Homer: The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

The End of the Beginning

Do not go about with your cheeks all covered with tears;

it is not right that you should grieve so incessantly.

-HOMER, The Odyssey

I WAITED NEARLY A WEEK BEFORE I LET HOMER’S online community know about his passing, needing time to mourn privately before I could do so publicly. I had known that the response would be overwhelming, although I didn’t know then how overwhelming it would be. The news about Homer grew and spread and then grew more, changing our lives and Homer’s legacy in ways we could never have imagined.

But before I write about any of that, the time has come, as promised, to write about Clayton and Fanny—how we adopted them, what they brought to our family, and what they came to mean to us. The last chapter of Homer’s story is very much their story, too.

WHEN I SET out to find a kitten to adopt as a companion for Homer, it was the first time I’d adopted a cat with a specific list of “qualifications” in mind. Actually, it was the first time I’d deliberately set out to adopt a cat at all. Homer, Vashti, and Scarlett had all come into my life through a fortuitous combination of luck and circumstances and—while not generally a superstitious person—I’d believed in the karmic destiny of that, the sense that the cats I had been meant to love had found me, rather than vice versa. This was true even of the two older cats we’d tried out previously with Homer. And while things hadn’t worked out permanently with our fosters, at least I’d been able to save them from certain death and help them find loving forever homes. Maybe that also was fate at work.

Now, however, we were looking for a kitten—not just waiting for one, but looking, because what Homer desperately needed after losing Scarlett was someone aside from Laurence and me to keep him company. The kitten ideally would still be very young—no older than two or three months, say—so that he or she would accept Homer’s unusual face and particular ways without knowing that “normal” adult cats looked or acted any differently. I felt that we were uniquely suited to give a home to a kitten who had special needs. And, I soon realized, if we were going to adopt one young kitten, we should probably adopt two. Kittens were high energy, and a kitten with no one to play with besides Homer might drive him to distraction.

I entered my search parameters on Petfinder.com, and after a few clicks found myself looking at a picture of two kittens named Peeta and Katniss. They were a bonded pair of litter-mates with a foster network called Forever Friends—located deep in South Jersey, only an hour-and-a-half away by train—who hoped to adopt the two of them out together. Both kittens were entirely black, although Katniss had a little locket of white fur just above her breastbone. Peeta had a deformed hind leg, more of a half-leg, really, which would likely have to come off at some point when he was older than the ten weeks he currently was. It didn’t reach more than halfway to the ground and was of no use in propelling him forward when he walked, but he nonetheless uselessly spun and spun the half-leg as he moved, wasting energy and risking injury.

I knew as soon as I saw them that these were our kittens. The sun hadn’t even come up yet when I filled out the online application, and I waited in a keyed-up state of anticipation for the hours to roll by until it was late enough for a (ahem) sane person to begin their workday and review the form I’d submitted. I received a call from Forever Friends before noon, and we talked for a while about Peeta and Katniss, their personalities, Peeta’s special needs. I gave them a list of references, and a week later I stood on the platform of New Jersey Transit’s Trenton station, waiting to meet the volunteer from Forever Friends who would deliver our newest family members.

Laurence and I had enjoyed the Hunger Games movies well enough, but ultimately wanted to name the kittens ourselves. Laurence chose Clayton for the boy, after the famous one-legged tap dancer Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates. I chose Fanny for the girl, simply because I thought it was a sweet, old-fashioned name, and in her pictures Katniss looked like a very sweet little girl.

WHEN FANNY AND Clayton came to us, it had been fifteen years since I’d lived with a kitten—and I’d never lived with litter-mates at all. I was charmed to see what a matched set they were, how they groomed each other lovingly and slept curled up in each other’s bodies. Their faces had enough subtle differences to be distinguishable, yet the family resemblance was obvious. They had identical large, golden eyes, and a habit of sitting next to each other with their heads tilted at identical angles, regarding Laurence and me with identical wide-eyed, solemn gazes. It was adorable, yet at times could take on an almost eerie, Children of the Corn quality.

The most enduring early image I have of the two of them comes from the evening of their fourth day with us. We’d set them up in our guest bedroom at first, wanting to give them a chance to acclimate, to feel safe in their new space and to get used to things smelling like Homer, while also giving Homer a chance to get used to things—like the t-shirts I let them sleep on and then wore around the house—smelling like them.

On the fourth day, I opened the door to the guest room and let them out into the rest of the apartment for the first time. Clayton, as if shot from a cannon, immediately took off in a quick bunny-hop on his three good legs, down the long hallway and into the living room. Fanny, however, stood anxiously in the doorway to the guest room, crying for her brother to come back. Every few minutes, Clayton would hop back down the hall to where Fanny stood, touching his nose to hers in a reassuring way. Come on! There’s lots of cool stuff to explore out here! But he was too eager to see his new home to remain with her for long, and soon enough he’d scamper away again.

