I’ve always been a writer. At Queens College, at Columbia University, at the Long Island Press, and at The Sun, I wrote—because I thought I had something to say. And for a while I think I did. But now my once-wonderful brain, with its eighty-six billion neurons (give or take) and trillions of synapses, is so damaged from Alzheimer’s disease that it’s hard to remember names, appointments, events. Even though my brain is confused and I’m struggling, always struggling, to see if my writing is good, I still want to write. And the writing that matters the most to me isn’t about Alzheimer’s. It’s about a cat. A cat who woke me up. A cat who changed my life.
*
In 1998 my wife, Norma, and I came home with two five-week-old kittens, Nimbus and Cirrus. They were very alive, unsteady on their feet, and both gray with subtle white markings and blue eyes that made them virtually undistinguishable from one another. Cirrus seemed a little shy, but it didn’t take long for the initial awkwardness to disappear. Both cats were intelligent and affectionate, but in different ways, just as my two daughters are distinct from one another.
Sometimes I’d walk into the bedroom and see them together on the bed: a bundle of gray, one of them stretched out on her back, the other curled around her. I’d call to Norma to come upstairs and look. It was like not wanting her to miss an amazing sunset.
Cats pick their humans, and Cirrus—my Aphrodite—picked me. I fell in love. She was regal: Her lustrous beauty. Her limpid, emerald eyes. Her gaze—intelligent, tender, nonjudgmental. She wasn’t large, but her long hair formed an aura around her, making her seem bigger than she was. She was graceful, intuitive, subtle, self-possessed. The smell of her fur was like freshly baked bread. Even her breath never smelled bad to me.
Cirrus was more sensitive than I am, and I’m a pretty sensitive guy. She was more sensitive than the most sensitive people I’ve known, and I’ve known quite a few: women and men who experience a world more beautiful and more terrifying than I ever will. (To insist we all inhabit the same world is like maintaining that an opera singer and a person who’s tone-deaf hear the same.) Was it alertness I saw in her eyes, in that attentive gaze? Intelligence, of course, but not an intelligence I could understand the way I sometimes understood human intelligence—which made her a reminder of everything I’ve never understood but, nonetheless, can love. I was often struck by the time she spent simply being alive. How radical! How irresponsible! How outrageous! What was really outrageous, of course, was that I wasn’t spending more time that way myself.
She was a fierce hunter. She got into fights. Her ears were nicked in several places. To a baby rabbit clenched in her jaws, she hardly seemed benign.
Like many cats, she communicated a great deal with her tail: Straight up meant she was in good spirits. When she was angry, it would swoosh. Languorous, it would make slow swishes. Not feeling well, down and dragging. She was never sick, at least as far as I could tell, except for the last day of her life.
If I slept past my alarm, Cirrus would wake me, which served both our needs: She got her morning snack, and I got to start the day when I needed to, which was often earlier than I wanted to, though that depends, I guess, on what the meaning of the word want is. When I was trying to finish an essay, she’d somehow know and wake me even earlier. Cirrus wanted me to get up every day to write. It didn’t matter if it was Sunday or Monday, if I was tired or ready. Was Cirrus my muse? Norma, who is also my muse, says she was.
Once, Norma and I took a short trip to New Jersey to visit her son, leaving Nimbus and Cirrus behind. I knew they’d have the whole yard and could sit around the Japanese maple, looking like God had put them there: so natural, so grounded, so at ease. I wondered if they’d miss me, unsure how they experience that feeling—just as I’m unsure how they experience the fullness of their creaturehood, an instinctual life unmediated by the kinds of associations I make with loneliness and being left. They weren’t me.
Sometimes Cirrus would walk in when I was doing sit-ups and plant herself on my belly. If I kept doing them, she’d jump off, and since her affection was hard to resist, I usually just stopped. Sometimes she’d get into what we called her “cat yoga pose”: legs stretched east; arms and head stretched west; spine twisted 180 degrees. Sometimes she’d fall asleep that way.
When I’d open the door for Nimbus and Cirrus, Nimbus would walk outside without hesitation, but Cirrus took forever to make up her mind. I’d hold the door open and just wait. There we were, the two of us standing in the open doorway, contemplating the world outside. How patient I was with her—and how surprised at my patience.
I wasn’t always that way. I wasn’t even fond of cats. Once, decades ago, frustrated with a girlfriend’s cat, I picked him up and tossed him across the room as if he were a sack of flour. The memory. The shame of it. If a man can change this much, there’s hope for humankind.
