On Cats and Other Catastrophes

... and the things that chip away at our collective innocence.

When I met my now-husband in 1997, I had just moved from New York City to Santa Monica with my four cats. The first time Joe came to my apartment, he met the brood.

“Oh… you have… cats,” I believe he stammered.

“I sure do!” I’m sure I chirped.

“How many of them are there?” he asked, looking around nervously.

“Just the four,” I assured him.

“Oh,” he nodded. “How old are they?”

“They’re all around eight,” I explained.

“And… how long do cats typically live?”

You guys, he asked me that. And I still proceeded to date, marry, and give the man children. He also eventually buried every one of my our precious fur babies—after they died, I should add—and I’m pretty sure he had a tear in his eye as we laid each sweet soul to rest. (He’s become a full-fledged Cat Guy in the ensuing decades, which is why I still put up with him. That and because he still puts up with me.)

The Cat Guy with Harvey Specter, our current obsession.

We lost three of the four before our daughters were old enough to understand death, so by the time the girls were in preschool, we were down to just Max. Max was getting older, and I felt like I should start to prepare them for the inevitable. I sat them down and explained that one day, Max would go to sleep and he wouldn’t wake up please Jesus peacefully at home and not in my arms at the vet’s office because his soul had gone to heaven—and heaven was amazing and he was going to be so happy there and my Dad was up there waiting and already so excited to meet him oh God I’m doing this wrong, please don’t go out and tell people you can’t wait to die and sure heaven is fabulous but it’s for old cats—and old people *cough-cough* but, you know, nobody they knew and not for a really long time—and anyway we would never, ever be able to replace Max but one day we would probably have to get another cat because we’d have all of that love inside of us that would need to go somewhere.

The girls nodded solemnly and we hugged and I felt like I’d earned a solid C+ grade on that hideous task.

That night at dinner, 4-year-old Sophie turned to Joe. “Dad, did you know Max is going to die someday?” she asked somberly.

Joe gave me a panicked look but I nodded confidently; it’s okay, dear. I got this. I mothered this one. Mediocrely, but still.

“Yes, honey, I know,” Joe replied, trying to match her melancholy tone.

“And then we get to get KITTENS!” she squealed, clapping her hands with delight and unable to contain her excitement (which was seriously rude because Max was right there in the room).

We laugh about that one a lot.

When Max trotted over the rainbow bridge, we did get kittens; a pair of twin Tuxedo siblings we named Charlotte and Delilah. They were the two cutest balls of fluff you’ve ever seen in your life, and they somehow knew from the day they adopted us who belonged to which girl. They were glued to their humans when the girls were home and glued to each other when they weren’t.

I hate this part of the story so much I’m actually cursing myself for starting it in the first place, but one morning as I was getting the girls ready for preschool, our neighbor called. “Can you come outside?” she asked. Weird, I thought, but I went.

She was standing at the end of our driveway and as I walked toward her, she held up her hand in a STOP motion and shook her head back and forth. She saw my confusion.

“It’s Delilah,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

My body froze. “Wait, no, what—” I started. Joe had come outside and was walking toward her and I already knew I didn’t want to see whatever was out there so I went back inside. I was broken and in shock but I held it together and got the girls to school, pretending it was just another normal morning and not the day that would teach my daughter one of life’s cruelest lessons and shatter her heart into pieces.

Important aside: Please don’t lecture me in the comments about the dangers of letting cats outside. At the time we lived in a 100-year-old farmhouse with no window or door screens or air conditioning at the end of a cul-de-sac in a town where the weather was idyllic year-round. It was humanly impossible to keep the cats inside during the day, although we always brought them in at night (which often caused arguments between me and Joe; “what do you mean I can’t open my own !&%?! window? I need fresh air!”). On the other hand, if your reaction is “Jeez, lady, it’s just a cat,” you can kindly let yourself out. Our pets are family and this is about the death of innocence as much as it is about losing a beloved companion.

That day was brutal. I sobbed in bed while Joe buried Delilah in our growing pet cemetery. What was I going to say? Why did I have to say it? Why was life so fucking unfair, I shouted out loud to nobody. Why? Delilah was just a baby. Sasha was just a baby. Charlotte roamed the house howling, looking for her sister, each wail carving a fresh fissure in my already broken heart.

I did my best to pull myself together before I picked Sasha up early from preschool, but my face was swollen and my eyes were slits. My sweet, stoic, sensitive girl hugged me immediately.

“What happened, Mama?”

So I told her. I said I was so, so very sorry and that it wasn’t fair and that we would love Delilah forever and that whenever she was ready, she could have any kitten in the whole world that she wanted, and that Delilah would want that for her.

Sasha didn’t ask what happened. She didn’t sob and kick and scream about injustice. There were no stages of grief. As tears slid silently down her face, she looked at me in what I can only describe as defeat.