Much of what we came to learn about their personalities was reflected in those few minutes. Fanny was a fawn-like creature—timid at first, easily spooked, but essentially composed of such pure sweetness and affection that it was like having Vashti with us again. It should be noted, however, that in terms of appearance, Fanny was Vashti’s exact inverse. Where Vashti had been a puffy white fluff-ball, Fanny’s black, short-haired body grew long and slender as it took on the contours of adulthood. But she was, in her precisely opposite way, every inch the beauty Vashti had been. I liked to say that Fanny’s face looked as if it had been drawn by Disney Princess animators, perfectly heart-shaped with high cheekbones, a slightly pointed chin, and tip-tilted almond eyes. “You’re so pretty,” Laurence would croon to her when he thought I couldn’t hear. “You’re a pretty, pretty girl.” And, like Vashti before her, Fanny would lean her head into Laurence’s hand and gaze up at him adoringly. Perhaps because Fanny was so Vashti-like in so many of her ways, she and Laurence seemed to understand each other right from the start.

Fanny seemed to understand Homer immediately, too. She was intensely interested in him once she’d made it out of the guest room, but she always approached him gently and respectfully. She would wait until he’d finished cautiously sniffing her and seemed comfortable before attempting to touch her own nose softly to his. If Homer batted a crumpled ball of paper around the living room floor, she would bat it back to him but not otherwise try to intrude on his game until he’d come over and explicitly invited her to play. If Homer curled up on the couch, Fanny would also lie on the couch close enough to make Homer aware that he wasn’t alone, but not so close as to make him feel crowded.

I don’t think she understood that Homer was blind, per se, but she seemed to intuit that he was happiest when he could hear her coming. We’d bought belled breakaway collars for the kittens for just this reason. But Fanny always greeted Homer with a trilling coo, as an additional assurance that her approach was both imminent and friendly. As weeks passed and Homer began to revert to his former playful ways—to once again seek out mischief and fun and food as eagerly as he’d used to—it became clear that this was, at least in part, because Fanny was a balm on the wound that Scarlett’s loss had left on Homer’s spirit.

Clayton, on the other hand, was an intrepid little soul, ready of an instant to bound fearlessly and inquisitively at anything or anyone that crossed his path. Clayton darted down the hallway the day we opened the guest-room door for him, and he never stopped darting, never stopped exploring, never stopped trying to insert himself into everything going on around him. If I’d thought that Homer lacked even a concept of vision because he himself was unable to see, then Clayton seemed to lack even the idea that anyone might not like him, simply because he himself was utterly incapable of disliking anybody or anything.

I’ll admit that Clayton was a puzzle to me for a long time. To say that cats are highly opinionated creatures is almost as reflexively obvious as saying that they have fur and whiskers. Even the most agreeable cat will have certain strong likes and dislikes. Fanny, for example, adored little toy mice and anything with feathers, but wasn’t much interested in any other toys. She was passionate about cat foods made from lamb, duck, or tuna, but couldn’t abide anything containing salmon or beef. As good-natured as Homer was, he hated being picked up, loathed being turned on his back, and would instantly recoil if you laid so much as a finger on his belly.

But Clayton liked everything. Literally everything. He liked crinkle balls and feathered toys and little fake mice and the plastic rings from water jugs and matchbooks and eyeglass cases and takeout menus and anything else small or portable enough for him to carry off in his mouth. He would eat anything you put in front of him. Dry or moist, regardless of flavor or texture—he ate everything and ate it all with equal gusto. You could pick him up, flip him over, rub his tummy, handle him however you liked, and he would nuzzle your hand and ask for more. One afternoon he sat in a chair with Laurence’s visiting ten-year-old nephew, who (only for not knowing any better) spent nearly half an hour rubbing Clayton’s fur the wrong way, while Clayton closed his eyes in a drowsy half-sleep, entirely unruffled.

Clayton liked everybody who came to our home and bunny-hopped out to greet them as fast as his three legs could carry him. He had a thick, club-like tail that swung out like a rudder at skewed angles behind him as he ran, most likely to compensate for some of the balance he lacked. When he wasn’t running, however, his tail seemed stuck permanently in a happy, upward thrust, guaranteeing anyone who approached a friendly—a downright enthusiastic—reception.