Cirrus rarely strayed from home. She would walk around the pond in our neighborhood with us but wouldn’t go by herself. And she usually came in early at night. One night, however, Cirrus didn’t return. I stood on the back porch, calling her name again and again. I went out to look for her. Finally I went to bed, consumed with worry, listening to every sound. Every hour throughout the night I went searching, tramping through the nearby woods or peering into parked cars with my flashlight to make sure she hadn’t been locked inside. I was on my knees praying when she walked in.
Cirrus often lay on my laser printer. If I needed to print something, I’d wait until she’d gone back downstairs; otherwise it meant moving her, which I was reluctant to do. Then, after the printer gave up the ghost, I ordered a new one without considering its shape. It turned out it wasn’t boxy enough for Cirrus to lie on comfortably, though she kept trying to figure out a way. I was grateful I could now print whenever I wanted, but I also felt badly at having deprived her of one of her favorite places to sit. I kept promising myself I’d replace it, but I never got around to it.
Many times, in the middle of the afternoon at The Sun’s office, I would think, Instead of sitting behind this desk, I could be home with my cats right now. And then I’d gather up my work and get in my car. Did I ever regret coming home early? Never.
I tried not to impose on her my ideas about how “sweet” she should be. Cirrus had a temper. If you put her down before she was done being petted, she might swipe at you with her paw. I’d hung on the wall an intricate Indian fabric decorated with small glass mirrors, but I had to take it down because Cirrus kept pulling off the mirrors. For years afterward she’d swipe at the empty space where it had been. Talk about being attached. Yet maybe she was also saying that I prized my intricate fabric more than my living, breathing companion. She never forgave me for taking it down. Cats don’t like change. Me either.
When we decided to have the cats spayed, it felt wrong. The decision to spay was emblematic to me of how much damage we’ve done to the natural world. How much damage I’ve done. And then this further insult: letting them be cut open and having their reproductive organs removed, as if I were gutting nature as well as them individually—two cats, two mysteries, two sentient beings to whom we’d given names, just as we were given names. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I felt so much grief.
How often Cirrus pulled me out of my gloomy thoughts, my preoccupations, my melancholic reveries, just by entering a room. She was my meditation teacher. She sat very still—hard for me to do. She didn’t accomplish anything. If she was my teacher, was I a good student? How much awareness did I experience when I slowed down to be present with Cirrus? How often do I encounter such an authentic, aware presence?
What was I to her? I have no idea. A familiar smell and an outstretched hand, a creature who fed and sheltered her yet was often in too much of a hurry to experience the miraculous world. A source of affection—but why? Why had I picked her to shower all those blessings upon? God knows what she saw when she sat there looking at me. A human with his work to do, as she had hers. What went through her mind as she watched me sit at the computer waiting for the right word to poke through the clouds in my head; when Norma and I made love; when I raided the refrigerator late at night? Who else has watched me so closely in all my private moments—weeping, or crying out in passion? Was I as interesting to her as she was to me? As enigmatic?
Her warm weight in my lap was especially important if Norma and I were going through a difficult time and I was sleeping on the sofa. Then Cirrus would stretch out on top of me, and we’d look in each other’s eyes, breathing together, bodies touching, minds touching. Of course I talked to Cirrus. Of course she talked back. But my communication with Cirrus wasn’t dependent on language. Neither was my communication with my children when they were infants, nor with my wife when we gazed into each other’s eyes. An ex-lover once told me about having made love with a man who didn’t speak a word of English. She didn’t speak his language either. Still, she said, the sex was great.
Norma sometimes felt jealous. “Like I had to look away because it felt like I was watching people making love,” she said. What else to call these moments with Cirrus but erotic? That’s a risky word, I know. It’s one thing to say you love your cat; it’s quite another to wax rhapsodic about your mystical erotic union. But our relationship was erotic—not sexual. Erotic—not romantic. Well, maybe a little romantic. When she climbed on my chest, it was the kind of closeness I usually associated with lovemaking, but it wasn’t sexual. When she was friendly with a visitor—climbing onto another man’s lap—was I jealous? For a moment, perhaps. But it made me so happy to see her receiving love. (Have I ever loved a woman so purely? Are you kidding?)
What does a woman want? Freud asked. What does a cat want? I ask.
Because Cirrus was always in the moment, the only way I could feel close to her, really close, was to become more present. Even if I was in the same room, I wasn’t with her until I stopped rushing around to get things done, and quieted down a little, became aware of my breathing, her breathing, the light, the sounds, the smells. Being present with Cirrus was important. So was being present with myself.
What do I know about the way cats and humans have been thrown together—mysterious creatures on a mysterious planet? All of us here for just a little while, then gone.
