There is so much we would forget, if the cats weren’t here to remind us.
For instance: diagnosis is not destiny. Joy resists the body’s buffoonery.
You can be incandescently happy without, say, a working pancreas, or the use of your back legs.
But there is a kind of grief more piercing than any wound, and a sorrow that burrows beneath the bones.
When they write “sad boi” on your medical chart, you know it’s serious.
In fact, everything about Emil was serious.
He was seriously bonded to his mama. To Emil, she was the whole world in one woman. In the peace of their home, four heartbeats comforted one another, a calm call-and-response as familiar as a Psalm.
Emil and his feline “siblings,” Kainé and Nier, aged without fear in her care. You can afford to lose track of years, when your calendar is crowded with love.
When Emil’s mama passed away, their cathedral of quiet turned into a cavern of silence, more serious than any sound. Days whimpered into weeks in the empty house. Fear and memory ricocheted off the rafters.
Caregivers stopped by with food and water, but the ache within Emil was deep and wide. Mourning is a canyon that seems to have no bottom.
But love was serious about Emil. And serious love is stronger than death.
Across time and space, Emil’s mama made a way to remake his world. Through a series of serenditipies, the doleful tuxedo and his siblings were on their way to Tabby’s Place.
If you are a cat (and, if you are reading these words, you are likely at least 49% feline), there is no softer landing than Tabby’s Place.
Fleece blankets are tumbling in the dryer just for you, at this very moment. If you are frightened, persons aged 12 to 90 will curl like jumbo shrimp on the floor to blink peace into your eyes. If you are short-tempered, muddling through, or laden with a list of diseases longer than a CVS receipt, you shall be loved more, not less.
Take it from our online reviews.
Regina says Tabby’s Place is more fun than Legoland, even if all the Legos were made of bacon. Bacon says Tabby’s Place is happier than Disney World, although that 5’10” mouse with white gloves looks delicious. Betty could have told Emil that Tabby’s Place is the place to go when you just don’t know where all the music went, only that it is gone.
But nobody can hot-glue happiness onto someone else’s heart.
There are no shortcuts through “serious.”
So, when a gaping gasp of grief arrives in tuxedo fur, we dare not rush his grief. Emil’s sorrow was safe at Tabby’s Place. No one shames a “sad boi” here. We hold space for his emptiness. We hold out our arms until he is ready to risk a chin skritch.
We hold our breaths until we hear the softest sigh of relief, like the first note of a symphony no one has ever heard before.
No one was more surprised to hear Emil purr than Emil. He caught himself off guard the first time he chirped at our staff, ashamed of his appetite for affection. He did not mean to blurt out his broken heart. He did not expect love to answer. But, it was too late. “Sad” was back on speaking terms with “safe.”
The first hugs and kisses felt ancient, and comforting, and uncharted, and new, all at the same time.
Hope came running down the walls of his canyon, first as small as a hamster stampede, then as wild as horses. Before Emil understood the seriousness of the situation, kindness had grief cornered.
He was glad to be here. He was glad to be.
Meanwhile, Emil’s brother Nier had Kainé cornered. Anger is sadness’s squire, and one-eyed Nier was squinting through his own grief. Volunteers came with rainbow wands, offering a kind of art therapy where pain and play can occupy the same space. The cats leapt, and love landed, and a soft purring laughter could be heard like rain in the desert.
But these were only the opening chords in a song both old and new.
Emil was the first to be adopted, enfolded in a family who soon could not remember life without him. They found him in the canyon of feelings and carried him home in safe arms. They are not a replacement for his mama. They are proof of the largeness of love. Emil, the sad boi, now soars across the air chasing green feathers.
We knew Kainé and Nier might be with us longer. Elderly collectors of afflictions, they were less overtly “adoptable” than their sensitive young brother. Yet, as only cats can remind us, the obvious is never the luminous.
Not even a cancer diagnosis could cordon Kainé off from love. Our angelic Director of Volunteers, Karina, whisked Kainé home for a season of sunshine and home-cooked chicken. Kainé passed in her sleep one night. But, through our tears, we could glimpse her first mama’s footprints across the Rainbow Bridge, gathering speed on the way to their reunion. Kainé lives on, having gone from love to Love.
But what about Nier, who at fourteen could out-nuzzle a dozen younger cats? Would age, arthritis, and a missing eye leave him invisible to adopters?
Silly questions. Love is more serious than that.
And, so it happened that Nier warmed his way into precisely the right heart, a beautiful soul who adored him almost instantly. In the bliss of her home, he is ageless again, the sum total of the love that has followed him all the days of his life.
The cats who lost everything are exploring the architecture of everything they cannot lose. Love is too serious to squeeze into one lifetime. Kindness crouches in the orange cubbies of Tabby’s Place and the forehead-bonks of friends who become family.
It is new and familiar, uncharted territory that feels like home.
At Tabby’s Place, hope holds the compass. We are each other’s treasure map. And every “sad boi,” girl, and human will be comforted.