For I will consider my cat, Tosca

This week I had the agonising experience of pet-owners everywhere. I had to say goodbye to my beloved cat and ask the vet to facilitate euthanasia. The trauma was huge despite her magnificent age (18) and the fact that she had been poorly for a while. What is it about our pets that has the capacity to move us so deeply?

As I sat weeping for her passing, I tried to analyse in a rational way what I would miss, or what I felt I had gained from her presence in my life. Of course there's the immediate comfort of the cuddle and companionship but if that were all, then it would imply our's was a transactional and conditional relationship. And presumably easily fixed by acquiring a new pet, much like replacing any broken inanimate object in one's life – an old torch, armchair or washing-machine. And it really doesn't feel like that.

Which leads me to conclude that she was an individual with a soul and a personality. Not that I mean to anthropomorphise her existence, but in some sort of parallel plane, her existence and life were not dissimilar to mine. She was certainly unique in her behaviours and demands. Maybe nothing exceptional in any one stand-alone characteristic, but as a specific group of attributes, brought together in one sentient being, for one brief span of time, she was unique. And yet, don't we all hold our own pets to be unique and the “most” special? I heard myself telling friends and family how extraordinary she was, attempting to explain that my grief is the greater for the scale of her distinctiveness, all the while knowing that in their hearts, their own cat or dog outranks mine in this respect.

So what do I really mean when I refer to her specialness? Perhaps it was in her eyes. Anyone who has held the gaze of an animal for a long period of time will know that there is a depth to be perceived there, no less than in humans. I felt that I knew her to the depths of her soul and that she knew me. To be physically close to her was to be emotionally comfortable and safe.

What did I admire about her? Only what is to be admired in all sentient beings. Her simplicity taught me so much. Like all cats she slept for long stretches of every day, but she was also happy to sit still for hours, eyes open and observing the world around her, without judgement or intervention. She never once, as far as I could tell, questioned or regretted her existence as a cat but lived entirely and gloriously to her full, feline potential. And how many of us can say the equivalent? Ever proud of her beautiful looks, she preened and strutted her stuff demanding strokes and cuddles from me many times a day. She basked in the sun and showed disdain for the grey days. She made nests in the clean laundry and played dementedly with the catnip toys. She sniffed the flowers and chased the bees and chewed the grass. As a young cat, she got into scrapes getting locked inside other people's homes.

But in the last 10 years of her life, she simply enjoyed the miracle of her own aliveness and mine. That, I now understand, was her ultimate gift to me – she made me see the world and myself through her eyes, and as such the world is perfect and I was the best person in it. And that's the marvel of animals, I realise. They rarely have much say in who will be their owner and yet they almost always come to love and take delight in that person. It's a daily demonstration of how each and every human being is equally beautiful and valuable and potentially loveable. If you set out believing you can love your companion, then most of the time it turns out to be true. And that's not as much of a given as our furry friends assume.

Every one of us knows and meets people whom we don't like and we admit that many find us irritating in return. So why do we not regularly encounter animals that dislike us? Pets don't seem to do that – they mostly don't question you or wonder how they might find someone better. They simply live with you in contentment, giving and taking affection in a pragmatic way, complaining if you are inconsiderate but holding no grudges. You are not objectively any better or worse than any other human on the planet, but you are the human in their life, so they respond to that and recognise the holy in you. It is not a common starting point for theology – though not entirely original either. The wonderful poems “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry” written by Christopher Smart in 1763 or “Pangur Bán” written by a ninth-century Irish monk are proof that others got there long before me.

But today, it is me and my cat that I ponder. And yes, I see the spark of The Divine both before me and reflected back.


For I will consider my cat Tosca.
Tosca, grey Tosca, how happy we were.

Comments

  1. Anonymous21 August 2017 at 10:43

    Her spirit is still around, Lotti, so you might communicate with raised vibrations...!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brexit Apathy

“The death of democracy...will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” These words of Robert M Hutchins seem rather pertinent to our current situation. Every day I ask myself again whether it's time to “let it go” and accept Brexit. And every time I ask that question, two big issues rise up to block the way. The first is the unbelievably cavalier way in which the individuals most affected by this are being treated – the EU nationals who live in the UK and the UK nationals who live in other EU countries. We have, as the saying goes, thrown them under a bus. And when you consider the stir caused this week by CCTV footage of a London jogger doing exactly that to a woman on the pavement, it brings home what a shocking analogy it is. As long as the politicians insist on playing games of chess with real peoples' lives, there will be millions of us who dig in our heels and say “unacceptable”. The second big stumbling block to accepting the out
Read more

Brexit - Secret Option Number Three

There's talk of riots if Brexit doesn't go ahead. It's hard to know whether this is a serious possibility – a proposed protest at the Supreme Court in December was hastily cancelled at the last minute when barely a few dozen showed any interest. But let's just for a moment assume it is a real and credible possibility. The prevailing narrative over-simplifies the choice – implement the result of the referendum or don't. Implement it and cause certain impoverishment to our nation. Ignore it, and risk riots and undermining the cause of democracy. But why is our vision so narrow? What if there is a secret option number three? There are five Ws that help us get to the bottom of a story – What? When? Who? Where? And Why? The first four are essentially fact-based and are in themselves often rather dull. They are answered easily enough with regard to the referendum result. The interesting question is the last one – “why”. And over a year later, we are still no clearer
Read more

Windrush - twig or branch?

I can't stop thinking about the so-called Windrush scandal. I say so-called, because I think there's a danger that we have got hold of the wrong end of the stick if this is 'only' about the Windrush generation. Or rather, we have grabbed firmly on to the twig, but if we run with that, it will snap away, leaving the main branch, the bigger point, unmoved. Don't get me wrong - the Windrush scandal is certainly shocking. The way individuals have been treated correlates with my definition of criminal. But these individual cases are but twigs from a thicker branch of systemic hostility to "the other". If we allow ourselves to be focused on individual cases, we allow Theresa May and the Government and, in fact, ourselves, off the hook. If the concern is that person A is deported in error, an apology can be made, decisions reversed and even, potentially, compensation made. And there the story dies, with no hint of "lessons having been lear
Read more