‘The cat popped into my life when grief had knocked me off my feet’

The wedding was in a tropical paradise. The island was almost halfway between Australia and Honolulu. The views from the window looked like a stock-photo screensaver. White sand, palm trees and crystalline water the colour of an unadulterated WKD Blue bottle.
It was a scenic place for me to burst into tears after hearing the neighbours’ cat had to be put down. He wasn’t just the neighbours’ cat that wandered into the yard to relieve himself in the garden. He had shoved his way, with insistent miaows and furry little head butts, into the lives of many in the two-street radius around his home.
We first met over FaceTime. Galway had just lost an All-Ireland final and my partner took the very reasonable view that he would never feel happiness again. To the extent that he decided there was no point staying out and trying to get jarred. He went home and lay on the floor to contemplate his decisions in life, namely being from Galway, when a little orange cat crept through the window and joined him on the floorboards. At 8pm I got a video call from a sunburned man in a maroon jersey with a cat that wasn’t ours sitting on his chest.
After that for the next two years the cat popped over nearly every day. Usually at 9am, as if he were clocking in for the work day. Then he would leave at lunch, come back in the afternoon then head off around 5pm. Putting in the day shift.
He started calling in earlier in the day when he realised he could join us in the shower. We had a frosted window over the shower/bathtub that opened out. Thanks to a halfhearted ventilation fan we nearly always kept it open to stop a mould colony forming in the bathroom. So when the cat heard the shower running, he took it as an open invitation to join us in our morning ablutions. I’m not sure what your morning routine looks like but I would suggest adding wrangling a half-wet cat, squiggling with confusion while wiping shampoo out of your eyes to it. Just to feel really alive.
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If the downstairs window was ajar, he would climb into bed with us. Tucking himself up under our ribs. Part of me believed I was like an urban Snow White with all the animals in Dublin 8 drawn to my kind and gentle spirit. The other half knew the cat was just getting cold and was trying to glean any body heat he could from me. Our relationship, one of the happiest of my life, was largely contingent on the fact we have the radiators on all day. But I went into this love affair with my eyes open.
The cat popped into my life when a wave of grief over my baby nephew had knocked me off my feet. I was flipping over in endless black water and unable to get the right way up. The usual order of life was broken. Children could die. Bad things could happen to good, innocent people. Your family could change forever in one Friday night phone call outside Tesco.
But here was a small creature, meowing at the door telling you to get up and let him in. I might not have slept at night but the day was beginning again whether I liked it or not and life didn’t stop when I thought it should have.
He sat on my desk while I wrote columns, was passed lap to lap on New Year’s Eve by delighted revellers when he popped in at 3am and forged community between the neighbourhood.
We got to know his real family, who did not ring the Guards on us for kidnapping but who very graciously acknowledged his penchant for house-swinging in the neighbourhood. I would often catch him in the front window of someone else’s house on the street, looking out from their lounge room window like he’d lived there his entire life. When I wrote about him in a previous column, my editor at the time sent a photo back of his little orange mug captioned “Is this the same cat?” He was a frequent gentlemen caller to her as well.
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I wonder how many other people’s days he brightened by rubbing up against their legs as they walked through the streets. How many seconds of reprieve did he give people whose minds were distracted from stressing about their mortgage or a declining family member’s health by the fluffy belly of a cat presenting itself for pats.
The morning of the wedding I was the picture of sanity crying over the neighbour’s deceased cat back in Ireland in flesh-coloured control pants that stopped at the top of my rib cage. But that’s life, we don’t get to control the things that gift us love or when they have to depart.