Would you rather I read this aloud for you? Happy to oblige! You can listen to the podcast version of this story here:
Our house is slowly being consumed by rodents. They no longer fear my presence. When I come down to my office at 3am, they don’t even have the decency to scamper and hide. They just sit there on the floor, staring up at me, as though I’m supposed to brew them coffee. They’ve even run across my desk while I’m working. I’ve taken to naming them.
“We need a cat,” Ula tells me.
I hate cats. She knows this. She pushes anyway. “Mice sense the presence of the predator. They’ll go away.”
Cats crap in boxes. When they’re mad at you, they crap in houseplants. Or your bathtub. They spray. They shed. Our last cat, Ramona Quimby, lived to age 17. After she died, Bob and I tacked an addendum onto our wedding vows.
“I, Shannon, promise to you, Robert, that I shall never bring home a kitten.”
“I, Robert, promise to you, Shannon, that I shall never bring home a kitten.”
Saoirse and Ula took no part in the vow ceremony. After a suitable period of mourning for their beloved Ramona in December of ‘15, they initiated Operation Kitty 0-16.
And I got them kittens. And delivered them promptly to the farm.
“It will give them something to engage with down here,” I told Mom as she met me at the kitchen door with crossed arms. I left the kitty carrier and two children on her doorstep for the afternoon. The kids went down there the next day. And the next day. That summer became the summer of kitty love at the farm. Ula named her kitten Bourbon. Saoirse named hers Kan.
And the mice started nibbling at the tallow soap next to my kitchen sink at home. And we moved all the starches into glass jars.
It was only a summer’s worth of Operation Kitty reprieve in our household. The cafe opened, and Saoirse and Ula discovered they could magnify their influence by influencing the influencers. They took on the front of the house. Saoirse talked to customers at the espresso bar about the importance of cats as she pulled their drinks. Ula would deliver their breakfasts to their tables and do the same. And then the customers would hassle us.
“You need cats,” they’d tell me when I ran out to bus tables.
“The girls have cats,” I’d sigh and remove their plates.
“In your house,” they’d clarify. “I know where there’s a cat who needs a home.”
“There’s never a shortage of cats,” I’d remind them.
And then Bourbon disappeared. Ula drew pictures of him and hung them in the post office and around West Fulton. He never came back. A cat’s disappearance is an odd mourning. The moment never comes when you conclude they are gone. There is worry, but there is hope, too. And then, somehow, life moves on, especially for Ula, who has pet chickens. And sheep. And pigs. And a goose.
But Kan stayed on. He became an extraordinary barn cat. He rode in the mule with Kate to do chores, scaled fence posts and perched on the top, made nests in the egg buckets. And he caught rats and mice. But as he grew to be part of the farm, Saoirse had a different sort of growth. She became a teenager. She began finding more and more things and people annoying and stupid. She took to spending more time home alone in her room. She got a boyfriend.
“Something’s wrong with Kan,” Mom says to me over the phone one morning in December. I don’t give it much thought. He is a robust beast. “Kan’s getting worse,” she tells me in January. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.” She is crying on the phone now. Saoirse takes the news in stride. Or so I think.
I’m downstairs at my desk crunching numbers in the middle of the night, generating the Sap Bush annual report for our January meeting. The first few weeks of the year are a strain for me: lots of reports to generate, lots to analyze, plus the monthly bookkeeping and all the usual tasks of running a business. I make use of the middle of the night for a lot of it, when the quiet of the house induces better concentration. But that night, Saoirse comes in to my office. Her typically cool, calm 16-year-old face is streaked with tears.
“I don’t want to lose Kan,” she sobs. I launch from my chair and catch her in my arms. She folds over me and I hug her tight, then lower her to the floor in front of the fire. It is hard for this strong girl to be vulnerable. Her armor is her composure. She tries to swallow down some tears, then bites her lip. I want to tell her that he’ll be okay. I know better than that.
Then she finds words. “Will you help me pray for him?” She has come and sat with me countless times when I’ve asked for help with prayer. But she has never asked for this. I find a candle, she lights it and we sit on the rug in front of the fire holding hands.
“There’s so much more I could’ve done,” she starts.
“What do you mean? You loved him! You’ve always been great with him!”
“I could’ve loved him more! I stayed away from the farm. I didn’t want to have fights with anyone. So I just stayed home. And I stayed away from Kan.”
