Sunday, February 9, 2020

Finding Max in Fluffy

Life is full of surprises; pleasant surprises that happen outside the boundaries of our imagination.

Fluffy came home as a kitten - less than a year old. She grew up for the past 3 years observing Max's mannerisms, habits, happiness, annoyances, pain, suffering and other things which as a human I cannot observe nor comprehend.

Don't get me wrong, Fluffy is a quintessential "free-thinking" cat that people have written about for centuries. But now without Max and in the company of two newbies Graph and Neo, she still follows Max's routine and subtle nuances of his mannerisms.

As a kitten, she used to get angry and annoyed watching Max get to go out with me and not her. But slowly, we made an unspoken deal that she can stay within the patio if she promises not to jump outside. She has kept her promise to date - I can trust her to stay in the patio even if I go inside. This unspoken trust is also, I think she learned from Max.

She wants me to hold and kiss her before each meal, she comes to the door when I get home, she follows me while I change to get her treats, she knows its time to go out (to the patio) when I put a cigarette between my ear gap, playing hide n seek, following me to the bed and I think, the onus is on me to observe more as time goes by. It goes without saying, all these mannerisms

Weirdly, during his final weeks, Max refused to eat and had to hand feed him. Since he wasn't mobile much, he would happily eat his meal while I told him stories of Fluffy's naughtiness. Looking back now, I think, there was an invisible bond between them which I cannot comprehend.

It's a beautiful miracle, in reality, unfolding in front of my eyes, a little cat version of Max now filling his big shoes every day.

Who would have thought a small cat would have so much similarity with Max when there is Neo, who not only is the same species as Max but also the same breed.

In Mexican tradition, they believe that everyone dies three deaths.
  • The first death is when our bodies cease to function; when our hearts no longer beat of their own accord, when our gaze no longer has depth or weight, when space we occupy slowly loses its meaning. - I was there with Max when it happened and there was nothing I could to stop it.
  • The second death comes when the body is lowered into the ground, returned to mother earth, out of sight. - After kissing his nose, toes and all over for one last time, I left his body with the caretaker of the cremation center. I hugged him and asked him to take care of him well. That was the last time I ever saw him. 
  • The third death, the most definitive death, is when there is no one left alive to remember us. - The biggest part of his final death will come not when I die but when Fluffy will be gone. I say this because nature has given her a better range of senses and emotions to observe Max better in 3 years than I did in 13 plus years. I cannot prove it but I think it is true. Nature has cursed us to make up shit when none exists while other animals are blessed to see things as they are. 
My emotions and rationale of seeing Max in Fluffy end here. Not for once, I planned to see Fluffy as a surrogate for Max nor I want to do that in the future. It just happened to be a pleasant surprise.

Fluffy is unique and she is just Fluffy the cat as she is. I am still learning so much from her as I did with Max. It is so easy to learn from dogs since we co-evolved for thousands of years but cats open up a new spectrum of frequencies and dimensions which we never knew existed. 

In her brilliant book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Backwell captured the essence of what made Montaigne - Montaigne.
"Perhaps some of the credit for Montaigne's last answer should therefore go to his cat - a specific sixteenth century individual, who had a rather pleasant life on a country estate with a doting master and not to much competition for his attention. She was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what what is was to be alive. They looked at each other, and just for moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes. Out of that moment - and countless others like it - came his whole philosophy."
I am so grateful and blessed to relate and comprehend what that means. When I look in Fluffy's eyes, I do get a constant reminder of what is to be alive. I want to leap across the gap, not for just a moment but repeatedly as long as I live. In each leap, I see something new and learn something new. And that keeps me going in this life without Max.




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