*
On November 10, 2005, Cirrus was in and out of my office as usual, but in the evening I noticed she didn’t want to eat. Then, in the middle of the night, she vomited multiple times. I called the emergency vet. They couldn’t tell us much by phone, but they didn’t really encourage us to bring her in, either.
At about 6 am I realized Cirrus was outside. When I called, she emerged from under the house, raggedy, un-groomed. Her tail dragged on the ground, very unlike her. This alarmed me.
She was always afraid of riding in the car and going to the vet. Her fear must have been magnified exponentially that day. Norma and I left Nimbus at home and got to the veterinary clinic before it opened, waiting at the door and murmuring encouragements to Cirrus, knowing she was sick but having no idea how bad it was.
After they brought her inside, a tech whisked her away to a back room and put her on oxygen and IV fluids. Her body temperature was six degrees lower than it should have been, a sign she was in shock. An ultrasound showed fluid in her abdomen—usually indicating inflammation. They used a syringe to withdraw some of the fluid, which was sent for testing.
The fluid contained bacteria, and since Cirrus didn’t have an obvious wound, the vets assumed her bowel was perforated. And if it was, she wouldn’t live without surgery. They told us they’d transfer her to a veterinary hospital, where she would get twenty-four-hour care, but they couldn’t guarantee she’d survive the half-hour drive.
That was when I burst into tears. It was just so sudden, like a Zen master’s stick whacking me from behind. No warning, no safety net. We weren’t ready to consider letting Cirrus go, but she didn’t have much of a chance. We got a minute to pet her, and she weakly meowed before they put her in the vet’s car.
At the hospital a nurse heard me give my name to the receptionist and asked, “Are you Sy Safransky?” She was a Sun reader, it turned out, which I took as an auspicious sign. Later, when I heard the surgeon had a Jewish last name like me, I told Norma it was another good sign. But everything just kept going downhill. They let us come to the back to see her. In her cage. Connected to all the machines. In a room with at least twenty dogs and cats, each in their own cages, connected to their own machines. The ICU. I’d never been in a place like that.
She was very sick, but she’d begun to stabilize: increased body temperature, better oxygenation. Still, she needed to survive surgery. It was her last chance.
According to the vet, Cirrus died three times during surgery. They brought her back with CPR. They found a ruptured lymph node. They didn’t find a perforated bowel.
Cirrus lived a couple more hours. Pain meds would have suppressed her vital signs further, so they gave her none. When her breathing and heart rate took a downward turn, there wasn’t much to do except end her physical suffering. Remembering this pierces my heart. Not my Cirrus.
Why did I let them cut her open without understanding the consequences? What agony did she suffer in those final hours? No pain medication: What kind of torture was that? The aching farewell in the ICU, her body straining to get away from such an awful place. To live? To die on her own terms? It was a horrible, painful death. I can’t pretend otherwise. Yet I don’t know what I would have done differently.
Norma said Cirrus must really have loved us to answer our call that morning. Left to herself, she would have stayed where she was to die. It was her devotion that made her come out from under the house, even though she was dying. Even though she must have known it.
*
The burial. It was November, and just about everything in Norma’s beautiful garden was dead. I dug Cirrus’s grave near the Buddha statue, the classic expression of equanimity on his face. I dug the hole deep and wide, and then I dug more the next day. I went way down with the shovel, chopped at the edges of the hole, then went down some more. I was nervous about opening the box she was lying in. How many times had I seen her alive? Now I was seeing her dead. But Cirrus was beautiful, even in death, her chin down to her chest, her face serene, soulful. I thought about her coming back to life. I thought about the promise of the resurrection. Promises, promises.
I read aloud from the last chapter of the great Hermann Hesse novel Siddhartha. (Norma remembers the line about “the sea of a thousand faces.”) Then we buried Cirrus in my old brown poncho. My mother gave me that poncho.
Had I cried this much after my mother died? I don’t think so.
Where is Cirrus? Her body is in the ground. In the dark. In the grave I dug for her in the middle of November 2005. Is she with me still? Is her soul somewhere else? In a better place? In heaven, perhaps. Just where is heaven, and which part do house cats inhabit? And what about all the birds who die and go to heaven—are they safe from the house cats? And if they are, how happy are the house cats? No answer. No heaven.
After Cirrus died, the grief came in waves that knocked me down. But between the waves I could eat again. Little by little, life returned to something called normal. The day started without her. The day ended without her.
What follows are some of my journal entries from that time.
