Opinion: What the small souls of cats can teach us about being human. An elegy.

His name was Geebers and he was like other cats, at turns greedy or loving, but mostly aloof, and with great lime-colored lantern eyes that hid a secret. He was striped gray, of 12 pounds at his best weight, and the markings on his face gave him a perpetual scowl. The expression was fitting because Geebers approved of precious few things, and chief among those was sunshine and wet food and my wife, Kim.

For a long time he disapproved of me.

And I of him.

He came to us in 2015, carried to our backyard in the mouth of his gray cat mother, who also deposited his white-furred sister along with him. Why the mother picked our house is a mystery, but it probably had to do with Kim being a soft touch.

Cats know these things.

Kim recognized the mother on sight, a cat that may have once belonged to some family but now belonged only to the alley. The mother had Geebers with her near our back door the first time she saw them. Then two days later she spotted both kittens alone in the backyard, near the shed. The story of the kittens’ arrival became part of the lore of life on Constitution Street.

Our house sits on one of those narrow, 50-by-150-foot lots common to small Kansas towns of a century past. The backyard is bounded by a wooden privacy fence installed in recent decades, and the wooden shed that houses the mower and other lawn tools is in one corner. This area is where the kittens lived that first summer, peering warily through the grass and weeds at the back door and deck, and ducking behind or into the shed whenever Kim approached.

Kim could no more ignore stray kittens in the backyard than she could have ignored an ivory-billed woodpecker. She took blurry photos of them, because they wouldn’t let her get too close, and she talked to them in one of her high-pitched animal voices. She has a different voice for each kind of animal. All of the voices are cheerful and some are goofy, especially when she’s addressing dogs. But her cat voice is the voice of recognition, of one traveler upon the earth greeting another in kindness. The kittens ate the dry food she left, but always at a distance, and Kim despaired that they would never let her hold them.

What were we to do with the kittens?

I was not thrilled at the prospect of having cats to take care of. They would have to be outside cats, because I am allergic to cats, and we’d already had one outside cat before. The neighbors had left that cat behind when they moved and Kim took care of her by default. That had been 15 years ago, when we were first married, and that is another story about a fine cat but one that did not rate an elegy by me.

Geebers, however, was another matter.

Over the course of the summer the kittens came, Kim began feeding them plastic spoonfuls of turkey baby food she left for them on a dish. She left the spoon so they would get used to it. Then she held the spoon at arm’s length as they cautiously licked it clean. She moved ever closer to the back deck with each feeding, and the kittens followed, daring to leave the safety of the grass and weeds and the oily-smelling shed behind.

The white cat, Foxy (sometimes called The Foxy One or simply Fox) was always the smarter or at least more practical of the two, hanging back while her brother ventured ahead. Geebers (short for the Gray Baby in that silly way people have of naming cats) would never get too far from her, always glancing back to make sure she was there.

But gradually even Foxy began to trust.

In time Kim lured them up onto the back deck, where they took their breakfasts and dinners of dry cat food and lazed in the sunshine and sometimes played the hunting game with butterflies they never killed.

As to me, the cats had a strict rule that I was to come no closer than I could reach. That suited me just fine. Cats make my eyes water and my nose run, even when I’m only a few minutes in the same space. There are few things that are as much trouble in a small package as a cat and there were two of them, but I tolerated them because I loved Kim.

The domain of the cats expanded as they grew, encompassing the sides of the house and the driveway and eventually the front porch with its railing and wooden steps. As a grown cat, Foxy would sometimes stalk and kill the occasional bird, a necessary part of feline competence. But I never saw Geebers pounce on anything besides a tennis ball or a giant toy carrot. Both became used to the routine on Constitution Street, of rising early with Kim for breakfast at the back door, of waiting for her to return from her morning walks, of watching as I walked up the front steps from work. He and his sister had a little house and a heated pad on the deck and spent the nights inside on the back porch during the worst of winter.

Being a responsible cat owner, Kim took them both to the vet when it was time. There would be no additional litters on Constitution Street. We would occasionally spot a cat that resembled Geebers in the neighborhood, and it would make us ponder what had happened to their mother.

In time another cat came to stay, a calico tabby kitten Kim rescued from a hackberry tree in the backyard in which she was crying. She was little trouble and craved the affection of the other cats, even though Foxy couldn’t stand her. The new cat became Newt (a contraction of New Cat) and at some point we agreed, or perhaps I made a pronouncement, that three cats was enough.

And that was how it was for a long time.

Upon returning home we would pull into the driveway at night and the cats would be there, waiting for us, their eyes shining in the headlights of the Jeep. When we were away for more than a day we would have a friend of mine pick up the mail and feed and water the cats. After the longer trips the cats would punish Kim, deigning to eat but then turning their backs, at least until the next morning came and all was forgiven.

