“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” – Jean Cocteau
There is a shadow in my house.
It is big and black and moves around the wooden floors to surprise me at times when I am not expecting it to be there. It is named Tycho.
Tycho (tee-ko) was in a metal cage on the right hand side of the cat room at the animal shelter in
Washington, DC, when we visited, looking for a kitten for Emma.
He was bottom right, cage number four. Several years before, we had adopted our tortoise shell cat, Sim Sim, at the same shelter. Sim Sim was three years old when we adopted her—a regal queen of a cat—loving, but quietly in charge, watching, sitting back quietly as every child who entered ran excitedly to the kittens. Not a kitten herself, Sim Sim just watched, it seems. Her cage was top right, number three from the end. I remember it as if it were yesterday. She had been there a while, waiting.
Just three years old, Emma, too, had run for kittens—who wouldn’t?—but when I quietly explained the realities of an older cat in a shelter needing love too, she gravitated—as I had done—to Sim Sim, a cat whose name, my friend Meg always said, reminded her of Dim Sum.
And so, Sim Sim joined our family when Emma was young. She is the elder cat in our home now, still queenly, still watching, aloof but so kind. Whenever Emma was sick as a young child, Sim Sim sat near her, watching over her, sensing the illness before we could.
When Emma got bigger and more responsible, I told her she could add a kitten to our menagerie, a small animal that could be hers to love and name and hold and sleep next to. She ran for a calico kitten at the back of that shelter room as I got stopped by the big paw of a young black cat, with a deep full coat. He sat looking at me, his big paw extended as if to shake my hand, his movements slow and languid, his eyes knowing. He was a gorgeous being, not to be ignored as he slowly moved his paw to hold me there with him. For some reason, it was clear to me that he needed me.
Emma found her Callie, a small calico kitten she named after the young woman who worked in the main office of her elementary school; I found my Tycho, the slow-moving black kitten who, even young, showed signs of bigness and connectedness and sheer, sheer love.
John shook his head slowly, knowing that no amount of reason would limit us to one of those animals. We paid, we crated, we left for big adventures with these two cats, now three at home.
From the beginning, Tycho was special. He was named for astronomer Tycho Brahe, a fact that would later thrill Emma even more as she became enamored with the idea of being an astronomer herself. While Callie was a playful, jumping kitten, Tycho seemed slow. He would sometimes sit and watch his shadow for hours. He appeared to have some kind of developmental slowness; he was a lumbering giant of a kitten, then cat. And with it came sweetness, an unutterable sweetness. He is the cat who always greets us, walks with us, winding around our legs to trip us up at times. He’s always there for us, like a dog more than a cat. On “Spongebob Squarepants,” where I get all my inspiration and philosophical meanderings, he is Patrick, the sweet and simple starfish. When the cats send a Mother’s Day card, for example (what? Yours don’t do that?), Tycho’s signature is always the simplest, biggest, most heartfelt one. There is no barometer in Tycho’s mind; he is pure, hot love, full throttle.
Several years later when we lost our minds again and got a dog at the animal shelter, Sim Sim and Callie actively showed their disdain by hissing and ignoring him. Tycho, bless his heart, took a slightly different and unique approach: he became stealth cat.
A boundless package of a Jack Russell terrier and Saint Bernard mix (no, I don’t know how his father and mother managed it and stop trying to imagine it, let’s move on with the story), our dog Blue didn’t know what to make of these strange, hissing animals. Sim Sim and Callie were aggressively unfriendly, while all eighteen pounds of Tycho was mystified. We watched, stifling peals of laughter, as Tycho “snuck” past Blue to get a closer look, walking so slowly that it was almost impossible to see the movement, as if his bulky form would be invisible if slow. Not surprisingly, soon Blue and Tycho were playing, wrestling, and sleeping together, best friends across a species divide.
Tycho’s the most gentle of the three, with a patience that allows kids to pick him up easily; he moves through his day nudging all the humans around him, as if touch is his lifeblood. He is always the one admired by guests—“he’s so gorgeous!” they say. And yes, he is.
When Tycho moved, he moved slowly and even as slowly as he moved, sometimes his walk was interrupted by a sudden sit, as if he could go no further. It was clear that Tycho enjoyed life in that slow motion pace as if below water, watching life go by and reaching out to it periodically.
