Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 81st post, Helena reflects on her life with two cats and what they’ve taught her about love. Enjoy!
The Perseverance of Love -St. Paul
I really shouldn’t have gone that night, to the diner, with my orange cotton Esprit bag carrying my pad and pen, hoping to get myself to write to the prompt, for my writing group, out, alone, a time I’ve discovered I can feel both on vacation and get work done, work I can’t get done at home.
“I really shouldn’t have…” that was the prompt. I hated it. It contradicts my world view, an organic thing I seem to have come into this life with. At the same time, I dislike almost as much dismissing a writing prompt. It feels like an act of petulance, and cowardice. I’d face it on my dinner vacation, waiting to order, then waiting for my order to be set on the table for me to dine. Perhaps I’d stay longer, if the place didn’t fill up. The corner was so quiet.
I really shouldn’t have draped my favorite scarf over my shoulders, defending against the air conditioner on a hot summer’s evening, the scarf still smelling, in spite of three or four washings, and hanging it over my porch rail to be purified by the sun, smelling, albeit faintly, from my cat Oliver’s indiscretion. I hope I am the only one who recognizes the traces of that smell. I can’t part with the scarf.
I really have to forgive Oliver. I love him so very much, though I resent his habit. Oliver is a “marker.” My struggle with love and anger, and I admit, sometimes rage, is ongoing—my beautiful, cherished, sacred space, my cabin in the woods, smelling like Oliver’s healthy elimination of fluids.
I burn incense, keep six litter boxes in the various corners he seems to prefer. But Oliver, I believe, is mischievous at heart, and is perhaps expressing something, I will never understand—maybe a resentment of his own.
I have to live with Oliver’s character defects, as he must live with mine. He is a tuxedo, black with a white map-shaped bib, a triangle on his nose and two white paws. He’s nearly human; he is so accessible, more accessible than most human beings I have met.
I could say I should never have taken that beautiful kitten calling my name home from Agway that day eleven years ago. And his brother, a gloriously beautiful orange and white, who I named Sebastian. Oliver, as I would name him, needed company, for one thing, and for another, the orange called my name, too. I lifted him from his cage. He lay in the palm of my hand and reached his paw toward me, stretching open his tiny orange fingers. What was I to do? Sebastian was a marker, too.
If I say I shouldn’t have taken those brothers home, it would be untrue. Love perseveres, suffers all things, I agree with Saint Paul, with the exception, I would add, of abuse. And while one could say, if inclined that way, that two brothers marking the holy place I live, the rustic cabin I inherited in an old Catskill Mountain valley, is that, an abuse, I’d be neglecting to tell the full truth about the love these brothers brought into my life.
I have always had cats. I had lost the last of my three when I finally went to Agway that day. I want to add here, that in spite of any advertising I have ever, in desperation, believed, there is nothing, nothing I have found that neutralizes that scent. So I live with the whisper of it in my feather comforter, the wood boxes next to the stove, and my dear, thrift shop find of that Pakistani scarf I wore to dinner that night and can wear with anything, winter and summer.
I could say I should never have taken those two home, particularly Sebasian. Sebastian emanated love. Unlike Oliver, he was not jealous, but accepted Oliver’s jealousy, when, for instance, he’d settle down on my lap or on my chest at bedtime and gaze into my face with a love so pure, it woke me from my human insensibility, to the love he emanated, love that covered, pierced me. A thing that felt it came from the creator, so present in that orange cat with his big white patches. Oliver had to have felt it—Sebastian was with me, close and uninterrupted, because wherever Oliver was, in the studio, upstairs, I’d hear his weight hit the floor and he’d hurry to be where we were, approach, holding Sebastian’s eyes with his looking as menacing as Sebastian’s were loving. I could say I particularly should not have had the name Pittman written that day on a tag to hold those brothers for me until the next day, so I’d have a night to sleep with this moment of awe, this monumental decision of increasing my family by two.
Logically, I shouldn’t have, I could say, if I understood life differently. Sebastian, the lover, died suddenly at just past eight years old. He was a big cat, and the vet thought it was a heart attack or a stroke. No warning, and my beloved Sebastian was an empty shell, still so beautiful with his gleaming whites, and his red-orange tail. I had called my son, begged him to hurry when Oliver woke me with desperate meows, and I looked down at Sebastian and saw him collapsing. I begged my son to hurry, so we could get Sebastian to the vet; I couldn’t have carried him alone. Then, into the telephone I said the words: “He died!”
Oliver took flight up to the second floor and looked from that height, through the balustrades at the lifeless body of the brother he had been so jealous of. Oliver was riveted, he looked stunned, horrified.
Then Sebastian’s body lay in the carrier as if it had been a game. He’d get up and stretch again and sit at my feet, looking up at me radiating all that love. But his beautiful orange and white body was still, the supernatural stillness only death brings.
My son arrived and we dug a hole behind the house. We wrapped the body in something I can’t recall now, a blanket, a rug, and lay him in the ground and covered him with the dirt we had dug. We marked his grave with stones.
Then we spent two days in near silence except for necessary talk –and lapses into talk of Sebastian.
I look into life through the things that in a movie house the audience would be saying, Noooo, don’t do it! That audience knows that cats lives are short, and with love comes grief. They know I would have to face that inevitable loss.
And I’d see that love remains and is the gist of life. I would read, again, St. Paul: Love perseveres…
*
Now it’s just Ollie and me. With no one to compete with, Ollie has changed. I’ve never seen again the anger that crossed his face when he sidled up to his brother, competing for my love. Ollie has bloomed. Silent Ollie has become vocal, speaking a language I work to decipher. Sometimes, we are certainly in conversation. His tones are human; mine are cat.
When I miss Sebastian, as I do often, I remember the dream I had the night after he left us. He, Sebastian, revealing himself to me as in a birth, came out of my solar plexus where he apparently now lives, my skin parting but with no pain. He spoke to me—in English.
I watch over you, he said. And beneath Sebastian were the other cats I had so loved in my years.
Paul knew, and we all learn it when we lose someone close to us.
*
This writing comes from a prompt, “I never should have...” I wasn’t going to take part in it. My sense of life is in such disagreement with the words: imagining that things could have gone differently is only a dream.
And if I hadn’t gone to the diner that night, with my orange cotton canvas Esprit bag slung over my shoulder, inside it my pad and pen, hoping to get myself to be braver, take on the challenge, hoping to get words worth reading onto my pages, something to first read to my writing group, then publish here, written, out of the house at that surprisingly elegant diner, eating my meal of fish and the mashed potatoes they do so well, ordering their homemade key lime pie, a dessert I could ill afford that night, I’d be poorer in the way that is about the essence of a life, not the price of a dinner out.
And the prompt? Perhaps there is nothing I ought not to have done that I did, all that experience, all the good it brought finally into my life. The love, wasn’t it worth it? I ask myself. And am, at last, grateful I left the house that night to feel again what it’s all about, all of it, when I look deeply enough.
Do you have, or have you had, pets? Have you ever written about them? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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