And I realize, as I break down for the umpteenth time today, cradling Velouria in my arms and sobbing slowly so as not to lose her, that after sixteen years, this, this is the moment when I finally take the universe off hold. The original impact in the water from my first days at the shelter has been rippling through me all this time, and now that I have removed all the layers of shrinkwrap I’ve spent decades covering myself in, the ripples have finally reached the surface. All of the songs that make up my history suddenly make sense—not in an adolescent teen vampire kind of way but in a way that shows that we are all connected by the permanence of love and loss, the original inhabitants of the soul.
Epilogue
On my first day at HSBV I befriended a Pit Bull named Smiley. We became fast and hard friends. Later that week I had my first experience with euthanasia, cradling, reassuring, and seeing off a Pit Bull who easily could have been Smiley save for the human abuse he had suffered that made him terrified of the shelter. Those two dogs proved to be the genesis, the two opposite sides of the flag I raised and, over the years, unfurled. As my ability to love two dogs expanded, some days against every grain of my will, to rooms of cats, blowing forty-five kisses in the middle of the night, and then wider still, slowly, to every cat and dog alive, and beyond, my ability to love became continentally huge. Today, right now, as I sit here writing, still reeling in the wake of a forced awakening, it actually is all coming to me.
Hopefully, you’re reading this because you’ve made a connection with an animal before. You’ve had your Benny. Or maybe you haven’t yet, but you will. Or you want to. My message, the message from all of us in the animal welfare community, is simple: Take a picture of your Benny, put it in an imaginary locket. Then, with the love you feel for your Benny, hold it in your hands so tightly that you become an alchemist; the love you feel for one becomes the love you feel for all. It is all one. Let the love you feel for your Benny expand until it is love for all Bennys.
The world is full of cats who need homes, wonderful, exhilarating, maddening cats. Let them into your life. If you don’t neuter or spay your animal companion, and they have a litter of twelve kittens, say, you may have shown your children the miracle of birth, and it may be one of the cutest things ever watching those kittens grow, explore, and learn to love the world around them. But know that, on the other end of that string, twelve cats in your neighborhood shelter die the next day. The math is simple and irrefutable.
We can achieve a world where no animals have to die needlessly; today, I truly believe this, to the core of my being. The responsibility we have is toward the alchemy that has nothing to do with our heads. I spent SO many years looking for the unifying theories of behavior—what makes cats tick? Why do cats do this? Why do cats do that? It’s simply just a waste of our collective breath. It saddens me so much when I think of the flawed understanding that protected me from loving that boy too much. Theorizing, explaining away, predicting behavior, empirical data—these are the psuedoscientific mechanisms that kept him at a distance, and kept the lessons at bay until now, some time after the dust from his passing has settled. Learn the story of your cat, but not like I learned the story of Benny; learn the lessons in animal time, assimilating ecstatic love and debilitating pain in the present moment. If you want to love them, learn to love like they do—firmly in the now.
Take the love you feel for one and love all. The process, I’m here to say, is terrifying. Loving the world is not like the trust fall exercise you did in EST, summer camp, or your last corporate retreat; loving the world is far bigger than that, far riskier, and far more impossible. And if you’re like me, you continually ask the universe to come closer, like a stranger you’re trying to pick up at a bar. When you kiss the universe passionately and she says she loves you, however, you run as fast and as far as you can, as if she were the cartoon skunk.
I feel blessed on this day. Ultimately, learning Benny’s story expanded my ability to diagnose the needs of other cats, yes, but more than that it also expanded my ability to love, expanded it to a degree I simply didn’t think was possible, because “think” can’t understand love. In this new world order, there are no whiteboards. There is only exploring empathy and acting with sympathy.
In recovery, we talk about acting as if. If you don’t feel human, if you’re walking around white knuckling, if you can’t surrender, act as if you do, act as if you’re not, act as if you can. Suit up and show up. Someday you will feel comfortable in the beautiful clothes you picked out. I’m writing a letter to you, the cat-loving world, in the suit I picked out for myself. I don’t have letters after my name. I’m not a scientist. I’m not a vet. And they are not me, either. I’m a storyteller, and I have spent most of my life learning how to inhabit the lives of others and how to tell those stories with accuracy and with to-my-bones truth.
I feel the everyday lives of every cat I’ve ever met. Benny was just the first to thumb his nose completely at my efforts, as if to spit at me, incensed at my efforts to pigeonhole him. But I will always be grateful to the universe for putting that cardboard carrier on my path, because the truths he wrote on me can never be erased.
Acknowledgments
First, to my compadres in animal sheltering. In my first days, thirsty for knowledge and challenge, Sunny, Lisa, Bridgette, Laura, Brad, Lizann, Teresa, Sarah, Lesli, Lauren, Jason, and Nana—you provided the foundation of support, laughter, creative argument, education, and challenge to get me through to the next day. I can pay it forward thanks to what you all gifted me. Also to Jan and Dori—sometimes, against your better judgment, you gave me the room to spread my wings, helping to transform a short-term job into a mission and a career. Finally, to the cat and mobile volunteers—Leslie, Peggy, Larry, and so many more—every day with you was a gift in compassion and education.
To my family, who, as beleaguered as I’m sure they were at my consistently off-kilter choice of career path (so much for having something to fall back on!), never wavered in their support of and pride in me as an individual. Thank you for loving me, even when I was unlovable, destructive, and numb.
To Jill, for reminding me of my purpose, even when the big picture threatened to sweep me away. You kept my head attached to my body, my body to my feet, and my feet to the ground. No matter what and no matter when, you will be my family.
To Joy, my literary champion. Your belief in my words is why Benny will live on.
To Joel, for providing the beautiful skeleton and supporting me selflessly and confidently as I learned to build skin.
To the wonderful shepherds of Tarcher/Penguin, Sara Carder and Brianna Yamashita, for allowing me to go away and write, and supporting to the nth degree what I came back with. And thank you, Saryta Rodriguez, for being the messenger when I missed every deadline in sight.
To Ken, thank you for keeping me alive when that was the absolute last thing I thought I wanted.
To Jean, you told me so!
To Todd and Kate, for staying in the crazy and believing in the sound as long as you did.
To the caring tenders of this garden—Siena Lee-Tajiri, Toast Tajiri, Heather Curtis, Adam Greener, J. D. Roth, Brian Rochlin, Susan Von Seggern, David Wollock, Rob Cohen, Mike and Tami Bloom, Lindsay Wineberg, Mark Degenkolb, and Melinda Toporoff. Thank you for taking the chance and giving this work room to be created.
To the ones who talked me through the jungle—Diane Israel, Stephanie Rasband, Amy Kisch, Craig Chesler, Diana Dawson, Bobby Colomby, Kate Benjamin, Peter Wolf, Minoo Rahbar, Adam Kaloustian, Sarah Pettit, and Steve Maresca. The bravery it takes to write does not come alone.
To every dopeless hope fiend the world over. The promises are real.
Love, Light & Cat Mojo—
Jackson Galaxy
ith friends
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