At a café the day after we bury her, I want to grab everyone and tell them to pay attention: to open their hearts; to remember that death comes without warning. That’s the headline that should run on the front page every day. Your parents, your children, your spouse, your good friends, your not-so-good friends: one day you’ll bury each of them, or they’ll bury you, and that will be a weight you’ll have to drag behind you, but you’ll hardly notice it because of the pain in your chest, where the arrow is lodged.
It’s as hard as losing a human friend; not a whit of difference. To those who believe my saying this is disrespectful to my human friends, I can only say that you don’t understand, in the same way that someone who’s never had children can’t understand what it’s like to love your child.
The hierarchy that places humans above cats has broken down. I know, in a way I once didn’t, that cats and dogs and birds and bees and every living creature are conscious in a way that’s too hard for most of us to acknowledge. We’re all a bunch of narcissists who imagine that no life-form is quite as appealing as this one we call human. We’re unable to share the stage unless the animals are the supporting players.
The kindness I feel from friends and neighbors is a measure of the great love that Cirrus embodied, and of my and Norma’s love for her, which was about as unconditional as it gets. It makes me wonder how many grieve over the loss of a beloved animal. There must be thousands: kids, adults, elderly people who didn’t know who was going to go first—them or their pets.
As I walk past the Japanese maple, just a few feet from where we buried Cirrus, the branches brush my shoulder: her hand on my shoulder. I won’t deny this. Or hearing her in the house late at night. I know the sounds of this house.
Leonard Cohen:
It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving
A fitful dream the morning will exhaust . . .
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this.
Maybe I’ll get to see Cirrus on the other side, leading the way just a few steps ahead, tail pointing straight up. How spectacular her tail was, how beautiful her flag.
I miss her. Even writing those words makes me cry again. Crybaby. The man who loved his cat too much. My friend Ram Dass said the universe is lawfully unfolding. He didn’t mean human law. He didn’t mean any system of jurisprudence I can understand. But even without understanding it, can I nonetheless accept it? Not today. Not yet.
Last night she had something to tell me, and she did. She told me to stop finding fault with my animal nature, with all the sexual desire that’s always been so hard to contain. For how many years have I judged myself for being too sensual and not spiritual enough? It’s good enough, Cirrus said.
In a hotel room hundreds of miles from home, more than a week after her death, she still wakes me up. No alarm clock. No wake-up call. It isn’t the sound of the coffee maker coming on. It isn’t the movement of the moon or the stars—there’s been nothing but a pale yellow light shining through the curtains all night long. Across space, across time, Cirrus says: Wake up. Get out of bed. Don’t go back to sleep for a thousand years. Don’t imagine that anything you thought was yours is yours to keep. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Get up and pay your dues for being in a human incarnation. Pay attention to your rightful territory. Don’t shirk your responsibilities to protect what needs protecting, to stand up for what’s right. Tend to your own body: cleanliness, godliness, you know what to do, what to eat, what not to eat. Play hard whenever your playmate will play. Never lose sight of your essential nature. The universe makes a home for you right now in this sixty-year-old body. Honor it as long as you’re in it, as you honored mine.
Who could have predicted Cirrus would die this young and this suddenly? Who could have predicted the woman behind the counter would give me the wrong order this morning?
I walked back to my hotel shortly after five this morning in the freezing cold with a big cup of coffee—black, no sugar—that turned out to be someone else’s: cream, sugar, totally wrong. I poured it down the sink, zipped up my jacket, and went out to get another. Easy enough. Like getting another cat, I suppose. There are millions in need of a home. But all I want is Cirrus, not another cat, not coffee with sugar and cream, not herbal tea, not chai, not soy milk or mother’s milk or the nectar of the fucking gods, those gods who presume to know better than I do what I need: another lesson in impermanence. Say goodbye, the gods tell me. Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
I miss her at home. I miss her in the middle of the night in a hotel room five hundred miles away. Standing on a street corner, watching runners in the Philadelphia Marathon, I miss running with her back to the house after our walk around the pond. I miss her as I sit here alone, drinking coffee, and I miss her with Norma’s arms around me, as I lie beside her, weeping.
She’s been gone three weeks. I still cry every day. Thank you, Cirrus. It’s good to be reminded that grief comes and goes, and that crying is as natural as laughing—or breathing, for that matter. Like a long exhalation.
I haven’t stopped grieving, but something has changed. The world swings her hips, and I take notice. I’ve started to care about politics again. Time yanks me by the collar. The future is waiting, but I don’t want to leave Cirrus behind. Time doesn’t care. Time is unimpressed that I still see her out of the corner of my eye: a flick of her tail, a sudden movement in the shadows. Time to move on, Time reminds me.
