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One of the clearest memories from the worst day of my life is of my cats, Joan (Didion) and Tommy (St. Thomas the Apostle), sitting on the living room floor. My partner had just told me he would be leaving the United States, and by extension our relationship, later that weekend. Restrictions on travel and movement and commerce were clicking into place as the scale of the Covid threat became widely obvious, and he was getting out while he could.
What I remember about Tommy and Joan is, as that conversation and its aftermath unfolded, that they would install themselves like sergeants at either end of the rug, solemn and wakeful. We two humans talked and cried and fell silent, but they two cats did not curl up or drift off. They did not wander somewhere less stressful. Normally, from October to May, the bottom-line relevance of any human being in this household equates to ability and willingness to warm a cat; but now the two of them kept their distance. It’s hard to describe the sensation of how aware they were; that for now they were not comforting anyone (though they would do plenty of that for me later), but sitting witness.
Back when I got them, Tommy and Joan fit in my palms, one in each. My friend (and cat ownership instigator) Sara came with me to the ASPCA in Harlem, and whoever was processing my adoption application encouraged me to get two cats, not just the one I had envisioned. They would keep each other company during my long workdays, I was told; the living costs would increase only marginally (this is not true); the shelter would waive the adoption fee for the second one.
If I was on the fence, the pair of personalities I then encountered closed the deal. Joan minxed out of her cage that day, exactly the charmer she’s always been—head of the social committee, chief seductress. Chirp, she said, and that was that. In another of four rooms dedicated to the black cats, Tommy cocked his head in naked skepticism. You could imagine him doubling down whenever Miss Hannigan swished by, telling him he’d never get out if he didn’t smile.
They came home in a pair of cardboard boxes. Sara and I drank martinis (vodka for her, gin for me). The cats became my kids.
This year, after we’d all survived, Tommy ate some Aleve and went to the hospital. When he came home, Joan hissed at him for several days. It happens: One cat shows up smelling weird and the other doesn’t recognize him. Imagine that that’s your phenomenology—you can’t pick out your roommate and best friend of six years on sight alone—and yet you know to assume loaf position on the living room carpet for a scene of domestic heartbreak, as the bars shut down and the borders close. I know there’s a cat explanation for all of this, utterly unanthropomorphic. But it doesn’t do much to dissuade me from the human one.
Writers often love cats, I think, because they’re witness to everything the world doesn’t see of us. I don’t mean the words that emerge, hopefully into publication. I mean the life that underlies and secures those words, the eddies of love and endings. The nature of a pet—more than a lover or a best friend or even a child—is that it’s present for all the unextraordinary moments that precede and separate the big ones. The chair you sit in, the mug you cradle, the space heater in the corner: among these fixtures of household, a cat is proof of life—yours, the ones they and you have known, the ones still coming.
Coming Tuesday: Sweat.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.