Гвен Купер: Homer And The Holiday Miracle

Treatment options, even the aggressive ones, were limited—and in any case had been emphatically ruled out by Homer himself, the absolute worst patient in our clinic’s thirty-year history of dealing with hostile felines (or so the vet techs assured me as they tended to their wounds).

Brought in nearly unconscious, my fourpound blind cat had still managed to fend off—with razor-sharp claws and roars of fury so loud they’d disrupted the entire hospital and every animal in it—one doctor and two experienced vet techs for the better part of forty minutes. They hadn’t allowed me to accompany Homer into the emergency area but finally called me in to calm him down long enough to sedate him and draw blood for testing before sending us home.

Most cats, of course, don’t have to be fully sedated merely to get a blood test. What can I say? Homer always was special.

He was also, usually, an exceptionally friendly cat. Homer’s eagerness to engage new people and make new pals had become the stuff of legend. But the vet’s office had always held a stark terror for Homer—and, despite everything I’d done to try to make things better for him (and for Homer’s battle-weary doctors, who really were only trying to help), things had only grown worse as the years passed. So when the doctor, having called to discuss Homer’s test results, suggested as tactfully as possible that Homer was “unlikely to benefit from a hospital environment,” I was in no position to argue the point.

Instead of any intensive or invasive treatment, the vet prescribed a course of medication that could be mixed in with Homer’s food—if Homer could even be coaxed into eating, which the doctor seemed to feel was unlikely under the circumstances. The medicine might buy Homer a few more days, perhaps another two weeks at the very most. Given the level of toxins in his blood, there was no plausible explanation for how he was still alive right now , and any long-term prospects seemed doubtful, if not downright impossible. That Homer could even pick up his head and walk around was an amazing accomplishment—and the vet warned that I should expect to see very minimal activity from Homer over the course of whatever few days he had left.

I had gone out to grab a quick sandwich with Laurence when I got the doctor’s call on my cell, and I was in tears by the time we got home with what was left of our half-eaten lunch in carryout bags. Homer was dying—he was dying —and I’d left him to go get a sandwich. The twenty minutes I’d been gone suddenly seemed like an infinity of time—time during which anything, anything at all, might have happened.

I don’t know what I expected to find upon our return, but the vivid images my imagination readily supplied did nothing to comfort me.

The first to greet us when we opened the front door were the two kittens, now ten months old, who we’d adopted back in April to keep Homer company after losing his two older sisters. Clayton was our “tripod” (so called because he had only one hind leg), a coal-black, roly-poly mush of a cat with a high squeaky voice, an endlessly fun-loving disposition, and a double dose of admiration for his big brother, Homer—tiny Homer who was, for all his small stature, still the biggest cat Clayton could remember ever having seen.

Fanny was his littermate, a sleek, sweetnatured beauty with Clayton’s same ebony fur, although Fanny’s was perhaps a touch glossier. Fanny didn’t like to roughhouse as much as her brothers did, but she’d been nothing but gentle and respectful with Homer—and I knew that her affectionate patience had been good for his spirits.

Homer had been an unwilling big brother at first but, over the past few months, Clayton and Fanny’s kittenish high spirits had coaxed him back to all his youthful playfulness. Lately, he’d developed an especial fondness for crouching down and “hiding,” then leaping upon Clayton in sudden ambushes. And despite Homer never having grasped the concept of vision well enough to be much good at hiding, Clayton—who was the dearest little boy in the world—wasn’t nearly as clever as Homer. It tended to make for a pretty even match.

When we entered the apartment now, the kittens were waiting for us at the door, but Homer was nowhere to be seen. My heart dropped into my stomach. “Homer?” I called anxiously. “Homer-Bear, where are you?”

With the feline equivalent of a victory whoop, Homer leapt from the kitchen into the entry hall of our apartment, landing directly atop an unsuspecting Clayton. Gotcha!

Clayton promptly pulled out from under Homer’s weight and wiggled his one-legged backside, preparing to launch a counteroffensive. But Homer was already distracted by the aroma wafting temptingly from the takeout bags Laurence was carrying.

Hooray—you have food! He brought his rapidly twitching nose in for a closer inspection. What are we having?

The common thread uniting all the great Christmas stories is the telling of wondrous, miraculous events. Not one of them is a story about something that could have happened, but then didn’t. A Christmas Carol isn’t that muchbeloved redemption tale about three ghosts who don’t show up. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer isn’t the parable of a uniquely gifted reindeer who opted not to guide Santa’s sleigh one foggy Christmas Eve. Even the story of the first Hanukkah isn’t that one about the seven thousand ragtag rebels who stared down the barrel of overwhelming odds and then said to themselves, Meh . . . why bother?

But, for us, the wondrous, miraculous thing that happened five years ago wasn’t so much something that did happen, but rather something that was supposed to happen—that we were told, down to a medical certainty, was absolutely going to happen—but that ultimately never came to pass. At least, it didn’t come to pass for so long that, by the time it did, even the most rational among our family and friends had come to laugh off “medical certainty” as primitive superstition, and to believe that the only true certainty in life is that there are no certainties.

What I’m trying to say is that, back in December 2012, the absence of news was the very best news we could have hoped for. And that was exactly what we got.

For the first time ever, I dreaded the unmistakable signs of the holidays’ approach—the glitter of shimmering Christmas decorations overtaking Manhattan, the fairyland glow of cunningly decorated shop windows, the colorful pile of holiday cards and newsletters piling up on the kitchen counter. Wrapping Homer’s customary catnip holiday gift in one of the flip-top boxes he so loved to pry open, I wondered if there was even a point to it. The first night of Hanukkah was four days away, and the last night was twelve. Would Homer still be here when we lit the last candle? Christmas was three weeks distant, and three weeks had suddenly become a lifetime— more than a lifetime, in fact. It seemed certain that Homer would be gone well before Christmas Eve.

At this thought, my eyes filled with tears and my hands grew so shaky that I couldn’t get the wrapping paper onto the gift box. I told myself that I’d get to it later, but days went by and I never did.

Over the next few days, I kept waiting for Homer to slow down, for the high gloss of his black fur to dull, for him to stop cavorting with Clayton and Fanny, or trailing me from room to room while his little paws made a cheerful clip-clop on the tile floor. I waited for his favorite toys to begin gathering the dust of neglect, for the kittens to wonder anxiously why their beloved big brother—their tormentor and role model, whose every movement fascinated them to no end—refused to get up and play. I waited for the tinges of yellow in Homer’s ears and gums—the easyto-spot external sign of his jaundiced liver—to turn an angry, unmistakable egg-yolk gold.