Stories

November 2019

My cat, Lucy, crossed over one month short of her seventeenth birthday.  The next May, ten months later, I adopted another cat who I now believe to be Lucy reborn in another cat body.

On some level, I must have known Lucy was on her way out. For months I’d looked on helplessly as she withered. I watched her lose weight, watched her fur grow dull and matted, watched her get weaker and weaker.  Still, when I’d started dating my college girlfriend, her cat had been twenty years old, all fur and bones, and her cat had still been walking around–albeit slowly–two years later when my girlfriend and I broke up.  Maybe Lucy could be one of those 20+ year old cats?

I was on the bus coming home from work when the call from the vet came in with Lucy’s test results.  Pancreatic cancer.  Lucy didn’t have long.

The night before she died–a Sunday–she slipped into a sort of coma. Every once in a while she twitched or cried out, as if to let us know she was still with us. I had hoped she would pass away quietly on her own, but she was hanging on. It was becoming clear that we would have to help her along. Unfortunately, the vet wouldn’t be open until morning. There was nothing to do but be there for her and wait.

That night a thunderstorm passed through Seattle. A rarity. The room would suddenly fill with surreal bursts of light but without any succeeding thunderclap. I half-expected Lucy to slip away during one of these brilliant flashes, but she lingered on until morning. As soon as we could, my wife and I took her to the vet one last time, where Lucy passed away in my arms.

Coming home without her was almost more than I could handle. For nearly seventeen years she had always been there, and now she was gone. Our two remaining cats, Mrs. Claws and Wilson–Birmans both–didn’t seem to notice at first, but Wilson, who had rarely left her side during the weeks Lucy had grown weaker, took to looking for her at nighttime. After lights out, instead of playing with Lucy, the way he had always done, he looked for her. His forlorn meows as he searched the basement in the dark were heart wrenching.

The day after Lucy died, I was on a flight to New York to attend a writers’ conference. It had been tough to leave so soon after her passing, but simultaneously good to be away from the sense of emptiness that filled the house.

Late on my second night in New York, I returned to my hotel and pulled out my iPad. I had meant to open the Books app to look up some of the novels published by the authors I’d met that day. When I opened the app, an ebook I hadn’t read for months inexplicably opened. The book was Animals in Spirit by Penelope Smith.

This didn’t seem possible. Yes, books opened automatically when you opened Books, but only books that were currently being read. I’d read a half-dozen books since Animals in Spirit, yet it opened without my intervention. I looked down at the page: Chapter 7: Guilt and Grieving.

“When animals enter our life,” it read, “we start on a journey filled with adventure, learning, and love. The animals reach deep into us and change us in ways that can hardly be described. We grow in love. And upon their leaving, we are lost, devastated. Over time, we explore the story and see the meaning, and stand in awe of these remarkable beings. What an honor they give us when they walk a part of our lives with us.”

The chapter went on to describe the death and dying process from the animal’s point of view and suggested exercises for coping with and letting go of the experience. It was just what I needed to hear, almost as if Lucy was trying to send me a message and help my grieving process from wherever she was.

A few nights later, shortly after I’d gone to bed, I was in that state between dreaming and waking, when I heard an inner voice repeating again and again. I’m always with you. I’m always with you. I’m always with you.

I woke a little startled. The voice was in my head, but it didn’t seem to be mine. I closed my eyes, exhausted, drifting off again. The inner voice was back. I love you. I love you. I love you, it repeated again and again and again.

I opened my eyes. Part of me wondered if this might be a message from Lu, but mostly I was too exhausted to think much about it. Again, I plunged to the edge of sleep and, again, the voice returned: I’ll be back. I’ll be back. I’ll be back. 

I had read dozens of accounts of beloved pets being reborn to be with their people again. The first was in Richard Bach’s memoir Bridge Across Forever. One night Bachman had an out-of-body experience shortly after falling sleep. Gazing down at the two cats curled up next to him on the bed, he realized from his out-of-body perspective that they were two cats that he had had before.

The books I had read more recently also mentioned this phenomenon, especially Animals in the Afterlife by Kim Sheridan. Frequently, when owners contacted their recently deceased pets via animal communicators, the pets would announce their intention to reincarnate to be with their owners again. This always excited the grieving owner, but invariably the owner would ask the pet, “But how will I find you?”

The answer from the pet was always the same, “I will find you.”

The next spring found my wife and me on our way to the breeder were we had adopted our last two cats. Despite my sense that Lucy would find us, it seemed logical that she would try to meet us there. 

