I picked up our new cat Felix from the local pet adoption agency in town (PAWS) when I was 15 years old. Our other cat, Tom, had just died in an accident, and my parents let me choose a new furry companion in the wake of the loss. Before you ask: Yes, I do like dogs. I’ve got nothing against a good old mini-Australian shepherd or a bounding Great Pyrenees. But Felix? Felix was a real friend.
At first, he was finicky, frightened, and preferred the jungle of the garage with its toolboxes and oily wrenches to the offered comforts of the indoors. We had to coop him up in there, or he would have bolted into the woods and frittered into the horizon on the other side of the conveyor belt. Soon, though, he eased into a situation of trust and comfort and dwelt in and out of the house for years and years afterward.
Last May, Felix died in an accident of his own during a tornado warning, and I laid him in a little grave in the old woods behind my parents’ house the morning afterward, when it was sunny and warm, like nothing stormy had ever happened the night before. For years, he would hop up on my lap, nuzzle my chin, make me sneeze, follow me down the driveway to check the mail, cross my path as if he was trying to force himself into being a priority. He liked to curl up in the sunshine on the porch and fold his paws beneath the white fluff on his chest, bow his head as if in creaturely prayer, and then raise his head when the sparrows and hummingbirds twittered in the apple tree.
I loved that cat. We all loved that cat.
It’s easy to say that Felix was just an animal, which is true, and that there are another forty some odd billion cats roaming the world with impunity as I write this, but it’s also easy to point to that confounding part of Scripture where Jesus, a bit outrageously if you think about it, says that not even a sparrow dies apart from God’s notice (Matthew 10:29), that even the hairs on your own head are meticulously, intimately, and carefully numbered. I guess God numbers the cats among us, too, from the crazy herds in Thailand to the ratty toms hiding in haybales in west Texas, to the little forest cat Felix who lived a long and royal life in Paradise Hills, Oklahoma.
Grief is God’s answer to loss. We must face something sad to say goodbye to it and duly reckon with reality. I cried about Felix for a little while after he passed, but then sort of stuffed it all under the rug and went on with my life, ambling back to his grave a couple of times, putting my hand on the warm stone, but then soon going back into the stream of distractions I’d recently been swimming in. Can’t feel so sad about a cat… Back to my screens, my podcasts, my music, back to my driving to and from food places in town, my anxieties, my world that intersected only on occasion with the lives and worlds of other people.
It was weird then, when the other night I turned off my phone, turned off the lights in my apartment, and settled down to sleep, that I thought about Felix and shed a few tears in response in the darkness. It turned out I wasn’t only sad about Felix. There was other stuff I sort of needed to grieve too, and my old cat was an avenue to a myriad of other complexes, like how I’ve been missing my friends who live really far away from me, how the world is in chaos, and how I feel like I am barely, if at all, moving the needle in a positive direction. How ten years ago really was ten years ago and there’s nothing I can do to change that. God, help me grieve what’s lost and over, really grieve it.
What’s funny, though, is the next day I felt…better. I wasn’t as anxious. It didn’t feel as though my soul was an ocean with a dam of scum buttressed all around it, holding in tides and currents. A good cry can really clean a fellow out.
I recently listened to a podcast between two psychologists who agreed that a big problem today is that people are numbing themselves out of their emotional valences. Pornography addiction, for instance, is only marginally about sexual desire. Really, it’s about escaping grief and negative emotions. If a man feels bad, he goes to the thing that makes him forget that he feels bad. Hence, the bottle, the gambling tokens, the OnlyFans page, the sports betting app. The podcast. The playlist. As the Grinch says, all the noise, noise, noise, noise!
It probably isn’t coincidence, then, that all this stuff comes up right before one falls asleep. Those are the golden moments when anything goes. You might be lambasted with a sorrow you thought your worked through or be inspired to write a concerto. You never know. We don’t often give our minds permission to speak to us. And it doesn’t matter how much time passes. If we stay numb, we stay numb. The dam calcifies and the ocean, once teeming with ideas and emotions, dries up in the hot sun.
C.S. Lewis was right, then, when he warned people of what loving even just an animal will entail. You risk heartbreak. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love anything. To the contrary. It just means that you can’t skirt sadness when the object of your affection dies.
You have to welcome grief at your door even when it’s like some hooded stranger that you’re not so sure about. You have to feed him soup at your table and consult with him like he’s an old friend. Because he is. And then you fall asleep at that table, wake up in the morning, and find that it’s sunny outside, almost like no stranger ever visited you and almost like nothing stormy ever happened the night before. And you’ll be okay.