Clayton even liked the vet. He liked the vet! A little cut at the bottom of his bad leg became infected and wouldn’t heal, requiring the removal of that leg months ahead of our original schedule. There were a number of vet visits leading up to the surgery—and then the surgery itself—and Clayton not only didn’t struggle or complain, he actually seemed to enjoy himself. When the vet pried back Clayton’s lips to examine his gums and teeth, Clayton purred ecstatically. When the doctor stuck a needle into him to draw blood, Clayton butted his forehead playfully into the crook of the doctor’s elbow. When he poked gingerly at the bottom of Clayton’s infected half-leg—which, surely, must have been at least a little painful—Clayton flipped onto his back and bonked his whole head affectionately against the doctor while licking his hand. I couldn’t help but feel somewhat vindicated at entering the same animal hospital where Homer had always caused such a ruckus with a good patient for a change.

But still…I wondered about things.

Fanny, as she grew, began to develop an adult cat’s more complex vocal patterns—perhaps not as varied as Homer’s, but deeper and more mature sounding than when she’d been only a few weeks old. Clayton, however, still had a very young kitten’s undifferentiated, high-pitched squeak. His meow didn’t even have an “ow” at the end. “MEEEEEEEEeeee,” he would say, starting out loud but trailing off as his breath ran out. “MEEEEEEEEeeee,” he said when I walked in the door, and, “MEEEEEEEEeeee,” he said when he wanted his food, and, “MEEEEEEEEeeee,” running to greet some new person, and, “MEEEEEEEEeeee,” when struggling for a plaything that was out of his reach. I joked that when the doctors had removed his bad leg, they’d taken away his “ow.”

“There isn’t any sign of…neurological damage, is there?” I asked the vet during one visit, just before Clayton’s surgery. “Any developmental delays?”

He seemed baffled. “What do you mean? Like brain damage?”

“No,” I said hastily. “Never mind. Just forget it.”

Of course, Clayton was our veterinary practice’s favorite cat, and whenever we came in there was a veritable welcoming committee waiting for us at the door. What a dream for a veterinarian—who presumably liked cats, yet only encountered cats who feared him—to finally find a cat who seemed positively thrilled in his presence. And what a dream for Clayton—who happily scamper-hopped around the exam table from the doctor to the vet tech and back again, demanding cuddles with a head-bonk and a high-pitched MEEEEEEEEeeee, hardly seeming aware of the needles, the rectal thermometer, or any of the other indignities to which he was subjected.

Perhaps the only thing Clayton didn’t like was not having anyone around for him to like. It wasn’t so much that he feared or disliked being alone. He simply never needed to be. Even Homer—much as he generally preferred to be with me—would sometimes head off to any empty bedroom or open closet. Fanny, sweet as she was and as much as she clearly loved us already, needed at least a few hours a day by herself, and would always prefer to be hidden away in some quiet spot when we had people over.

But Clayton never wanted to be alone, or even out of plain sight. Clayton didn’t nap on top of chairs or under beds or buried among piles of clothing or tucked away in a corner of the closet. He’d sprawl out smack-dab in the middle of the floor of whatever room we were in, where you couldn’t walk from one end of the room to the other without stepping over him. A question that, to this day, has literally never once been asked in our home is, Where’s Clayton? I haven’t seen Clayton in a while.

As I said, I loved Clayton right from the start—but he puzzled me. Part of the bond that we form with the animals we love comes from that sense that they know us, and that we know them, better than anybody else does or could. I never had—and never would—understand anybody down to the very bottom of their soul the way that I did Homer. I knew every like and dislike, every joy and fear, that Homer had, and had felt the first glimmers of that deep knowledge in those very earliest moments when we’d first met.

But what did I know about Clayton that any stranger couldn’t have figured out within five minutes? What ultimately makes all of us different from each other—different and unique—are the things we like and the things we don’t. Clayton liked everything and disliked nothing—or, if he did, he kept it to himself—which made him a bit inscrutable.

But if there was one thing that Clayton definitively liked more than anything else—one thing that could raise his usual level of happiness to outright ecstasy—that thing was Homer. Small as Homer was, he still towered over Clayton when we first adopted him—and Clayton clearly thought that Homer was the most fascinating thing in the whole world.

Clayton wasn’t much interested in Homer when Homer was sleeping. But if Homer was awake and in motion then Clayton was right beside him. When Homer walked to his food bowl or the litter- box or down the hall, Clayton bunny-hopped along at his side. The pushiness of this—the lack of any respect for polite boundaries—irritated Homer at first. Every few steps, Homer would pause to whack Clayton in the face with one paw.

