I’m spending each day sitting with Molly, my fifteen year old cat, watching her grow weaker and fade away as her liver fails. At the moment she’s still taking joy in life (the pleasure of food, albeit with some difficulty, as well as the pleasure of company) but it’s likely to be days rather than weeks.
It’s hard not to be amazed by the stoicism of cats; she’s clearly aware she’s dying, having retreated into this room ten days ago and refusing to come out, but she seems utterly at peace. Without the rumination I’m currently plagued by, like a fog which impedes my connection to the present moment, she just is. Even if what is seems obviously shit from my perspective, without the roaming outside and sleeping on the grass which took up so much of her days, she’s still effortlessly taking what pleasure is available in the situation she finds herself in.
I’m trying to follow her lead and take what joy in connection I can in these remaining days, until we reach a point where her suffering outweighs the narrowing satisfactions of living. Earlier today I thought back to Jean Cocteau’s explanation that “I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul”. The fact she’s been with me since I was 23 leaves it feeling deeper than that, as a constant presence through the vast majority of my adult life. Has she become my visible soul over time? Former partners have described the connection with such eerily similar language, that I’ve come to accept there’s a depth of entanglement there which they were all picking up on. My ex-wife described her as my daemon (“the external physical manifestation of a person’s “inner-self” that takes the form of an animal“) and I can certainly see what’s captured by that, though I don’t think it does justice to the otherness I have always experienced.
I never imagined her as an extension of myself, even if at points in caring for her I was seeking to better care for myself. Because there was always a sense of the alien quality of her consciousness. She inhabited a radically different world to me: full of predators and prey, sights & sounds I couldn’t sense and natural rhythms I could only barely intuit, even at my most sensitive. Yet in spite of that alienness, in spite of the absence of the language in which my soul is written, there was the possibility of attunement between us. There was a resonance which could miraculously emerge in spite of the vast gulf of consciousness separating us. I have spent much less time with her in recent months than I had in previous years which I now regret. But these final days have left me newly aware of what a remarkable thing it is to sit with a purring cat, looking at each other, taking comfort in mutual proximity.
I’m going to miss her so much but the flip side of that grief is a profound gratitude to my silent comrade, as she was once described to me, for these many years of quiet mutual presence with each other.
Her name is Molly and her watch is almost over. But not quite.
Mark Carrigan 