin.… [The] dead inhabit us—for good, if we will let them do that, which means, paradoxically, letting them go.12

All very well to say, and surely true in time, but you cannot force it. Augusta’s death paralyzed me for two months at least, and I’m not ashamed of that. Excessiveness is in the eye of the judge, and in this matter only I can judge. I did find myself defending myself sometimes, sometimes against myself, more often against someone mystified, whose mystification as time passed shaded into annoyance, or just distance. You are as alone as ever you have been. You hoard your grief.

You stay home. Friends ask you out to dinner, you find a lie for declining. Work? You can’t focus on anything, except this one thing. In the loss is the life you shared, Wiman says. Now you’re supposed to see the joy and the light in it, somehow to be in that life. How is that supposed to be possible? The fucking cat is dead.

Support groups—new friends. Old friends. Counselors. Books—Amazon shows eight thousand books on grief and bereavement, 13,612 on death and grief. There’s even a coloring book that claims solid scientific proof of efficacy.13 The problem is, you have to summon up the energy to buy it, and the colored pencils, and the sharpener. Then you have to find the further energy to face the thing. The problem is there’s a hole in your heart.

Then slowly, as slow as an arctic aurora dimmed by ice-fog—and by disbelief—a thought takes shape, renascent from Wiman: In the loss is the life you shared. Slowly, the absence becomes a presence. This pain is the presence of love deprived of its object. Love with empty heart, empty hands. Love can’t exist alone—of course it’s crying out. Love is not an intransitive verb.

You can’t have Augusta back, but you could have:

A kitten.

Could you not love a kitten? Would that love not at least resemble your love of Augusta? Would it not be better than this emptiness, this voiceless yelling from the bottom of a pit? This waiting, tired, hurting, voided love is a particular love, the love of a cat, a cat gone forever but nonetheless cat-love, specific—yes, Dr. Katcher, all right—specific to the species. You can’t satisfy it with a new car or a drug or a lover or even a baby. You have to have a cat.

Is this a resolution, then? No, it’s only an impulse. But add this thought: There are too many kittens in shelters, there are thousands of cats killed every day because nobody has adopted them. Some shelters turn away kittens when they’re over capacity. Maybe that’s what happened to Augusta! That might have been why her stupid, hopeless human ex-protector dumped her in the snow that night. I have always believed that Augusta had littermates who died that night in the snow.

Elizabeth and I began to talk about it. Our new cat (what an idea, our new cat, O Augusta, forgive me) had to be a girl—a gentle soul, a quality rare in tomcats, I believed—and she couldn’t look anything like Augusta. She had to be a kitten, so that as she grew up there would be continuous exchange of learning and investment between us. (Or was that a way of saying my inner Pygmalion wanted to be able to shape her character?) We walked back through the things we had done wrong with Augusta, and we swore we would not do them with the new cat. Most importantly, we would not leave her alone for long times.

—Are we ready?

No.

—What about now?

Not yet.

Kitten season was at its prime. (Births begin in early spring and stretch into fall, but midsummer is the peak, so twelve to fourteen weeks later will offer the widest choice of kittens just the right age.) Elizabeth sent me a link to the Pets Unlimited website. Unlimited is right. Kitten after kitten. Filters and filters: age (kitten, youngster, prime of life, oldster), gender, color, hair length, pattern. The personality types—Poet, Cat Next Door, Lionhearted—are each described in corny baby-kitty-speak, but they’re probably the most important consideration.

You could shop online all you wanted, and we did, lollygagging blithely till we kept coming back to this one. We couldn’t stop looking at her. We were doing exactly what Eileen Karsh warns everybody against—we had fallen in love with a photograph. It was time to go and meet the actual kitten.

This is where everybody needs to take a few deep breaths, or a dozen, and a day and a night—before you set foot in the place—to talk and to try to think it through. The responsibilities. The expenses. Who’s going to do what. Do you really agree—has the whole household bought in. Because once you get there and something happens between you and some kitten, you can go from 90 percent certain you don’t want one—you’re still grieving, you were just looking—to I’m in love, this is the one, can I take her home today? in about a quarter of a second.

Pets Unlimited, fortunately, has already thought you through. No matter who you are, no matter what stage you’re in, they’ve seen you before. But of course not everybody has a Pets Unlimited, and if you don’t, please pay close attention to what they do, and consider putting yourself through something like the same rigors. If you do, you and your cat will be happier for the rest of your lives together.

