Гвен Купер - Homer - The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

It was, in its way, one of the most beautiful moments of my life. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t even cry.

WHEN VASHTI DIED, we scattered her ashes at Fort Tryon Park, far, far uptown in Washington Heights. It was a beautiful, hilly park with acres of wide lawns and lush flowerbeds, and it commanded stunning views of the Hudson River and the Palisades beyond. Vashti had always loved water, and I had wanted to give her a whole river of it, a place from which she could watch the water sparkle and dance before it was carried out to sea. Scarlett had never shared Vashti’s love of water and grass, but we had brought her ashes there too, so that she could be with Vashti.

And so, a week later, when we received Homer’s ashes, we carried them all the way up to Fort Tryon Park, to the same lawn beneath the same oak tree where we’d released Scarlett and Vashti. My original three—Homer and his first, fastest friends—would be together again. The views were as sun-dappled and peaceful as I remembered. I hoped, I wanted to believe, that Homer at last was able to see them, to see all the beautiful things in this world that he never had, even though he’d seemed to be born knowing them already.

There was hardly anybody else at the park that day, and Laurence and I were alone in our little spot. I kissed the wooden box holding Homer’s ashes before I opened it. As if awaiting its cue, a breeze blew up and carried them away from us, into the sunlight and out toward the river.

I wish I could say that I had a stirring eulogy for the occasion, something as heroic and fine as Homer himself had been. Something befitting the send-off of a cat who had touched so many lives, who had become the symbol of something so much bigger than himself, but who had never stopped being my own, my much-loved, dear little guy.

But I had expended so many words on Homer already—tens of thousands of them. My words were all used up. I could only think of someone else’s. A scrap of an E.E. Cummings poem I’d first read back in my college creative-writing days, when I couldn’t possibly have foreseen the little black cat who would find me someday and become the author of all my good fortune.

“I carry your heart with me,” I said to the air and the ashes and the water flowing below us. “I carry it in my heart.”

The breeze waned, and Homer’s ashes, which had risen high above our heads, began to fall into the waiting grass. Laurence and I took each other’s hands, and then we turned to go.

The End of the Beginning

Do not go about with your cheeks all covered with tears;

it is not right that you should grieve so incessantly.

-HOMER, The Odyssey

I WAITED NEARLY A WEEK BEFORE I LET HOMER’S online community know about his passing, needing time to mourn privately before I could do so publicly. I had known that the response would be overwhelming, although I didn’t know then how overwhelming it would be. The news about Homer grew and spread and then grew more, changing our lives and Homer’s legacy in ways we could never have imagined.

But before I write about any of that, the time has come, as promised, to write about Clayton and Fanny—how we adopted them, what they brought to our family, and what they came to mean to us. The last chapter of Homer’s story is very much their story, too.

WHEN I SET out to find a kitten to adopt as a companion for Homer, it was the first time I’d adopted a cat with a specific list of “qualifications” in mind. Actually, it was the first time I’d deliberately set out to adopt a cat at all. Homer, Vashti, and Scarlett had all come into my life through a fortuitous combination of luck and circumstances and—while not generally a superstitious person—I’d believed in the karmic destiny of that, the sense that the cats I had been meant to love had found me, rather than vice versa. This was true even of the two older cats we’d tried out previously with Homer. And while things hadn’t worked out permanently with our fosters, at least I’d been able to save them from certain death and help them find loving forever homes. Maybe that also was fate at work.

Now, however, we were looking for a kitten—not just waiting for one, but looking , because what Homer desperately needed after losing Scarlett was someone aside from Laurence and me to keep him company. The kitten ideally would still be very young—no older than two or three months, say—so that he or she would accept Homer’s unusual face and particular ways without knowing that “normal” adult cats looked or acted any differently. I felt that we were uniquely suited to give a home to a kitten who had special needs. And, I soon realized, if we were going to adopt one young kitten, we should probably adopt two. Kittens were high energy, and a kitten with no one to play with besides Homer might drive him to distraction.

I entered my search parameters on Petfinder.com, and after a few clicks found myself looking at a picture of two kittens named Peeta and Katniss. They were a bonded pair of litter-mates with a foster network called Forever Friends—located deep in South Jersey, only an hour-and-a-half away by train—who hoped to adopt the two of them out together. Both kittens were entirely black, although Katniss had a little locket of white fur just above her breastbone. Peeta had a deformed hind leg, more of a half-leg, really, which would likely have to come off at some point when he was older than the ten weeks he currently was. It didn’t reach more than halfway to the ground and was of no use in propelling him forward when he walked, but he nonetheless uselessly spun and spun the half-leg as he moved, wasting energy and risking injury.

I knew as soon as I saw them that these were our kittens. The sun hadn’t even come up yet when I filled out the online application, and I waited in a keyed-up state of anticipation for the hours to roll by until it was late enough for a (ahem) sane person to begin their workday and review the form I’d submitted. I received a call from Forever Friends before noon, and we talked for a while about Peeta and Katniss, their personalities, Peeta’s special needs. I gave them a list of references, and a week later I stood on the platform of New Jersey Transit’s Trenton station, waiting to meet the volunteer from Forever Friends who would deliver our newest family members.

Laurence and I had enjoyed the Hunger Games movies well enough, but ultimately wanted to name the kittens ourselves. Laurence chose Clayton for the boy, after the famous one-legged tap dancer Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates. I chose Fanny for the girl, simply because I thought it was a sweet, old-fashioned name, and in her pictures Katniss looked like a very sweet little girl.

WHEN FANNY AND Clayton came to us, it had been fifteen years since I’d lived with a kitten—and I’d never lived with litter-mates at all. I was charmed to see what a matched set they were, how they groomed each other lovingly and slept curled up in each other’s bodies. Their faces had enough subtle differences to be distinguishable, yet the family resemblance was obvious. They had identical large, golden eyes, and a habit of sitting next to each other with their heads tilted at identical angles, regarding Laurence and me with identical wide-eyed, solemn gazes. It was adorable, yet at times could take on an almost eerie, Children of the Corn quality.