My mother was right: We two-legged animals can learn a lot from loving a four-legged one

 

Holly, the cat: in kitten hood; hiding in the ferns; relaxing in her dotage

One year ago on this date, I arrived for the last time at my mother’s in Edmonton. She died three weeks later at the age of 95-and-a-half, after a long and good life. I’ll write more about my mother’s death another time; today, I am writing to celebrate a different long and good life — this one belongs to Holly, our feline companion who turns the equivalent of 84-human-years old today.

I hesitate to call myself her ‘owner’; anyone who has ever had any kind of relationship with a cat knows full well that we don’t own them. We share our house and our heart with them and, if we are lucky, they return our love and affection with something akin to acceptance.

Having grown up with cats as the family pet, I tried to branch out once I had my own place. In the early 1980s, I tried to share my life and home with a dog, but it was not a happy experience — for either of us. I did not understand how to relate to a dog. I did not participate properly in his training. And I did not ever adapt to the schedule of regular walks that a dog living in a city home requires. Ever since, I have limited my animal relationships to the feline variety.

I’m always a bit embarrassed to confess that Holly captured me with her looks. She was a pretty little tricolour kitten romping around the adoption room at the Winnipeg Humane Society and, while I have a long-standing soft spot for orange cats, I was taken by her pretty face, so home with me she came. She would be a lovely lap cat, I thought. She thought otherwise, however, and has hardly ever, in all her 17 years with us, settled on a lap. Nonetheless, I love this little creature fiercely for many reasons:

• Her innocence and clarity: She meows for what she wants, when she wants it — food, an open door, a footstool to help her get up on the sofa — and she expects a swift response.
• Her antics: Her mind may be small, but she really knows it. She will sit herself down in front of me, holding me with her eyes focused on mine, until I get up and follow her — to her food dish, to her box downstairs or to the door she wants to have opened. If she could talk, I’m pretty sure she would be saying, “Sheesh. What took you so long?”
• Her sense of home: She has gone missing many times, but has always come home. Eventually.
• Her longevity: She is proving to be long lived, so we are having the pleasure of seeing her accommodate to old age. It means slowing down, appreciating a comfortable place to sleep, enjoying her food, and still, every now and again, roaring around the living room after a snack of catnip.

Finally, I love Holly because I like sharing the house and my heart with this little four-legged being. I enjoy watching her settle on Val’s writing desk, on her special pillow, in the sunroom that overlooks the front yard so that she can monitor the birds in the flowerbeds and the people on the street. I love the feeling of her little body arrive on the bed and plunk itself down against my legs — a warm, heavy weight of companionship. I like that her needs must, necessarily at times, supersede my own, helping to balance my perspective about what’s important in life — today, right now, in this moment. It’s Holly.

My mother was many things, including wise. She knew that having a family pet (always a cat in our case) would mean many things for my siblings and me, including that we would suffer the grief of its death one day. But Mum also knew that experiencing the love — and maybe especially the mysterious give and take that comes with such love — would prepare us for the inevitable loss of that love. Indeed. It is, maybe, the most important life lesson of all: Love freely. Give your heart to another. Be present to their whole being. Love them fiercely. And let them go when their time comes.

One day, Holly will die; I know this. But today, I celebrate her as she marks we mark her 17th birthday.

Holly being a not-lap cat, with Mum, at the cottage, July 2018

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.