One of the best things about dealing with an outfit like Pets Unlimited is knowing with what tenderness and expertise the cats have been made ready. Shelters like this have superb volunteers who foster kittens, sometimes motherless and very young ones. These lovely people know all the right things about handling baby kittens and exposing them gradually to a variety of people and helping them with shyness or other possible social problems. Pets Unlimited’s volunteers must report precisely what they’ve done to build the kittens’ confidence, and to minister to their medical needs, and to socialize them. They’re even asked, and required to put it in writing, “What makes this kitten one of a kind?”

People considering adoption may not know how well prepared their prospective feline companions are. If you’re adopting from a shelter, a good conversation with staff members who have gotten to know the kitten or cat you have in mind can be invaluable. Eileen Karsh wisely points out that all kittens are adorable, and you need to pay close attention to figure out a kitten’s underlying personality type. So if you’re uncertain about the temperament of the kitten you’re thinking of—and you can’t get good information about it—then consider adopting an adult. Grown-up cats are a little easier to figure out if you just spend some time with them. If you can find out what sort of life the cat has been living, that can help, too.

When you visit the adoption center at Pets Unlimited, a distinctive sense of well-being permeates the place, and there is a foreordained choreography to your visit. What everybody does first is take a little walk around the… I guess you have to call them apartments; they’re certainly not cages. You notice that the place doesn’t stink. Once in a while the dogs get to barking, but mostly they stay as quiet as the cats. There are litters of little-bitty ones with moms, still nursing. There are old ones with longing eyes. There are shy ones half-withdrawn in their little carpet-covered houses. There are pairs and trios, sometimes siblings, sometimes not, rollicking, rolling, wrestling. There are mature bonded pairs sweetly grooming each other.

Couples find each other’s hands. Some people furtively wipe the corners of their eyes. Some are overwhelmed and hurry away—it’s too much too soon. Few find the experience less than powerful.

Somebody opens the door. The kittens are there, and some toys. They look at you. You look at them. Out of the corner of your eye you notice that you are being watched. (You’re assessing the prospective adoptees. The staff assesses the prospective adopters.)

There were three: Murray, a striking aluminum-silver tabby, named for the nerdy writer on the Mary Tyler Moore Show; Ted, the goofball of an anchorman, a darkish brown tabby; and Mary Tyler, the one we had already fallen in love with by picture alone. They were littermates. They and their mother had been found next to an irrigation ditch in the Central Valley when the kittens were tiny, and the family had been fostered by one of Pets Unlimited’s saintly volunteers. All three kittens were full of beans, fearless, friendly, glad to be held, athletic, but Mary Tyler had glamour, pizzazz, star quality.

She also looked strikingly different from any other cat I’d ever seen—a riot of features that achieved nonetheless an extravagant harmony: a sleek, shiny pelt that lay flat as a leopard’s, with black spots on a background of steel-silver underlain with soft tan fur; a golden sparkle at the tips of her guard hairs; a black longitudinal stripe down her back which turned into raccoon stripes up an oddly flattened, long tail; hind legs longer than her front ones; bold black Cleopatra eye liner; a broad, flat leathery nose like a lion’s. All these, we learned, were characteristic of Bengal ancestry. But she was no true Bengal: Her breast and belly were fuzzy soft snow white, shading to golden fawn at the edges, and all four paws were big round snowballs with big black toepads, most unlike the delicate mince-through-the-jungle feet of the bred-to-be Bengal. Her otherwise elegantly leonine nose bore a comical splash of white on one side.

And the eyes. She looked at you, into you, inquiring. Could there even have been a flicker of humor? No, that’s too much to assume of a cat—but play, yes, her eyes showed an eagerness for play. We picked up a little chase toy and those jackrabbit hind legs sprang her straight up, she grabbed it in both paws and with teeth too, and tumbled to earth heedless as a—kitten. Which after all is what she was. Twelve weeks.

Yes. This was the one.

You emerge into a room clean and medical, echoic, official. You sit across a cold desk from a professionally polite interviewer with a checklist of questions, the Cat Adoption Profile. This two-sided single sheet of paper starts innocently enough—name, address, etc.—but pretty soon it gets personal. For whom are you adopting this pet? That’s an intentionally loaded question. Two of your choices are “gift” and “other.” If you check one of those, you’re not likely to get much further. Another choice is “family.” Check that one and they’re going to want to meet the family, all of them, to be sure that everybody’s on the same page about wanting to adopt (often they’re not). Have you had pets in the last ten years? Dog, cat, or other? Age? Spayed/neutered? And another loaded question: Where are they currently? If you left them behind when you moved, or you gave them to Granny because, oh, Granny seemed lonely, or any other answer suggesting that you might not take personal responsibility quite seriously, that’s a red flag. The next question is clearly diagnostic: Under what circumstances would you return a pet to the shelter? The interviewer has been trained in matchmaking, and has been alert to every nuance of your answers. They can turn you down at any point for any reason.

