What is the value of a life?
Do the planets lean in close when one stray trembles?
Is the Northeast Hemisphere brave enough to save a single empress?
You and I know: we walk among legends at Tabby’s Place. We have never skritched the neck of a mere mortal. We have never administered subcutaneous fluids to a simple constellation of stripes and spots.
We will never meet that imaginary species called “just a cat.”
We will never wrap our hands around the magnitude of love.
We could sooner hold Jupiter like a grapefruit.
Love landed upon one life in Puerto Rico. There is no shortage of stray cats on the island or on the planet. There are unseen innocents from San Juan to Secaucus. But once love sees one, love summons the spheres.
Life had been citric for the little caramel stray. She had given all her strength to her kittens. They were joyously adopted, and she saw them no more.
She had caregivers, but fear dug a trench between her trust and their tenderness. Her small patch of land was all she’d known, so she did not leave, despite grave danger.
But the neighborhood was getting more perilous by the day, and razor wire pierced her soft skin as she struggled to find shelter.
She was a sad story, but there are many sad stories.
She was an innocent cat, but there are many innocent cats.
What is the value of a life? Love owns no calculator.
Love knows only the hour of its birth, when brown eyes meet green eyes and the atmosphere constricts to yes.
Yes, history has put you and me together, on the island of this hour.
Yes, you are hurting, and I have arms long enough to reach you.
Yes, this is outrageous, and together we can outrage all the forces of death.
And so it happened that a single small cat, on a single small island, summoned lovers across latitudes. No more would she be a princess of pain. The wire was cut. Despair’s messages would not get through.
One wounded cat became Emperatriz, The Empress.
Unseen angels assisted with flight plans and pragmatic miracles.
A stray, once sliced to ribbons, was celebrated as a gift.
Emperatriz ascended the Eastern seaboard, arriving in Ringoes, New Jersey. She was a single cat.
She was a cat so singular, it took not a village, but a hemisphere, to save her life.
She is still dazed and amazed.
This is perhaps the most appropriate reaction to being alive at all. She will have all the time she needs to trust us, and to trust life itself.
What is the value of a life?
It is the entire reason we are here, together, today.
Welcome, Emperatriz.