“You did what was normal for a person your age,” I argue. “Finding us annoying and wanting to do your own thing is how you become an adult.”
“But he didn’t deserve that!” Her tears flow harder. She slumps down into herself. Only the grip of my hands keep her from curling into a ball of self loathing.
I want to argue with her. I want to tell her to snap out of it. I want to tell her that no one blames her. But a tiny voice inside me whispers stay quiet. She’s entitled to experience her own regrets.
I don’t want my children to have regrets, I argue back with the inner voice. I want to squeeze these out of her. But I don’t. I listen to the voice and stay quiet.
“You know, he never fell for the cucumber trick,” she tells me, a tiny smile appearing on her face. “We tried scaring them both with all different size cucumbers from Grammie’s garden.”
We watch the candle light flicker from side to side for a little while, then she speaks again. “We used to shove them into a picnic basket and then carry them up to the farm pond for picnics. I can’t believe they let us do that,” she laughs. “And they stayed up there with us, too.”
A few moments later she adds, “And then there was that time we were sleeping over at the farm, and Grammie said we couldn’t have them in the bedroom with us. So Ula and I waited until they fell asleep, then we snuck them up. But we didn’t bring their litter box. And they pooped. And one of them had diarrhea, and it was everywhere! It was the middle of the night and we were trying to clean up all this cat poop without waking Grammie and Pop Pop up! It was awful!” She laughs more.
We fall back into silence, but she doesn’t crumble into herself this time. I feel her hands start to relax.
We offer prayers for the souls we love, but so often, these prayers are medicine for our own aching hearts. And while Kan would not pull through his illness, I witnessed a different sort of miracle.
I watched my teenage daughter battle her regrets. She didn’t allow me to blot them away. Instead, she stayed with them on that living room floor. And they led her on a journey to self-forgiveness and acceptance of Kan’s passage. But they did more than that.
I had assumed that the roll of the aloof teenager was an obligatory developmental passage. I also assumed that one day, with the flip of a switch, that phase would end. What I never understood was how the experience of regret is critical to moving through this. Regrets are a call to change and grow. My compulsion to squelch them within her could stymie her own inner drive to ask more of herself, to push herself to grow and find deeper fulfillment.
We don’t ask the divine in our prayers to let Kan live. He’s a cat, after all. One never commands a cat. Not even the divine. We ask Kan to consider recovering and staying with us. Then we use our prayer to express gratitude for all that he has brought us.
And then I feed the woodstove and damper it down, and Saoirse blows out the candle. I turn off the computer and leave my figures and calculations for another time. We go to the guest bedroom and crawl under the covers. My body can no longer stretch the length of hers, but I curl around my not-so-little girl as best I can. She leans into me and falls asleep, my baby once more, however briefly.
But Kan’s passage does not break the wedding vow addendum. It’s the mouse turds Bob and I find in our coffee cups. I told you they were looking for coffee. Our vet tips us off to some healthy kittens at the dairy farm at the bottom of the hill. Bob and I tack an addendum on our wedding vow addendum, and our family goes on a kitten quest. We arrive at milking time, and the healthy kittens all scatter. One wheezy kitten with his tail lobbed off climbs up on the farmers’ office chair and swipes at Ula until she picks him up. She names him LaFayette. Another with a smashed foot and infected eye brushes around Saoirse’s legs until she takes him in her arms. She names him Mordecai.
After several hundred dollars and several return visits to the vet, they’re restored to health. Lafayette has adopted the nickname Yetti as he stomps across the floor pouncing on anything that moves in the house. Mordecai has taken to the kitchen. He sits in the middle of the floor as I work, studying my every move. I find him to be a bit of a food critic. He’s now known as Chef Mortie. Saoirse and Ula claim full responsibility for the litter box.
And then, one morning in the predawn hours, shortly after Kan’s death, it happens. Chef Morty and Yetti disappear behind one of the chairs in my office. There’s some scrambling and bouncing. The dogs get agitated and flank either side of them. When I turn to see what’s happening, a dead mouse is laid at my feet. Suddenly, I am smitten with cats.
I credit the spirit of Kan for coaching these felines into the behaviors that will endear themselves to me. I credit him with a lot of things these days, particularly the renewed growth and reflection that I’m seeing in my daughter. Kan, I am deeply thankful you walked this earth. Rest in Peace.