Jewels

After my early childhood cat, Iris, passed away when I was nine, I dramatically stood in front of the house and cried to my parents that I wanted a new kitten because there was a “hole in my heart” left in her wake. And I guess the speech resonated with them–about a week later, we drove down to the SPCA and picked up Ruby.

The most common advice to give pet owners who are grieving seems to be “get a new one,” and as awful as that initially sounds, it does work. We missed Iris, of course, but kittens and their endless energy really make it hard to stay sad for long. Ruby became the patch to the holes in my parents' hearts as well (even though they will claim I forced them to adopt her), since Iris was the last cat to go from the pets that were a part of the family before I was. If you ask either of them, they will tell you just how good of a girl Iris was, and that they still miss her, even twelve years later. 

Though slightly skittish in her earlier years, Ruby eventually grew into what was quite possibly the friendliest and most docile cat anyone could ever meet. She developed a (very) stocky frame and an abnormally long tail, and would blink her big green eyes at anyone she thought she could steal some attention from. What she lacked in brains, she made up for in love. In fact, I am convinced Ruby knew nothing but love– She stored an abundance of it in her chunky body for her family, friends, and anyone else who was kind enough to rub her Buddha's belly.

They say animals know when they are going to die. It’s why some cats will wander into the wilderness to be alone, and some dogs will get a final burst of puppy-like energy before they go. My knee-jerk reaction through my grief was to say that this could not be true in Ruby’s case; I wanted to say that Ruby didn’t know anything, that she had never quite managed to even form a complete thought, that her favorite activity was to chew on our broom, so there is no way she could ever possibly predict the end of her life was approaching so suddenly and so early. 

But, maybe to have a soul is to have the capacity to love, and maybe there is a chance that in her last bit of time on Earth she acted on this capacity...

We can’t directly communicate with our cats. We have to guess their wants and needs, and sometimes we get them wrong, but if there’s one thing even the owners of the grumpiest cats can tell you, it’s that their cat loves them. They may not have complex thoughts (Ruby certainly did not), but there are indeed emotions and empathy in there. It is evident by the way Ruby looked up at me when I kissed her head and the way she excitedly tapped her paws when I came home from college that she had a soul that resonated deeply with love for me. If she did know that death was near, she certainly did not show it. But, maybe to have a soul is to have the capacity to love, and maybe there is a chance that in her last bit of time on Earth, she acted on this capacity because, coincidence or not, a feral black kitten with the same big, green eyes, showed up on our patio two days before her death. 

I received a flustered phone call from my mother, who had sworn off taking in more cats, that a kitten was on our patio and that we needed to catch it. It was scared, alone, and very new to the world, so it did what any creature who thought its life was in imminent danger would do, and bit the hand that was trying to feed it. My mom had no choice but to let it go, and it made a run for our open garage. She was no bigger than the palm of my hand. 

The day after Ruby’s death, I only got out of bed to feed the kitten. I sat there in the garage in silence for a while, trying to ignore the fact that my best friend was now six feet under in the backyard instead of inside on the armrest of her favorite chair. The kitten crept out of its hiding place to eat, and though it hissed many times as I tried to get closer, it did not run from me. For the first time, I was able to pet it, able to make it understand that I was not a threat and that I wanted more than anything to help. I picked her up, determining that she was in fact a she, and moved her to our inside porch. My parents, who still insisted they did not want another cat, helped me relocate her. I don’t think any of us were willing to let another cat die. 

It took weeks of treating Soot (Soot Emerald Smith, Soot Emmy for short) for feline herpes and a serious bacterial abscess in the side of her neck for her to finally begin to flourish. It felt like we were in a constant tug-of-war with death, fighting to keep her here with us. We had to administer medicine multiple times a day for weeks, pipet water into her when she did not want to drink, and even administer a saline IV into her neck when she was looking particularly lifeless. 

Like many other pet owners who acquired a new pet too soon after losing one, I have had to grapple with the guilt of loving the new pet when mourning the old one, which was nowhere near finished. Yet, I truthfully believe that the grief over losing a companion never fully subsides–I look back on Iris’s death and still longingly wish she was here. I think I may look back on Ruby the same way for the rest of my life. 

Soot is my new best friend, but she is not a replacement for Ruby. Soot's love is, in some ways, the same as Ruby’s. She is a lap cat in the same way, adores forehead kisses in the same way, and purrs constantly in the same way. They both like to chew on brooms, roll on their backs, and show their bellies with their paws in the air. But Soot’s love is also different. Ruby’s love felt like that of a very best friend, one you have known your whole life and cannot imagine living without. Soot feels like more of a soul bond–if the cards had not been dealt in just the right way, she would likely be dead. I would not have been forced to get out of bed in the days following Ruby’s death and would not have been forced to take on the responsibility of caring for her. I would not have been made to be distracted from my grief long enough to take care of myself and to feel love when I thought anything other than loss was impossible. Soot and I look at each other with the love of two beings that would not be here and would not be whole without each other. I do genuinely believe the stars aligned for us.

When I left to go back to school, the dirt over Ruby’s grave was soft and warm with the summer, like the universe draped her favorite blanket over her. When I get back eventually, the ground will be packed down and unyielding, with short winter grass grown over courtesy of the passage of time. Though unrecognizable as anything out of the ordinary, I can point out the spot in which I placed her into the Earth that day in June in a heartbeat, like a hidden scar. I don’t know if Ruby planned for Soot to succeed her, or if everything just lined up in the strangest sequence of coincidences I could have come up with, but one thing I do know is that even though wounds leave scars, they heal over in the same way holes in the ground do. And that losing Ruby was one of the worst things to ever happen to me, but finding Soot was definitely one of the best.