People don’t tell you they’re hurting, sometimes, until it’s too late. There might be signs—withdrawal, irritability, a change in habits, loud sighs, but if you’re not open to seeing the signs, it’s easy to ignore, overlook, explain them away, complain rather than investigate. I saw it with my stepfather who died 37 days after his diagnosis of lung cancer. He had been sick for some time, it is now clear—cancer doesn’t kill you in 37 days—but he didn’t tell anyone. Instead, we saw the shortness, the irritability, and we whispered about him being more ornery than usual. It all came clear when the diagnosis arrived, and the death 37 days later: he was hurting.
Hindsight hurts with its finiteness.
And so it is with pets, too, even more incapable of saying. They keep their pain from us—to protect us? Because they can’t understand what pain is? Because we are too busy to see, too self-absorbed to pay attention, too much more important?
As I sat working at the computer last Monday morning, I heard a thumping sound, over and over again. John must have put Emma’s Converse tennis shoes in the dryer, I thought to myself. She’ll need them for school—I hope they dry in time. And yet, the sound got louder and louder, as if the thumping was approaching. “Oh God,” I heard John wail, “Oh God, it’s Tycho.”
Thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump. And to my horror, I saw our large black sweet cat trying to walk, but unable to. The thumping sound was his horrible, awkward ballet, dragging two useless back legs behind him. I wanted to run from him. What happened? I screamed! What happened? He looked like he had been hit by a car, but he hadn’t been outside. His back half was oddly still; valiantly, he struggled to move as if even he couldn’t believe it.
Walking one moment, unable the next. Walking one moment, unable the next.
John and I stood motionless for a moment, stunned by what we saw and couldn’t comprehend. Tycho tried to pull himself up the stairs, frantic for something—a space to go to, someone to tell him what was wrong, a quiet dark place to sort through all this new information? It was all too sudden; I couldn’t go toward him; I was paralyzed with the horror of what I was seeing.
John picked him up and raced with him to the emergency animal hospital, since it was a holiday. He called me hours later with just two words that changed everything: “bone cancer.”
Emma had spent the night at a friend’s house; after bringing Tycho home, John picked her up. She was sobbing when I opened the door. She ran to Tycho, lurching toward him in her speed to get to him.
She ran toward him. This is what it means to have a pure soul full of love, I thought, remembering my own revulsion and impulse to run from Tycho, to pay attention to my own fear rather than to comfort him. She ran to Tycho; by this time, he was silent in the corner, his black fur brilliant against a dark pink towel. Squeezing between the chair and the wall, she held vigil with Tycho for hours, drawing him and her broken heart, though I only knew that later.
We held Tycho until late in the night. The next morning, we called our vet’s office. Surely there had been a mistake; this was all wrong. Emma chose to go to school; I think she needed the distance. She said her goodbyes on our porch, holding Tycho for what might be the last time: she knew that and he did, too. It was a beautiful morning.
Bone cancer.
That means Tycho had been in pain long before this final failure of his spinal cord.
The cats’ food and litter boxes are in a “mudroom” at the back of our house, accessible by hopping over a small door. Tycho loved to eat. He would often stand by the door and wait until someone happened by—“what a lazy, big old cat,” we would say. “Look at him—too lazy to even jump!” we’d laugh, then open the door and let him in—or not. Recently, he would drink Blue’s water, this side of the mud room door. A few days before, we had found poop on the family room floor—we blamed our dog, Blue. It was a sign from Tycho—he could not jump that door any longer. It wasn’t because he was too big, too lazy, too dumb. It was because it hurt too much. I’m sure he tried until he could no longer. He simply couldn’t.
Is it so, sometimes, with people too? Perhaps when they are doing the equivalent of pooping on your floor or eating your food or refusing to jump, it isn’t because they are mean or idle or stupid or arrogant or lazy. Sometimes, I learned from Tycho, it is because they are in pain of one kind or another.
He must have been in so much pain. That jump must have been so, so difficult for him—for how long? Imagine his confusion, his pain, his silent anguish. It breaks my heart to think of it.