I don’t know that Clayton liked being hit in the face by Homer, but it didn’t seem to faze him, either. He’d crinkle his little brow a bit, but he never flinched or stepped back or raised his own small paw in a gesture of self-defense. He’d hop next to Homer or around him in circles, and every few feet Homer would pause to smack him in the face—and, like a Slinky, Clayton’s head and neck would compress for a moment, then instantly spring back up.

Homer and Clayton together reminded me of Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier from the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Spike would stride impressively down the sidewalk with little Chester scampering around him, peppering him with an endless stream of eager questions. What are you doing, Spike? What are doing today? Where are you going, Spike? Huh? Can I come with you, Spike? Can I? And every so often, without breaking stride, Spike would whack Chester in the face with a laconic, Ehhh…shut up.

That was Homer and Clayton to a T.

It pained me to see Homer bothered in any way, after the rough few months he’d had. But, ultimately, being irritated with Clayton was better than being sad about Scarlett. Homer began running and jumping again, at first to avoid Clayton, and then simply for the pleasure of it, as he’d used to do. If Fanny charmed and soothed him, then Clayton brought him out of his shell.

Scarlett and Vashti had never been as playful as Homer would have liked, and with them he’d never been able to assume a role more authoritative than that of mildly annoying little brother. Now Homer was the big brother, accompanied by two kittens who loved to play as much as he did and then some. He had reasons to get up from his spot on the couch, other than feeding times or his daily shift from the sofa to my lap. Clayton and Fanny were perfectly content to be minions and let Homer be the boss, and it was a role that Homer clearly relished.

Even if I hadn’t been able to love them for their own sakes (and I was crazy about them—they were, as I would frequently say to Laurence, “made of adorable”), I would have loved Fanny and Clayton for bringing Homer back to me—my Homer, the Homer I knew and loved best, the Homer who’d always greeted each new day as something to celebrate. Homer was Homer again.

And I honestly believe that Homer wouldn’t have found the strength he needed to fight his illness for as long as he did if not for these two ridiculously happy little ragamuffins, who moved into our home and claimed our lives for themselves.

HOMER HAD SOMETHING like fifteen thousand followers on Twitter, but it was on Facebook and my blog where his real community lived. By now, there were nearly thirteen thousand people who’d “liked” Homer’s Facebook page, but the number of people who actually followed us there on a day-to-day basis was still very small. They were the people for whom I posted pictures of Clayton and Fanny as they grew, and who had sincerely mourned with us when we’d lost our girls. Homer’s community gave us the permission and space we needed to embrace our grief fully and recover at our own pace, without having to encounter a single person who rolled their eyes and wondered rather impatiently why we couldn’t get over it already—why we were so sad when it was “just a cat.”

I had known that the grief would be deeper, the sense of loss more profound, when we lost Homer. It was Homer’s community, after all. But I had thought—naively, I now realize—that it would be more or less a slightly larger version of the same thing. Thinking this—that the one or two hundred comments and emails of condolence we had received after losing Vashti and Scarlett might be as many as four or five hundred now—I had waited four days after Homer’s passing, enough time to put on a “game face,” before posting the announcement to social media. It was August 25th—as fate would have it (although I didn’t register this at the time), exactly four years to the day since Homer’s Odyssey had first been published in 2009.

Publishing Homer’s story had changed my life, but that change had been a slow one—because book publishing is a slow business. I’d spent nearly a year writing the proposal and outline for Homer’s Odyssey, another year finding a publisher and then writing the book itself, and it had been six months after that before the book had first appeared in hardcover. Even all the craziness of Homer’s photo and video shoots had played out over a period of months, turning our lives topsy-turvy for perhaps one day every two or three weeks, and then leaving us to enjoy relative normalcy the rest of the time.

Nothing at all in my previous experience had prepared me for what it felt like to have my whole life change in a day.

The Facebook post announcing Homer’s death was shared more than three thousand times, and received more than eight thousand comments, within only the first few hours. People began posting pictures and stories of their own special-needs rescue animals to Homer’s page—animals they said they had been inspired to adopt by Homer’s example. Most of them were cats—cats large and small, fluffy and hairless, former street cats, backyard cats, cats who had been considered “undesirable” by their breeders. Cats who were blind or deaf or both, or who were missing limbs or paralyzed from the waist down. “Wobbly” cats suffering from cerebellar hypoplasia, and cats who were positive for FIV or FeLV. There were also many special-needs dogs, a handful of rescued bunnies and horses, and one albino gecko with poor depth perception. (I swear I’m not making that up.)

