I write obituaries for cats.
I could explain that I write obituaries for cats for people. But the ones who know don’t need the asterisk. The ones who don’t know will still say, “Oh, God.”
“Oh, God” is the correct response.
Cats are as divisive as socialism or the suburbs. Venerable literary journals state in their guidelines, between prohibitions on plagiarism and preferences for 12-point font, “if your manuscript can in any way be construed as a ‘cat story,’ kindly refrain from submitting.” Tinder contenders thunder reverence for dogs, then threaten, “You’d best peel that ‘Crazy Cat Lady’ magnet off your Toyota before our first date.”
Chicken Soup for the Soul devotes entire volumes to cats. Sophisticated minds devote entire op-eds to reviling Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Cats are too murderous or too mushy. Cats are too hateful or too Hallmark. Cats are either evil or squidgy-widgy, consorts of reprobates or doily ladies. Few consider that doily ladies may be the world’s subtlest rebels.
“You throw your gift away on cats”
I am not half as brave as they are, having fallen rather than climbed into God’s favourite farce. I left the ministry for the cat shelter. I put my Master of Divinity in a plastic carrier and boarded the ark. I stumbled down the oaken pulpit, forgot when Ordinary Time ends, and got a job at a pet sanctuary. I stopped preaching the Gospel so I could get on all fours with the ungrateful.
I write obituaries for cats.
Oh, God.
People who once nicknamed me “Angel Angela” asked if I had backslidden. A fatherly friend declared me God’s favourite adopted word “apostate” and walked it on a leash for all to see. “It would be bad enough if you were Bo Peepin’ it with literal lambs,” his final email blazed. “But cats. You throw away your gifts on cats.”
I did not know what I was doing when I took the cat sanctuary job, any more than my new boss knew why he should take a chance on a “defrocked priest.”
“I was never frocked in the first place.”
“So, you’re naked.”
“More than you know.”
I told myself this was an intermission in the Good News Revue—six months, a year at most. I would lick my wounds, let the pitchfork pokes heal, and seek absolution in a Ph.D. application. I would finally get around to that ordination. In the meantime, I would do some good in the garden of mewling things.
A creature ran off with my keys.
My assignment was Development, the subtle word for “Fundraising.” I would be feline. Pugs and papillons might bark beneath your window, but I would slip sermons inside cat stories inside “cases for support.” I stood at the fountain and caught astonishments in my bucket.
I had always been on the side of cats, uncool enough for the bumper magnet. I could make a reasoned defense of these poets and despots, long-tailed egos stitched of empathy and greed and silk and soot. I had felt the Hertz of their inner airships knitting my broken bones. I had relearned my alphabet in wordless peridot eyes.
But nothing prepared me for sanctuary cats.
Sanctuary cats
Befitting a shelter for “hopeless situations,” these were spastic monastics who worried the world. St. Augustine was a belching orange tabby, restless heart and failing kidneys. Julian of Norwich was a diabetic tortoiseshell, tight as a hazelnut. Teresa of Avila was a kitten in ecstasy, fish-faced with the revelation that joy is not scarce. Simon Stylites, the infamous monk who perched on a pillar for decades, was the feral, hidden and hissing and holding the hem of God’s garment.
When they ached, the heavenly host booked red-eye flights. They let us call them volunteers and donors. Michael the Archangel took a break from battling Satan, quickly changing into the costume of a flannelly mechanic. Gabriel put vestal virgins on hold to close golden eyes and announce, “this life was good.” Six-winged seraphs flapped down the highway to hold little friends one last time.
The people hid inside the cats. The cats saved the people. The cats and the people could not stem the reckless love.
People who knew they were unacceptable bled for the unadoptable. All of these were the least of these. The people hid inside the cats. The cats saved the people. The cats and the people could not stem the reckless love. The cats and the people could not lose each other.
Oh, God.
They were the haggard small who no one wanted. Incapable of self-pity, they poured forth speech like the bawdy sky. They had nothing to offer but need. They were Beatitudes dressed as children dressed as cats dressed as life dressed as death.
Oh, God.
They spat at us and slashed us and hid from us and farted at us. They comforted us and consumed us and refused to be healed no matter how well we hid them under our wings. They died and unravelled us and sent reminders that lo, they were alive.
They existed without earning. They expected grace with gravy. They punched me in the heart until the parables started beating again.
Oh, God.
I am the narrator
I could never leave this place. I had never been to a more beautiful church.
I had never been among so many people who would groan if I mentioned Jesus. I had never been among so many people who would declare me their own anyway. I had never realized that I had never really believed in “irrevocable.”
Baptized into the fellowship of grief, I vowed to eulogize every cat. When your shelter burgeons with one hundred frail, this is an impulsive oath. My laptop runs with tears. My words smudge into sermons insisting the trumpet would sound for every fallen friend. I demand their resurrections. I bear witness to their lives. I bear witness.
I am the narrator, rowing my ferry between grief and prose. I sketch labyrinths for my friends to walk. We reach the centre and find no answers. We use different words for grace. I am pleading more than preaching. I am thanking more than anything.
I could explain that I maintain a respectful separation between church and sanctuary, that I never cross the line between sacred and profane. But angels and volunteers and dying cats and impossible cats know that no such line exists.
I write obituaries for cats. I throw away my gifts on cats. This is what gifts are for.
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image 1: Mimzy; image 2: Bess Haimiti; image 3: Andrys Stienstra