“But she wasn’t even old.”

You see, honey, I lied to you. I had to. It’s not just old cats and old people who die and it isn’t always jubilant. In fact, it’s almost always gruesome—even when there’s some relief—and yes, it can happen to babies and kittens and even mamas and dadas. And I was going to tell you that someday, I promise I was, but I thought I had more time. I didn’t think you were ready and I definitely wasn’t ready and I wish it wasn’t the way things worked and if I was in charge of the universe, it wouldn’t be. I’m sorry, baby. I’m just so sorry.

Charlotte and Delilah, the OGs.

[*excuses self to have a good, solid cry*]

I was reminded of this end-of-innocence moment last night at dinner. At the blessed present, both girls are still home on holiday break and as we ate and chatted, the subject of the Pacific Palisades fire came up. (Keep in mind my girls were born and raised in Santa Barbara, where wildfires were part of everyday life and evacuation was an annual event at the very least.)

“How did it even start?” Sasha wanted to know. Sasha is nineteen and has lived in New York and Milan on her own and she’s about to take off for Seoul, Korea, also solo. She’s a full-fledged adult. She also still sleeps with stuffed animals and texts me menu pictures from seven time zones away and asks what I think she should order. She doesn’t watch or like the news. I would never call her naïve or innocent, but she’s the sort who would offer to carry the weight of the world even if she was on crutches. (My broken-record lecture to her is you can’t set yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm.) She feels things deeply, forgives easily, and gives everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. Her older sister Sophie is my conspiracy-theory buddy; the one who’ll send me Alex Jones and Candace Owens clips and is obsessed with all things political. She loves debating (she might get that from me) and hunting (she definitely does not get that from me) and can talk about death theoretically and unemotionally. Sasha writes poetry and rescues dragonflies from the pool skimmer and just wants everyone to get along and be happy. When she was three, I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up; she thought about it for a minute and then replied confidently, “a butterfly.” I bet her answer hasn’t changed.

“We don’t really know,” Joe answered before I could. “Probably a campfire or lightning strike. You guys know how dry the forests are.”

“Actually, it’s not the forest land that’s burning,” I said, my need for the girls to understand what was going on quickly pulling rank on my maternal urge to shield them from the world’s evils. “It’s the downtown, prime commercial and residential real estate. It’s intentional, just like Maui was.”

“We don’t know that,” Joe replied, seeing me abandoning my usual protective role and perhaps feeling as if someone had to play that part.

“I think we do,” I insisted. I detailed the similarities; the sudden, swift nature of the events. The inexplicable, selective burning (i.e. the rings of untouched, still green-leaved trees and foliage surrounding piles of ashes where million-dollar homes once stood). The hydrants and reservoirs—you know, those things that exist for expressly this purpose—running out of water. The fact that both places were on track to become “smart cities” in the next few years. Biden’s utter disregard for both disasters while continuing to funnel millions of dollars out of the country. The multiple, simultaneous blazes (with a recent test run on the books, no less, and amid unprecedented high winds) that conveniently diverted and diluted resources. The massive recent fire department cuts and cancelled insurance policies that would ensure rebuilding wasn’t an option. I hated what I knew my words were doing to Sasha in particular, but she needed to know the ugly truth.

Parenting is not for sissies.

“They’ll blame climate change so they can enforce their travel restrictions and carbon taxes and essentially control everything we do and how we live,” I predicted. “And then they’ll blame Trump for handling it poorly even though it didn’t happen on his watch and despite the fact that he all but predicted precisely this. They’ll make it miserable—or impossible—for people to rebuild so they can keep that prime oceanfront real estate for themselves. And then they’ll do it somewhere else and then again somewhere else, until enough people wake up and start holding the guilty parties accountable.”

Silence.

“Do we have any ice cream?”

The discussion was over. I didn’t even get to the part about how the city had begun laying the groundwork for just such a disaster when they terminated skilled, dedicated firefighters for refusing the Covid jab. We didn’t cover the similarities to the North Carolina land grab after Hurricane Helene, or the theories about the fires being purposely set to expose (or destroy, depending on who you ask) the child trafficking tunnels under the Getty and Playboy Mansion and much of Los Angeles, or the speculation that they may have been employed to erase any evidence of depravity in some of the torched celebrity (many suspected pedophiles) homes. I hadn’t mentioned the fact that LA’s MIA mayor Karen Bass is reported to be a card-carrying Marxist and vocal fan of deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

I didn’t have to. Enough innocence had been lost for one day. Seeds of insight and of discovery had been planted. Like countless parenting tasks and responsibilities, it didn’t feel great or even good—but it was necessary, important work.

I don’t have a prompt for today’s post, only a prayer: for the safety of the victims and first responders, for the continued triumph of the human spirit despite the agony that comes with awakening, and for justice to be served—ultimately, finally, and (if it’s not too much trouble) swiftly.