The questions go on, and on. How many hours a day will the household be without people? How much do you think it will cost you each month to provide the necessary medical care and to cover the costs of feeding and caring for this cat? Many people are stunned to learn the answer: seventy-five dollars or more.

It is most important to me that my cat—(She stops abruptly in midsentence.) Go ahead, answer.

The note of forced sincerity in our voices was painful. Every answer was accurate, our desire for this kitten pure as Montana snow. So, um, could we have her?

Yes.

You sign a legal document about as charming as an apartment lease, put the $125 fee on your credit card, and—wait. She still had to be spayed, and she needed another two weeks with her mom and her sibs.

We asked if we could see her again, and they brought us and the family back to the greeting room. As soon as I sat down cross-legged, our kitten—our kitten!—padded merrily up onto my knee and looked into my face. My answer to her question was: Yes. The other kittens held shyly back, as though they knew. Elizabeth picked up our kitten, and she curled into the curl of Elizabeth’s arm and buried her face in the crook of her elbow. This was good, a good decision. We went home certain of that.

We chose to name her Isabel, not for any meaning but for its sound, its simplicity, its matching threes of vowels and consonants, its graceful dactylic meter, for how well we knew she would recognize it when we called her, how she would like it when we talked to her, how she would be comforted when we whispered it, and for the beauty of the many other ways it is spoken around the world, among them

Ysabel, Isabella, Isabelle, Isbel, Belinha, Bella, Belle, Ibbie, Issy, Izzy, Libby, Sabella, Zabel, Elisheba, Alžběta, Ella, Else, Eliška, Eli, Elise, Eliso, Lilly, Lis, Lisa, Lise, Liisu, Liisa, Liisi, Liliána, Sibéal, Ealisaid, Ishbel, Betje, Jelica, Yelyzaveta…14

These incantations were somehow hopeful mnemonics—we were readying ourselves for the coming days of which we knew we would want not to forget a moment. They were also hopelessly ineffective erasures of the name Augusta.

In the meantime we had homework—a corner-stapled sheaf of forty pages, printed front and back. The cover page blared

CONGRATULATIONS!

PETS UNLIMITED ADOPTION CENTER RESOURCE GUIDE FOR NEW PARENTS

Getting Ready for Your New Cat

Bringing Your New Cat Home

Protect Your Pet from Common Household Dangers

Introducing Pets to a New Cat

Starting Out Right with Your New Cat and the Litter Box

Positive Reinforcement: Training Your Dog or Cat with Treats and Praise

Be Prepared: Natural Disasters and First Aid

Cat Toys and How to Use Them

Removing Pet Stains and Odors

Caring for Pets When You’re Ill

Coping with Allergies

Understanding Your Kitten’s Behavior and Development

Reducing Your Cat’s Fearful Behavior

Solving Aggression between Family Cats

Cat Aggression toward People

Your Pregnancy and Your Cat

Preparing Pets for a New Baby

Are We All Moving?

Of Course You Can Cry

—Of course you can cry? Jesus, we haven’t even got her yet and already they’re preparing us for her death? But truly, there was stuff in here that in fifteen years with Augusta we still didn’t know. Chocolate is poisonous to cats? Rubber bands can cause intestinal blockages? (Augusta played with them for years, and apparently just lucked out.) An earthquake survival kit—great idea for San Francisco! We didn’t even have one for ourselves.

Before Isabel could be released, they gave us yet another stack of paper: vaccination records, need for dental care, pet insurance providers, post-adoption info sheet, thirty days of free medical care, we could “surrender” Isabel within thirty days but wouldn’t get our 125 bucks back. Surrender her, my hind foot.

We went to take a look at her. She was all alone now. Our big-eyed, big-eared kitten was sporting a plastic Elizabethan collar, to keep her from gnawing at the freshly stitched incision of her spaying surgery. Could we take her home now? Could you please take off the collar?

Yes, but first, back to the big metal desk and more documents, accepting Isabel “as household pet and companion,” promising to provide exercise, play, food, water, love, kind treatment, and medical aid at once, at our own expense, not to have her cosmetically altered or used for experimentation, never sell or abandon her, indemnify and hold harmless… any and all liability… settlements… enforceable through judicial proceedings… costs and reasonable attorneys’ fees… scribble scribble. Okay, okay. Now?

Well, let’s just run through these Take Home Instructions for Mary Tyler (their software wouldn’t allow for her new, true name until five years later): heartworm—fleas—high protein low carb, canned better than dry—cats not respond to force—places to climb and look out of windows—room or other space her own—prevent litter box problems, get kitten off to good start—biting—

All right, all right already! Do they give this much paperwork to incoming freshmen at Harvard? Can we please have our kitten now?