As the years passed Geebers relaxed the arm’s length rule, overcome not by trust so much as curiosity. Whenever I was working on something outside, such as fixing the lawn mower or repairing the steps, he would come closer to get a better view of what I was doing. All sawing and hammering and painting was endlessly fascinating to him.

Then, on June 28 of last year, he allowed me to touch him.

Kim noted the date.

It was just a pat on the head at first, or a touch beneath the chin. I would have to wash my hands immediately after, or else my hand would start itching. But it wasn’t long before this became a ritual, that whenever I came up the wooden steps he would rouse from whatever spot he’d been lazing in, amble over, and receive a few pets. Even if I had my hands full, I would have to put my bundle down and scratch his ears and rake my fingers under his chin. If he didn’t get enough pets, he’d reach out with a paw to try to stop me from walking away, or he would spring up and serpentine around my ankles.

It was both annoying and oddly satisfying.

During the hardest days of the past year, when I was worried about the nation and the world, the ritual became a comfort. Things were always a little better with Geebers waiting on the porch because of what it symbolized. Our life on Constitution Street remained, despite trials. As long as the cats were there, so was Kim.

In a column in November of last year, I wrote about how on a sunny afternoon the cats lounged on the porch while I pondered where we were headed as a country. In the piece, I declared that I wasn’t a cat person.

I still am not.

But I did become a Geebers person.

There was a lot of handwashing.

Geebers also came to like the mail carrier, who would pause on the porch and give him a pet. It was unusual behavior. I thought at the time that Geebers must have been confused, that perhaps he had come to regard all men as me. Or perhaps it was something else. In August of this year, Geebers developed a bloody spot on his right cheek. We assumed it was from a scrap with another animal and Kim took him to the vet, who gave him a shot of antibiotic.

But instead of improving, the wound worsened. It seeped blood.

By early September it was back to the vet, who said he feared it was cancer. A biopsy confirmed feline lymphoma. It is the most frequently diagnosed of all types of feline cancer. Chemotherapy treatment would have been expensive and, because the disease involved his head, was unlikely to prolong much of anything except his suffering.

Geebers spent the next three weeks keeping to his routine while the disease steadily ate him alive.

He stayed mostly at his spot at the top of the front steps, waiting for pets from me or a word from the mail carrier, and while his face looked like hell he continued to eat well. But he wouldn’t allow anyone to touch his head, although he still enjoyed a few pets beneath his chin.

Kim made a final appointment with the vet. She was determined to spare him the suffering of the inevitable surrender to cancer.

She spooned his last meal out of a baby food jar. Turkey.

At the vet’s, Kim picked him up out of his carrier and followed the business-like but sympathetic staff back to an exam room, where she placed him on the table. Then the vet administered a lethal sedative, probably sodium pentobarbital, and placed a bandage over the spot. The bandage was for us.

Kim’s hand was on his flank. We said goodbye. In a few minutes those bright eyes went dull, and Geebers the cat was dead.

Kim wept.

“I’ve never seen anything die before,” she said.

She had not witnessed a person, or an animal, die. It was something she had been spared, something I had not known about her in 15 years of marriage. I felt suddenly odd and somehow callous, having assumed that everyone was as familiar with death as I was. I had been present at the deaths of both of my parents. As a journalist, I had been at various crime and accident scenes not long after the passing of many strangers. And I had seen many animals die, some by my own hand while hunting in decades past.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I told Kim how lucky Geebers and his sister had been that she had lured them out of the weeds. But I was thinking what everyone thinks, the rotten truth that one day each of us will be taken, in ways peaceful or not.

But I knew the secret behind those lantern eyes.

It was love.

If there is any grace in this world, either animal or human, it is to be found reflected in the eyes of those who love us. It is a small epiphany sparked by a small soul, but a real one, and watching Geebers die was an indictment of all the days I’ve wasted in forgetting something I already knew.

There is a trap in becoming desensitized to death, of becoming too comfortable with the idea, of reducing all things to an anecdote. Perhaps it was the pain of watching as my parents died early so long ago, in different but equally horrific hospital rooms, of the delayed shock journalists suffer witnessing the fatal results of war, wickedness or just bad luck.

I have held death at such a reserve that I cannot give a coherent timeline of events leading up to the deaths of my parents, my brother, of close friends. I would have to rely on notes and letters and death certificates. Even with Geebers, Kim had to correct my dates, because in my memory the cancer lasted longer and Geebers had been letting me pet him for three years, and not one.

If there is a lesson in this, an elegy for a cat, perhaps it’s among the most ancient of ones, a lesson reserved for human beings but spared lesser creatures who know nothing of their own mortality. It is a sin to waste — or fail to mark — a single day.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.