Love has no coupons to give.
Love knows nothing of discounts.
Love asks everything, but somehow, it does not leave us empty.
To love is to live beyond caution and calculation.
On September 26th, we had never seen Adira. Hundreds of tuxedo cats have entered Tabby’s Place in formal wear, yet no two are alike.
To make contact with another soul is to carve a new room in your life.
On September 27th, Adira looked up with a face like no other. She had lived a contented life in a cared-for feral colony. But this day, Adira’s face made her caregivers gasp. They did not know what to do, so they grabbed love’s shoulders and rode to Tabby’s Place.
A tumor had ravaged Adira’s cheek, and her olive eyes were heavy. Still, Adira looked up. Time and tumors are thieves, but their arms are short. They cannot take your beauty. Adira looked up, because she believed in love, even now.
Adira looked up, and though she had never seen them before, she knew our staff. Her heart recognized them at once.
Love cannot stay incognito. The bond between the new face and the kind faces was stronger than one hour. Even those of us not in the room felt our spirits pulled into the braid. We were all one, united in adoring Adira.
We were all one, but only one would bear love’s weight all the way to the horizon.
“I will take her home.” Drew has been a hospice foster for many cats. Her home and her heart have sheltered their final stanzas, the poetry of the last purr. She does not get used to this. It does not get easier.
Every loss asks everything. Drew enters the fog knowing where it leads, and she does it again, and again, and again, and again.
“I will take her home.”
Adira looked up. The old cat and her new parent agreed. These few days would be an epoch of miracle and wonder. They would love as though they had forever. They would weave their lives into a cord never to be broken.
If you told this story to an algorithm, the artificial intelligence would stammer. Logic says that love scales with time. The system cannot accommodate a bond born in mere days.
But we are made of flesh and mystery, same as the cats who become ours and demand that we be theirs.
Adira looked up, because she knew.
I cannot fathom how Drew and our other hospice fosters do what they do. I cannot take the measure of love that gives after everything has already been given.
I can only tell you that Tabby’s Place exists outside time.
The dying cat at our door is as safe as the old-timer. We take cats who need everything because they give us more than Earth can understand. They lift our heads.
Drew and Adira spent three days of rebel bliss together, building a fortress no tumor can topple.
At last, love spoke softly and said it was time. Adira joined the ancestors, the mountain range of Charles and Rose and Angelo and Webster and every face who remembers us, even when we forget.
Adira looked up and saw that our community continues, one braid on both sides of the sky.
There are no discounts for loving days instead of years. There is no love that is still love without asking everything.
Yet still, here we are, fuller than before we spent it all. Adira, we look up, and we see you, and we know that love never fails.
Before the tears fall, I want to say Thank You, Drew and Tabby’s Place – Adira did not die alone on the streets, or in a solitary bed in the infirmary, Adira died wrapped in love, knowing she mattered. A priceless gift.