A volunteer came out, smiling, carrying a cardboard carrying case with “Mary Tyler” written on the side.

It is a drive of seven blocks, three minutes. We have already set up the bedroom with food, water, scratching post, litter box, bed with sheepskin blankie. We carry the case upstairs, open it, and out walks Isabel. Isabel! Isabel, welcome home! She looks around. Not a trace of fear on her face, in her body. She walks forward, tail high—I think I like it here. She goes straight to the scratching post and plucks merrily away, proof of her good education. She looks at me, sits down, sits up, lifts her front paws high: Pick me up! She rests against my chest like that, white back feet perched on my arm, front feet flat on my chest, cheek to my heart—a gesture and posture that will last forever. O Love!

All the details that Pets Unlimited goes into, all their advice and demands, their lists and forms and sign-heres, may seem persnickety. I suppose they are persnickety. I wonder how many other shelters and adopters go through so much rigamarole. Is it necessary? Is it excessive? All I can say from personal experience is that they gave us a bold, calm, intelligent, friendly, non-neurotic, healthy, loving cat. For almost no money. And who but for their having taken her in would probably have grown up feral, or, equally likely, died a bad death before her first birthday.

And think. Think of the depth of responsibility we undertake when we assume one of these fragile little lives. Legally, the cat becomes our property. And morally, what? We may have to supply our own words for the obligations we incur—there may, really, be no adequate words. How many of us rush into this half-blind, and one morning, perhaps when the cat has run away, or is sick, or is acting intolerably badly and won’t stop, all of a sudden we go, Oh, shit, what have I done? and we find out either that we love the poor creature more than we ever knew and we wish we had paid more attention to the details back when it would have mattered, or that we never should have adopted her in the first place and now we face the guilt and the bafflement and the brick wall of now what?

This is going to go on for years. She is going to be utterly dependent on us. Here and now: What we do in these first weeks and months will shape her behavior and our relationship all down those years. We’ve seen it, down through these chapters. We have to sweat the details. Isabel? Here’s your litter box, here’s your food, here’s your blankie. Good kitty!

The light returns that we thought was gone.

All over the world, cats are coming into people’s lives all day, kittens, middle-aged cats, old cats, damaged cats, grouchy cats, placid cats, cats sleek as otters, bony cats, fat cats, suspicious, trusting, restless, scaredy, fuzzy, fizzy, timid, foolish, crazy, cool. Wanted, unwanted, somewhere in between. Some will be abused, some ignored, many misunderstood. Some will be lonely, some will be sad, some will run away and be run over, some will sicken and die. Some will never know a day that isn’t happy, full of birds and children’s chatter or timeless and serene. Nearly all will love someone.

“I could have loved you better,” I sang the Tom Paxton song back through time to Augusta, “Didn’t mean to be unkind / You know it was the last thing on my mind.” Maybe not the last thing, but bad enough. I wasn’t paying attention, Augusta. How did you feel when we went away? I didn’t even think. You were glad to see us when we returned, which was enough for us to fool ourselves into believing it must have been all right. You were only a cat.

We didn’t mean to be unkind. She loved us anyway. What choice did she have? Who else was she going to love? Augusta had love inborn. She had to do something with it.

Now, bringing Isabel home, we did know better, as now you, having read this book, also know, and so Isabel and your kitten have the blessing of at least some understanding, and we have the blessing of the burden of responsibility.

Their lives are shorter than ours. We can witness their lives from beginning to end, not just witness but be in them, from naming to knowing, from wonder to love, an arc, and then—now—another. We can, we must mean to be kind. “Let us not be weary,” wrote Paul to the Galatians, “in well doing.” Every day of her life, the kitten and the cat she becomes will make the effort worth our while.

A cat shivers, wet, under a homeless addict’s blanket but also is purring. He feeds her better, takes better care of her than himself. After months on the concrete they get a room—quiet, warm, secure—and the man thinks, This is the only living creature on earth who loves me.