Writing about Cirrus won’t bring her back, but wouldn’t it be meaningful nonetheless to describe how I fell in love with her, and the baffling nature of that love? To praise her animal nature and mine? Once we were two beings of different species who lived under the same roof, brought together by who knows what mysterious karma. Now she’s dead. Is the love dead? No. Will the love die when I die? I don’t know.
Come on, Sy, say what you know: Love is real. Not “my” love, but love itself. Do I need to quote some mystic who says it perfectly, or can I stumble toward the light as I am?
But I don’t know about love right now. I don’t know about truth. I just know the incomprehensibly vast universe is no bigger than the grave I dug for Cirrus. And yet, and yet, where is there room enough for my love for her? Where in all of God’s creation is there room for my love?
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Nimbus, hoping my presence makes Cirrus’s loss a little less difficult for her. Regardless of what Nimbus understands about death, here in the land of the living, she’s lost her sister. Companions since birth, loved by the same two humans, eating side by side, sleeping in the same bed, grooming each other, playing, sometimes fighting when the play got out of hand. I’m not sure whether either of them distinguished who “Cirrus” was and who “Nimbus” was, as we usually called for them in the same breath. But Nimbus is certainly aware right now that Cirrus is gone, that winter is upon us. How deep is her grief? I have no idea. When they chased each other from one end of the house to the other, were they having an “argument,” or merely a “disagreement”? Or was this just another kind of love?
Norma and I talk about a proper memorial for Cirrus: whether to buy a statue or move the Buddha. The next day Nimbus is curled around the Buddha, the first time we’ve ever seen her there. The day after that an owl flies right in front of me as I’m driving out of my neighborhood and perches in a tree no more than thirty feet away. I get out. We look at each other.
Loving an animal is a religious experience. Did that make my cat God? No. She was already God.
The first time Norma and I make love after Cirrus’s death, when my heart is as open and receptive as it can be, I feel Cirrus. It isn’t her physical presence—I don’t imagine she’s on the bed—but I feel her there. She wants me to know there’s no reason to feel guilty. The message is simple. How do I know it was her communicating with me and not me talking to myself? I don’t. I just know I feel less guilty.
The next time Norma and I make love, my mind drifts for a moment to the conflict I often experience between sex and spirituality, as if my sexual desire were incompatible with my desire for God. As I pray that this split be healed—I’ve prayed for this many times before—Cirrus enters my mind. I don’t want her there. I don’t want to drown in grief again. But pushing the grief away means pushing Cirrus away, and that’s too painful. So I let her in, and it’s as if I’m opening a door in my heart to let Nimbus in, too—to let in anyone who wants to enter: Friends, neighbors, anyone. All sentient beings, all suffering beings, no one left out. Then something happens that I can’t explain.
A sound comes out of me, unlike any sound I’ve ever made. It is a high note, a pure note. It fills my body, fills the room. It doesn’t feel like singing. It is a vibration that is more primal than any “om” I’ve ever chanted, more glorious than any “hallelujah” I’ve ever sung—a stream of energy, an explosion of pure love, pitch-perfect, as if I’ve become love’s tuning fork. My whole body is awash with this sound. Am I making the sound, or is the sound making me? It emanates from the door I’ve just opened in my heart. It’s the answer to my prayer. It hoists me on love’s shoulder so I can see over the wall—the wall I have erected between sex and spirit, the wall I thought God put there. Tears stream from my eyes.
Later, when I ask Norma what she thought happened, when I ask what it sounded like to her, without telling her anything of what I experienced, she says her first thought was that she was hearing Cirrus—that Cirrus was inside that sound.
All night in my dreams I searched for Cirrus. I knew she might be dead, but I couldn’t be sure. When I woke up, I burst into tears, all uncertainty gone. I’d buried her three years ago in the garden outside our door.
Cirrus woke me up to nature, to the natural world I habitually fail to notice. She woke me up to the natural order of things: We’re born, we live, we die. Every child we’ve held in our arms, heart bursting with love. Every lover whose hands we’ve forgotten or will never forget. Every stranger who showed up with a message we knew better than to follow. Every worker and every boss and every classmate and every teacher. Whoever made the chair we’re sitting in, the clothes we’re wearing, the eyeglasses, the handkerchief, the throwaway plastic pen.
Cirrus also awakened me to the nonhuman: To the worlds of those we call “animals,” wild or otherwise, who might as well be living on different planets. Cirrus made my world bigger by leading me into some of those other worlds. Hers most of all.
*
Much of this essay was written twenty years ago, when I could still write. I’m eighty years old now, and Cirrus has been gone for a long time. Yet I miss and love her still. As I accept the reality of my diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, across space, across time, Cirrus reminds me, Wake up.
