With Grace

     It’s been over a month now since the Land Full of Stories gathering, a time in which I’ve meditated some on wildness as I’ve grieved the death of The Queen of Everything, my cat companion, Grace Blanket.  That weekend, as my peers walked a little of Texas’s wild ground, shared ideas, and, I imagine, wrote furiously with the natural and communal stimuli all around them, I walked with my friend through her last days here in my community of four (three cats and me) in central Michigan.

     She had leaped out of the darkness into my arms fifteen years ago on Fourth of July weekend.  A friend had dropped by late, and as I leaned against a post in an orb of light on my porch seeing Robyn to her car, I heard a rustle in the shrubs near my feet. Before I could react enough to stand up straight, I felt a slight weight in the crook of my arm.  I looked down into the eyes of a dark, scrawny kitten already intently focused on my face. Every muscle tense, her body spoke of her fears, her need, but those eyes may have already been alerting me to my own.

     What could I do late at night and on a holiday weekend but take her in? I left her to some food and water and an investigation of the utility room as I headed toward fitful sleep with “you already have three cats, you can’t afford another, there’s not enough room” playing over and over in my head.  I acted on that practical mantra, placed the newspaper ad, and fielded the phone calls. After a few queries, a woman said she was interested and would call soon to schedule a visit.  I went back to the utility room to share this news with the tortoiseshell, now glossy and sleek.  I picked her up to a purring that stirred the air.  Out of my mouth came “aren’t you just a bit of grace?”  And then came the tears, sobs really, wracking sobs, unbidden and shocking.  When the woman called a day or so later, I told her that the kitten had been adopted.

     So, yes, there would be four cats, and she would be Grace, Grace Blanket, named after a central character in Linda Hogan’s novel, Mean Spirit. My decision could only answer those sobs, not explain them.  I think now that perhaps I saw something of my own vulnerability in her.  I was undergoing intensive physical therapy on my shoulders and was thus in constant, incapacitating pain. At least twice a day, I’d wrap dozens of ice cubes in towels, line the bed with garbage bags to catch the melt, stack the pillows just so, and sink my shoulders and neck into iced numbness. Once Grace joined us in the house, she began to participate in this ritual.  Tucking her head under my chin and stretching her already long, lanky frame down my body, she purred and slept until I lay in lukewarm water.

     Six months later myalgic encephalopathy (the likely new name for chronic fatigue syndrome) began to unravel my life.  One of its most diabolical symptoms was an unrelenting insomnia. Driven to bed for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, I couldn’t sleep, my mind ceaselessly circling, circling, circling. The exhaustion was so profound that I began to feel as though I was somehow fading out into the universe, disappearing from myself, from my place, from life itself.  So Grace modified her ritual, balancing herself now along my side, her head resting on the very top of my arm, her body stretching out and settling along the curve between my shoulder and hip.  Animal body to animal body, I slept then, the simple weight of her body pressing me back toward Earth and holding me there—for all the years of her life, all the years of my illness. Now sleep comes hard again; I’m left to find new ways to hold myself close to life, to Earth.

     In the last two days before her death, I had run out of things to offer her.  Her heart and kidneys were failing, and her coat of glossy black with its splashes of cinnamon and buff was almost gone.  Only a few guard hairs remained over her shoulders and along her sides.  All of this rendered the content of my words meaningless, pills and ointments pointless, and, of course, she rejected every soft spot I devised. Except for one—my lap.  So I pulled myself out of human time, eased into the recliner, pulled up a throw, and waited.  Soon she would make her slow way to the base of the chair, dare a wobbly leap up, and settle gingerly, painfully into my lap.  I’d wrap the throw around her tense, trembling body, stroke her head, and talk softly of our history.  Often it would take an hour, but eventually she would relax and slide into deep sleep and the tremors would stop.  I would sleep then too within the circle of those final blessings as the hours passed.

     As a kid, I tramped the fields, fencerows, and ditches for miles around our family farm in Michigan’s Thumb. As an adult in Utah, I hiked the Wasatch and Stansbury ranges near my Salt Lake home and fell passionately in love with Utah’s Red Rock country, especially the Escalante River watershed.  I’ve known wildness, then, defining it, when I came to define it at all, as something remarkable and exotic, something “out there” attainable only in rare, dramatic moments.   But here in the quiet of my living room with a domestic cat, I felt my own wild nature at its deepest in the space we created around us.  I had to become still and alert so that I could extend myself toward that which was alive and in need but still, for all our years together and her domestication, a creature distinctly nonhuman. I had to slip fully into my animal body in order to offer my only comfort to her—my body’s warmth and scent, the softness of its belly, the caress of its fingertips, the timbre of its voice. 

     While Grace had called her primary name out of me, her “middle name” had been a literary, intellectual affectation.  I was showing off, trying to be clever by adding “Blanket.” She would have none of my self-consciousness, my feeble aggrandizement: with her intelligence, playful wild heart, attunement, and body, she made her whole name literal, fulfilling every promise it implied. She had come out of the darkness, unbidden.  As I traveled as far as I could with her back into that mystery, that place of ultimate wildness, she called upon me to put down any pretensions I might have had left, to face my fear directly, and thus to learn that I, too, could offer the deep, essential shelter of my animal body.

Comments

[Susan Albert]

Linda, thank you so much for sharing your journey with Grace Blanket, and for making it a part of our own journeys into wildness.--Susan

[Brenda@Coffee Tea Books and Me]

I came to you from a link in a blog I have never read before!

And...here I find a person who can understand.

My beloved feline friend of nearly seventeen years had a stroke last week. We were to have her given her "shot" today but our Vet is sick. We have her with us one more day.

I've been blogging about it. I thought I would be prepared because of her age. Nothing prepares us for the void in our life.

[Laura]

Linda, I was so touched (with "grace") by your words, and love the way you've woven so many issues together in a seamless "blanket")! You explored grief, illness, healing, love for animals and human nature in one short piece. I enjoyed the buildup from the seemingly everyday to profound thoughts on human and animal nature. I look forward to more of your writing.

[Susan J Tweit]

Bless you, Linda, for sharing Grace's story and yours. You've reminded us of what we search for when we look to wildness: inspiration, knowledge of our deepest, best selves, and comfort for the journey, wherever it may take us.

Susan
http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com
susanjtweit.com