A tribe of calicoes in a barn. A shaggy professional comfort agent in a kids’ cancer ward. A skeletal ancient under the hand of a lady so old she has forgotten his name—it’s a fifty-fifty bet in hospice which one will go first. A fluffy mini-Persian groomed every morning to accompany Madame in the Maybach and peek from her Birkin while she shops, has her nails and waxing done, and texts her assistant about nothing. A big-balled neighborhood bully, property of a friendless and bad-tempered exterminator who cuddles the big tom at night and murmurs baby talk to him as they fall asleep together. A mild-mannered, peace-loving house cat caught in post-divorce joint custody, one week in a gloomy man-cave with loud sports always on, then five days of children scrapping, capped by a weekend at the beach or in the snow, neither of which she has ever known or understands. A Roman ruin, cats well-fed, their every need attended to by devoted gattare, their bloodlines reaching back to the Empire, their late nights red in tooth and claw. A one-eyed lady cat with a permanent limp rescued from a car crash, languishing in a shelter till just short of the euthanasia deadline adopted by a timid young lady with a limp of her own. Kittens abandoned in the snow, kittens fostered in the warmest of families, kittens in thousands, in millions, learning who they are, in concert with human companions discerning their inner lives, each teaching gentleness to the other, all finding a new order of love.

Isabel has been trusting from the start. When she is sprawled in the middle of the floor it never occurs to her that you might trip over her. Still, it has taken more than a couple of years for us to find each other’s inner quiet. The other night as I sat on the sofa watching a movie and Isabel was curled up next to me, my left hand was lying flat when I barely felt something soft as the movement of air and I looked down to see that Isabel had extended one paw partway across the back of my hand. I felt like Muhammed with Muezza. I was absolutely not going to move that hand.

Soon she was asleep, the paw withdrawn into the circle that a sleeping cat makes. Isabel sometimes wraps her tail into the circle, but this night she left it loose. I have discovered that I can talk to Isabel when she is sound asleep and her tail will answer. “Isabel,” I say, accenting the first syllable, and the tip of her tail flips up, and then with two weak twitches relaxes, marking the meter of her name.

I change the rhythm: “Isabel,” and sure enough, her tail replies da-da-dit.

—I love you.

—Weak twitch, strong twitch, fading twitch.

—Are you dreaming?

—Da da dot da.

It’s uncanny. I lay my hand on her side. She doesn’t respond, she is breathing deeply, she is deeply asleep. I can go on talking, and she will go on semaphoring back. All this is likely the action of so-called mirror neurons, to which a number of higher functions have been attributed and which, in that realm, have been much argued over. But at this primal level, probably by the same mechanism that causes people to cross their arms in sync or yawn together, mirror neurons are at work. Shall that technical knowledge lessen the mysterious bond which the phenomenon embodies, or shall the science deepen the mystery? I say the latter.

Through my hand, as she breathes, her warm flank slowly rising and subsiding, I feel the confident and tranquil love which Isabel has taught me and an awareness of a kind I can never learn.

There is a cat in San Francisco who keeps a schizophrenic woman company on crowded sidewalks downtown. The woman has a box for people to put money in, and some of them, seeing how well-groomed and well-dressed she is, try to engage her in conversation. But she speaks only gibberish, volubly. The cat remains perfectly calm at all times.

Augusta, dying and in grievous pain, showed only the briefest flickers of discomfort; for years she simply lived with her illness with no diminution of her sunny contentment, and then she purred and quietly faded. Little kids pick house cats up and haul them around like floppy old Raggedy Ann dolls. While the dog whimpers under the bed, the cat sleeps through the thunderstorm.

There used to be a guy in Greenwich Village who also sat in the street, not asking for money but also with a collection box. He had a white rat that walked around the brim of his top hat and never jumped down, and a cat who was perfectly calm.

Also in the Village, at Balducci’s produce market, Mr. Balducci was a surly tyrant, but his cat, though sometimes inclined not to move from his resting place on, say, the grapefruit, was as tranquil as a Tibetan monk.

When they feel safe, cats sleep, and dream. Fully awake, fully aware, they consider doing something, and sometimes they decide, on consideration, not to do it. Then they may turn to their human companions for comfort and love, sometimes for resolution of confusion, and the people feel comforted, loved, and calm. Sometimes they fall asleep together in a singularly peaceful way, in a subliminal attunement.

Is the peace that suffuses the being of a deeply sleeping cat a secret while also a constant of her inner life?

As anxiety leads to trouble, calm leads to peace. Could it be that the calm of a cat can lead us to peace?

Some cats are trained to jump through hoops of fire, and offstage are preternaturally calm. Bookstore cats are known to be especially peaceful.

Isabel asleep, the street cats, the Balducci’s cat, the bookstore cats, the performers, Augusta dying, all these cats traveled different paths to the same place.

Someone nurtured those cats in lovingkindness, and lovingkindness is the gift they give, and give again, to their human guardians—that innate peace which has emerged from their inner life in the exchange of love across the species divide. As more and more cats are fortunate enough to be born and to grow in kind and loving care, will their people share with others the lovingkindness that their cats share with them?

Black kitten. White snow. Good luck.

May it be so.