V's Pick #50: Cleo by Helen Brown

I've noticed as I've gotten older that I cry more than I used to. Perhaps that's the first tick of the maternal clock or perhaps I've just seen more of life and thus appreciate both beauty and sadness in strident, deeper waves. My watering eyes know no bounds - TV commercials for underwear, a spectacular moment of growth in a student paper, an especially sweet gesture from John. And for the last week, pretty much every time I'd read a section of Cleo.
In Helen Brown's words, I found a little more of myself. On the surface it's a story about a cat, but I will tell you without hesitation that it is really a story about life. It's a story with many lessons, but one of astounding clarity which I have learned this year: life is not really living unless there's a cat involved.

Despite having and losing many cats growing up, including the cat who was in the family before I was (Creampuff was 21 when my boyfriend and I buried her in the garden) I have never really considered myself a "cat person." Oliver was mine because my dad found him by the mailbox and he just sort of never left my lap. Foxy was mine because I was walking our family dog (our Cleo) and this (what I thought...) little boy kitten waited for and followed me for three days straight. Many others I had and lost before those two were both heartwarming and sad. I actually wrote my first poem because our cat Tigger, hadn't come home during a thunderstorm. However, I still could never admit to myself that I needed a cat.

2010 opened with Oliver's death. Gruesome and sad, he drug himself across the floor on the night we knew he was expiring as I attempted to leave. He hadn't made a sound in three days as we sat in vigil but before I could escape to John's place for the night, he flung himself toward my feet, olive-green eyes locked on mine and let out the most truly animalistic sound I've ever heard. I said goodbye in my own noises and came home promptly the next morning to bury him with my mom. Losing him was hard; I'd nursed him back from the dead as a kitten and he'd been one of the shortest living cats in our brood - 10 years. But Foxy was thriving living with John and I knew I'd soon join her so the healing was a softer process.

In August, coming home from Wisconsin, I felt war-wounded. Having kissed Foxy's head a week earlier and knowing she had a clean bill of health from her vet visit a few months prior, I had nothing to equip me to deal with the silence her absence left in our lives. The phone calls from John mid-week had quickly gone from "Foxy's missing" to "Foxy's not missing" to "Foxy's dead." I couldn't really cry - I'd buried all of our family pets and that was my grieving process...but with this one, the one cat who throughout the years I'd really felt was so eternally mine, I would have to let go without digging. Our neighborhood was extremely helpful, and John's parents stood next to him as he buried Foxy two days before my plane was to touch down. Her final resting place is idyllic for a cat who was wild for seven years before spending her last seven with me: under a willow tree next to a pond, with a handmade stone marker, as much carved out of the earth as the tears John spilled while making it. I wish I could say I did the right thing when I came home, but I didn't. I panicked. Foxy had been with me through everything in college. She'd been my only reason for sleep during the waiting period FSU put me on to decide MFA criterion. She'd been my solace when I'd come home with a broken heel, a broken bank account or a broken heart. Her purr could fix anything and selfishly, I was kind of mad at her for leaving me before she could help me figure out how to fix this.

A bizarre week passed; looking back it seems it flew, but inside of it, time seemed to stand still. I kept her litter box and bowls a few days too long. I refused to vacuum her fur off the furniture. I tried to cry, but it was like something inside me had rusted. Her 7 pound absence in our apartment weighed at least a ton. We didn't eat much, we didn't talk much, we didn't do much. And then, laying in bed one night, John asked if I wanted to get another one... Positive I could never find a cat that would make me feel anything ever again, I declined his offer, but reminded him that I had been wanting a dog since before Foxy's time.

Writing this now, with Sadie on her back at my feet, rolling around with her stuffed chicken in her mouth, and Jude sneezing in the living room from under the TV stand, I feel like I'm on a different planet in just over a month's time. Love is an amazing elastic thing. Meeting Sadie allowed me to grieve for Foxy and while the tears I've cried in no way equal the love she brought my life, they're a start. A small offering to the animal gods that I can do it again. And meeting Jude two weeks ago, well, that's just how cats work. John and I had discussed getting a kitten at some point; dead set on making sure Sadie grows up to be one of those cool and socialized dogs who can live with anything, we knew a cat was in the future somewhere down the line. However, while the right thing to do, picking one out at a shelter, just isn't my style. Cats, unlike dogs, just happen. And it was way too soon for me to consider alternatives.

At Sadie's first vet appointment, this oddly familiar woman approached me with a black and white kitten. She works at Aloha (my vet clinic) and runs a kitten fostering program with the Humane Society on the side. I later learned that she came over to me because she said there was just something about Sadie and I sitting there that told her I could give a kitten a good home. While the black and white kitten wasn't ours, I was happy to pet a tiny morsel of furry life and really felt connected to Linda and her cause. Half an hour later, waiting for my bill, she returned with a gray kitten who promptly walked past me and curled up next to Sadie on the bench. Frail and so tiny, I was almost afraid to touch him. He didn't care...he looked up at me with unmistakeable Siamese eyes and mewed his way into my heart upon contact. Like all the great cats in my past, Guston, now Jude had found me. Named for a tropical storm and a song that speaks of loving again, Jude's purr has began to stitch my heart back into fullness. And beautifully, one of his favorite places in the world is to be perched on me or John's shoulder...something I *never* thought I'd find in another cat after Foxy.

Cleo found me too - on the day we ended up bringing Jude home, I was walking around Barnes and Nobel with a stack of books in my hands. I saw this one and knew it was the only thing I wanted to read that day. I didn't even make it home, stopping for lunch as an excuse to tear into it, I was three chapters deep on my way to vet to pick up our sick little dude. So, that's part of my story. If you love cats, or just even like cats, you need this book. Brown is a modern-day philosopher and most amazingly, she shares my thoughts:

"Cats aren't something to be "got." They turn up in people's lives when they're needed, and with a purpose that probably won't be understood to begin with... Life is contrary business. Sometimes what you think you don't want and what you need are the same thing" (285).