The Keeper of Cats

 

                                             A Cat Sketch done by Gus in Anchorage, Alaska.

The Keeper of Cats

There has always been a strange fate between me and cats.
Love and irritation have long walked side by side, as though the feline spirit had been assigned to me as a lifelong mirror — to reflect my own unhealed corners.

I have killed them, fed them, scolded them, and wept for them.
Once, on my birthday, I accidentally reversed my car and crushed a kitten. The sound has never left me.
Another time, I tried to help a dying cat by injecting formaldehyde, thinking I was ending its suffering. Instead, I only extended it. The memory still burns.

I used to be allergic to cats. My body rejected their nearness — sneezing, itching, inflamed — as though every cell carried some old resentment. Yet something inside me said, Face this fear. Heal through love.
So I raised them. And strangely, my body healed. The allergy disappeared, but the deeper wound remained — the wound of impatience, of wanting control over what is wild and free.

                                                        Can cats walk on Water?

My late wife, Nancy, was a cat lover. She would pick up kittens from the streets and bring them home, and before I knew it, our small house was filled with twenty-four of them.

One night, exhausted from painting, I turned off the lights and lay down — only to find my hand resting on a pile of cat poop on my pillow.
In the darkness, I wept. I wasn’t angry; I was broken. I realized then that love without surrender can become a kind of prison — and that to love truly is to let go of the need to control.

Now, at seventy-six, I still lose my temper sometimes. I still raise my voice, still feel irritation rise like a storm when the kittens claw at my peace.
But something has shifted. Each time I falter, I breathe and whisper:

“May all cats forgive me. May I forgive myself.”

                                                              It's a cat's world out there!

 

Perhaps I have been a cat before — proud, curious, untamed, scratching at the truth. Perhaps the cats that cross my path are messengers, reminding me that no act of love or cruelty ever goes unnoticed in the great web of being.

I write this not to justify, but to confess.
May this confession mark the beginning of my healing — and the flowering of an unconditional love for all beings, feline and human alike.
For beneath every act of cruelty is a heart that once loved too much and did not know how to bear it.

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