Life
Lessons from my Cat
With everything cats teach
people about life,
love, and grace, who are the real masters?
Each year, I make an annual
teaching journey from South Florida to Woodstock, New York,
and often gain insights that become a column. This time,
I’m writing about a different journey—one of courage and
trust that can make an enormous difference in the way you
live your life.
The journeyer was my cat, Ananda (Sanskrit
for bliss), who recently passed away after months of
suffering from multiple cancers. I don’t know how much
cats know about the medical conditions they’re treated for
by the veterinarians hired by their "masters." (I
put quotations around that word because, with everything
cats teach people about life, love, and grace, I wonder who
the real masters are.) I don’t know if Ananda knew she was
dying, but she certainly withdrew from life. She lost
interest in food during her last four days on earth, stopped
licking us daily the way she was famous for, and stopped
sleeping with us, as well. In the face of all her pain and
nausea, she displayed an unmistakable courage, never once
losing the grace and dignity that were her trademarks.
And then there was the trust
She trusted us when we had to force
medications down her throat because we couldn’t put it in
food since she had stopped eating cat food and even Bumble
Bee Solid White Albacore tuna in water, which, in healthier
days, was, for her, the cat’s meow. She also trusted us
when we brought in a strange man with hypodermic needles and
vials of fluids. He was a traveling Dr. Kevorkian who
mercifully could put animals out of their intense
suffering—but she didn’t know him from Adam.
Yet she trusted her body with him because
we did, and she trusted us literally with her life. And so
she lay there in the arms of my wife—the arms she leapt
into 16 years before while escaping the ASPCA cage she’d
lived in, to enter our lives. (She was my birthday present
with a mission: bring joy back to my heart after a month of
grieving my father’s death.) I brushed her body with the
brush she loved, and the doctor administered the injection
that sent her into the freedom of the Beyond, or what animal
lovers call Rainbows Bridge.
What would your life be like if you
suddenly starting living with courage and trust? What if you
had the courage to go for what you truly wanted in your
career, your relationships, and your spiritual life? What if
you had the courage to speak your truth today and everyday?
What would your life be like if you
trusted in the same Universe that beats your heart in your
chest and breathes for you every minute of your life,
whether you’re waking, sleeping, or dreaming? You don’t
give a moment’s thought to your next breath because, at
some level, you’ve surrendered to your Higher Power to
take care of that for you. Imagine if you also trusted to
live the life your higher Self and your heart are
encouraging you to live.
As a cat, my late Ananda is said to have
nine lives, but do you really know that you’ll have
another one? So why wait until the end to live the life you
were born to live? If you let my cat’s death inspire your
life, please let me know, so I can whisper that to her in
the other world.
She is hugely missed every day, but her
legacy of courage and trust, of bliss and grace, and most of
all, of unconditional love, live on in me. And that is
already making a difference in my life and in the lives of
many others whom I touch, so she is still making her
beautiful presence felt on earth while she’s enjoying the
delights of Rainbows Bridge.