We had been waiting for this moment for months, but on the way to the breeder’s we encountered an unexpected traffic snarl. Seattle is known in part for its traffic, but not on Sunday mornings. It only became an issue when we arrived late to the breeder’s house. We had thought the appointment to view the kittens would just be the two of us, but when we pulled up to the curb there were several cars parked near the breeder’s driveway.

Two families had also shown up to look at the kittens but, unlike us, they had arrived on time. There were six kittens in all, three boys and three girls. When we walked into the house, someone was already writing a check for one of the male kittens. In another part of the living room, a second family–grandma, mom and two young girls–were examining two of the three females, trying to decide between them. Kittens crisscrossed the room like billiards on a pool table after the first break. I felt a terrible sense of unease. How were we going to find her?

I needn’t have worried. At that moment a kitten walked directly up to my wife and let us pick her up. We had found our cat. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that she found us.

Right away our new cat, Emily, began exhibiting behaviors and characteristics similar to Lucy. Anyone who has a close relationship with a pet knows that all animals have a distinct personality and even if a breed shares general qualities, they all have different habits and a unique energy. Emily definitely shared Lucy’s spirit and the more time that went by, the more examples we’d get of how similar the two cats were.

It wasn’t just that Emily liked to sit in the same places that Lucy did and do the same things. There were very specific episodes that led me to believe that Lucy and Emily shared the same spirit:

• When Lucy was young, I used to giver her little fish treats when I got home from work. She would race down the basement stairs and jump on an old chair in front of the cabinet where I kept her treats. Emily began doing the same thing, even though I hadn’t kept treats in that cabinet for a good fifteen years.
• When we first adopted Lucy, we kept a collar with a bell on it so we could find her in the house. Over time, Lucy grew accustomed to walking into a room and announcing her presence by shaking her collar to make the bell ring. Even years later, when we permanently took the collar off, Lucy would still walk in the room and shake her head to let us know she was there. Emily did the same thing.

• After I’d take a shower, Lucy would go to the spot where the shower curtain met the shower wall and lap up the water at the edge of the tub. Emily also took up this habit, although no other cat in the house ever did this.

• Lucy used to love bread. Once, as a kitten, she swiped a dinner roll more than half her size off the dinner table without detection, and somehow managed to bring it upstairs, where she was found playing with it under my desk a half-hour later. Another time, she stole the very last cinnamon strudel made by Grandma Therese and consumed it before anyone else could taste it. You get the idea. Similarly, Emily could find and chew open a loaf of bread within three minutes of grocery bags being placed onto the kitchen floor.

• One morning after waking up briefly and going back to sleep, I found myself in the dinning room. I knew this was a dream, but everything about it was completely real, as if I was really standing in my dining room. There in front of me, perched on the buffet table, sat Lucy. She wasn’t facing me, but looking at the window to my left. Carefully, I moved toward her, afraid that if I made too much noise or a sudden move she would run away. I reached out to pet her and the moment my hand touched her, Lucy turned into Emily. Only now she was facing me.
• One night almost a year after we adopted Emily, I was upstairs in my home office. I had set up a little memorial for Lucy there: a small cherrywood box with her ashes, her collar from when she was a kitten, and a little stuffed animal goose that we had gotten out of a Happy Meal when the movie Babe was popular, a little goose that Lucy liked to play with. On this night, I suddenly missed Lucy profoundly, deep in my bones. I felt a terrible ache inside. I grew tearful and, even though Emily was sitting nearby on the floor, I couldn’t help but miss my old Lu. A few minutes later, I was downstairs for dinner with a lingering sense of sadness. I looked down and there on the floor was Emily with that little Happy Meal goose that had, just moments before been in my home office. She had carried it downstairs to show me, as if to say, “Dad, what are you so sad about? I’m back. I’m right here.” Emily had never played with that goose before and she has never played with it since.

It was so nice to be reunited with Lucy, yet there was one thing I wasn’t prepared for. Before then, when I’d thought of Lucy’s return, I’d expected the crusty old cat that I’d grown to know and love, the cat that was losing her hearing, who would patter silently up behind me and meow loud enough for her to hear her own voice, scaring the crap out of me. 

What I didn’t anticipate was Lucy-as-kitten. Little Emily was so much like the little kitten that my wife and I had picked out at the animal shelter eighteen years before. Emily was the same yet not the same, an old soul in a new body. And as much as she is like Lu, this little furry being is a new story, having new experiences, making new memories, creating new relationships with her housemates, cats and humans alike.

Though physical bodies fail, the story, it seems, goes on.