And yet, how did this happen so quickly? On Sunday he was meeting me at the door to lead me to his food; the next day he was paralyzed. A day later, he was dead. “Is this the end of Tycho?” little Tess asked, wisely, as we held him that night. I was struck silent by her question. From where does this question arise in a 3-year-old’s mind?
John answered later by telling Tess that Tycho was going to a big fantabulous cat farm to live, a place where he would eat big cat dinners, play with his furry cat friends, and nap on big, big beds as big as cars. She seemed satisfied with that answer and as much as I am inclined to bare the truth to even small ears, I must admit that I preferred the Cat Farm answer to the alternative. Even I couldn’t bear the thought of telling the truth about Tycho, so I was happy about the farm version, in the vainest of hopes that perhaps it was true—I mean, really, after all, who I am to say that it isn’t? Or if not a farm, then perhaps my Kiwi friend Richard had it right: "the feline spirits are even now gathering across the world to escort Tycho to the heavyside layer."
In that small room at the vet’s office, the eventuality made painfully immediate, John held Tycho; I held Tycho’s head to comfort him, though there was no amount of comforting that would make this right for him or us. It was too sudden—too sickeningly sudden—would it be any less so if it were 37 days or years? No.
Pets are not less a love than any human. Love is love. And if you have responsibility for another, it is damned hard to live with the feeling that you’ve let them down, as I felt, looking into his eyes for what would be the last time. It seemed cruel that I knew his end was near, but he did not—or did he? As in the Tsunami, when animals made their way to safety, I believe that animals know more than we do—Tycho knew, but when? just as he knew when he picked us out all those years ago.
He figured into our lives in ways that only now we know fully, a knowledge writ large in this vacuum that his loss has brought us. His looks of love and satisfaction and pure adoration are—quite honestly—hard to come by in humans.
And as if life weren’t circular enough, the circle circled yet once more: as before, those years ago, he lay looking at me, his big paw extended, as if to shake my hand, his movements slow and languid, his eyes knowing. He was a gorgeous being not to be ignored as he slowly moved his paw to hold me there with him. For some reason, it was clear to me that he needed me, especially now.
And then he was gone.
We had to leave him, a silken black cat with one paw extended, just as he had extended it to capture me in his heart before. We folded the quilted teal pad gently around the rest of him, its color a beautiful contrast to his fur. Even in death, he was gorgeous. We stayed with him for a long time, sobbing—don’t ever let anyone tell you how you should grieve, or for how long, or for whom. We picked up his crate, now forever empty, opened the door to leave, and stood looking at him one last time, tucked into his last sleep. I had a nearly irresistible urge to scoop him up and run, like Calvin from the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes once ran, so fast that Calvin—dressed as Stupendous Man—reversed the rotation of the earth and made time go backwards. The table was too hard for him, the lights too harsh; I turned them out to ease his rest.
Tycho’s ashes will be spread in a special place, perhaps near a stream in the woods, a place we can go back to when we need to.
I feel not only great loss, but guilt: I should have known. He counted on me to know, to take care of him. I failed Tycho.
And I am left with one overwhelming thought: I should have opened that damn door. He must have really hurt each time he jumped over it, just trying to make his way to food, drink, litter. It hurts me to know how arduous each of his last meals must have been.
We cry in unlikely places: today it was the dentist’s office, me and Emma. We let the dental technicians think we were overcome by the very thought of fluoride treatment; that wasn’t it. Emma draws to process grief; we all do it somehow because we must.
The shadows now moving around my wooden floors are not Tycho. They are a black diaper bag that I see out of the corner of my eye and my heart skips a beat at the mistaken thought that it is him. Wherever he has gone, Tycho is not here where I want him to be. Nor will he ever be. My home’s visible soul is missing.
As my buddy William Faulkner wrote, “Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.” Feel.
~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~
Please open the mudroom door for Tycho, where “mudroom” equals “whatever you can do to make life more humane and comfortable and easier” and where “Tycho” reads “important person or being in your life.”
When Daddy died, those many years ago, he asked for a piece of Shoney’s strawberry pie the night before he died. We reminded him that the doctor said he needed to lose weight—yes, he said with a crooked smile and sweet resignation, he remembered. Daddy died the next day. We couldn’t have known, could we? but I’ve sure thought a lot about that piece of strawberry pie in the 26 years since. Get the pie, open the door, do the things that you don’t want to look back on and regret, those ones, the sometimes simple ones. Sometime, you see, we will all be walking one moment, unable the next. Who will run toward us, and who will run away from us?
Read the signs before you, not behind you, not after you. People act differently when they are in pain—look for causes, not blame. Hold open the door for someone today, and every day.
There is a shadow in my house.
From the beginning, Tycho was special. He was named for astronomer Tycho Brahe, a fact that would later thrill Emma even more as she became enamored with the idea of being an astronomer herself. While Callie was a playful, jumping kitten, Tycho seemed slow. He would sometimes sit and watch his shadow for hours. He appeared to have some kind of developmental slowness; he was a lumbering giant of a kitten, then cat. And with it came sweetness, an unutterable sweetness. He is the cat who always greets us, walks with us, winding around our legs to trip us up at times. He’s always there for us, like a dog more than a cat. On “Spongebob Squarepants,” where I get all my inspiration and philosophical meanderings, he is Patrick, the sweet and simple starfish. When the cats send a Mother’s Day card, for example (what? Yours don’t do that?), Tycho’s signature is always the simplest, biggest, most heartfelt one. There is no barometer in Tycho’s mind; he is pure, hot love, full throttle.
A boundless package of a Jack Russell terrier and Saint Bernard mix (no, I don’t know how his father and mother managed it and stop trying to imagine it, let’s move on with the story), our dog Blue didn’t know what to make of these strange, hissing animals. Sim Sim and Callie were aggressively unfriendly, while all eighteen pounds of Tycho was mystified. We watched, stifling peals of laughter, as Tycho “snuck” past Blue to get a closer look, walking so slowly that it was almost impossible to see the movement, as if his bulky form would be invisible if slow. Not surprisingly, soon Blue and Tycho were playing, wrestling, and sleeping together, best friends across a species divide. 
Tycho’s the most gentle of the three, with a patience that allows kids to pick him up easily; he moves through his day nudging all the humans around him, as if touch is his lifeblood. He is always the one admired by guests—“he’s so gorgeous!” they say. And yes, he is.
She ran toward him. This is what it means to have a pure soul full of love, I thought, remembering my own revulsion and impulse to run from Tycho, to pay attention to my own fear rather than to comfort him. She ran to Tycho; by this time, he was silent in the corner, his black fur brilliant against a dark pink towel. Squeezing between the chair and the wall, she held vigil with Tycho for hours, drawing him and her broken heart, though I only knew that later.
John answered later by telling Tess that Tycho was going to a big fantabulous cat farm to live, a place where he would eat big cat dinners, play with his furry cat friends, and nap on big, big beds as big as cars. She seemed satisfied with that answer and as much as I am inclined to bare the truth to even small ears, I must admit that I preferred the Cat Farm answer to the alternative. Even I couldn’t bear the thought of telling the truth about Tycho, so I was happy about the farm version, in the vainest of hopes that perhaps it was true—I mean, really, after all, who I am to say that it isn’t? Or if not a farm, then perhaps my Kiwi friend Richard had it right: "the feline spirits are even now gathering across the world to escort Tycho to the heavyside layer."
We had to leave him, a silken black cat with one paw extended, just as he had extended it to capture me in his heart before. We folded the quilted teal pad gently around the rest of him, its color a beautiful contrast to his fur. Even in death, he was gorgeous. We stayed with him for a long time, sobbing—don’t ever let anyone tell you how you should grieve, or for how long, or for whom. We picked up his crate, now forever empty, opened the door to leave, and stood looking at him one last time, tucked into his last sleep. I had a nearly irresistible urge to scoop him up and run, like Calvin from the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes once ran, so fast that Calvin—dressed as Stupendous Man—reversed the rotation of the earth and made time go backwards. The table was too hard for him, the lights too harsh; I turned them out to ease his rest. 
Please open the mudroom door for Tycho, where “mudroom” equals “whatever you can do to make life more humane and comfortable and easier” and where “Tycho” reads “important person or being in your life.”