I shared these pictures and stories with Homer’s community as they came in, thinking them the most fitting tribute Homer could possibly have received. But for every one story and picture I shared, three or four more would appear in the “Visitor Posts” column along the side of the page, until I could no longer keep up. And people posted other things, too. They found older pictures of Homer that I’d posted online years earlier, and they shared them again on Homer’s page now. Sometimes they Photoshopped these pictures, to give Homer angels’ wings, to show him at the Rainbow Bridge, to frame him with solemn black borders that announced the years of his birth and his death. Each photo and post moved me deeply—until a few days later, when the numbers were so large that I was simply bewildered. I hadn’t known there were so many. I’d had no idea.

Facebook’s algorithms clearly interpreted this influx of new activity on our page as “good,” and began sending more and more and then even more traffic our way. It had taken nearly four years for Homer’s page to accumulate those thirteen thousand “likes,” to reach a point where content from the page reached perhaps five thousand people in a week. I had thought those numbers were pretty big. But, within a week of Homer’s death, his page had acquired an additional fourteen thousand followers and reached more than two million people. Hour by hour, day by day, Laurence and I watched those numbers go up, thinking every day that surely—surely—today was the day when it would all begin to level off.

And every day we thought that, we were wrong.

When you lose a member of your human family, there’s usually one day when you reach out to all the people who need to be called or notified, and then that part is done. But social media doesn’t work that way. For all the thousands of people who’d seen my Facebook post within hours of its going up, there were many thousands more who didn’t first see it in their news feeds for another day, or several days, or a couple of weeks. Every day there were people who were only now first seeing their friend’s re-tweet of somebody else’s Twitter post that had gone up days ago. Every day somebody visited my website—not even knowing there was any specific news about Homer—and, reading my blog post for the first time, then forwarded it to half a dozen other people they knew, who themselves forwarded the link to a dozen more. Every day, somebody saw for the first time the share, re-tweet, or re-post of another blogger’s tribute to Homer.

Sometimes the news was divorced from social media altogether—a rumor that people heard word-of-mouth, and they wrote to me for confirmation. At least twenty or thirty times in the typical day, I would receive emails from people wanting to know if what they’d heard was true, if Homer was really gone, and if so, when and how had it happened?

For me, every day was the first day all over again. I felt like a skipping record, forced to keep repeating the same notes over and over because my needle was stuck in a groove and couldn’t get un-stuck.

Laurence has never said so, but I suspect that I wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest wife during this time. I know now that Fanny, and especially Clayton, felt a difference in me, too. I petted and played with them as much as I ever had, but something essential within me was becoming numbed.

The emails began pouring in immediately after I posted that first announcement, and within a few days they were followed by sympathy cards in the mail—first in a trickle, then in a gush, like something out of Miracle on 34th Street. We received hundreds—literally hundreds—of sympathy cards and letters, and hundreds more cards from shelters and rescue groups, informing us of donations that had been made in Homer’s name. Along with the cards and letters, people sent us their own home-made versions of Homer—stuffed macramé Homers, ceramic Homers, Homers blown from black glass, a watercolor painting of Homer from Brazil, a Homer necklace pendant carved out of an old vinyl record from San Francisco, a hand-painted sculpture depicting a super-hero-caped Homer in front of the Twin Towers from Iowa, a soft-sculpture Homer purse that came all the way from Japan, a framed Homer needlepointed in black Egyptian silk and surrounded by gold thread from Los Angeles, and even an extravagantly framed oil portrait of Homer from “Hank For Senate’s” humans in Virginia.

Soon the media inquiries followed. I ended up asking a book publicist I’d worked with once to write up a press release containing the essential facts and some boilerplate quotes from me, so that inquiring press could have something to work with without my having to tell the same story dozens of times. A few months later, The New York Times Magazine would run Homer’s obituary online as part of December’s annual “The Lives They Lived” feature, which rounded up notable deaths from the preceding year. By then, enough time had passed for me to be proud and even a little amused, to wryly observe to Laurence that we certainly shouldn’t expect the same kind of coverage when our time came.

But, at the time these things were happening, all I could think when dealing with press was that I was afraid of repeating the same things too often and sounding like a robot, yet also afraid of deviating from my stock answers and sounding like a moron.

I know how I sound in writing all this. How awful it must have been for you, to receive the heartfelt love and sympathy of so many people! It wasn’t awful at all, of course. It was astounding, amazing, miraculous enough to convince even the most hard-hearted cynic of the generosity and infinite kindness people were capable of.

Every time somebody wrote to say that they felt as if Homer had been their own cat—that they’d cried upon hearing the news as if they’d lost one of their own—my own heart throbbed in sympathy. I knew—I knew—exactly how that felt. When I saw all the donations that had been made in Homer’s name and thought of the lives that would be saved because of them, my heart swelled with gratitude. When I received all the beautiful things people made and sent to us, I was thankful until I thought my heart would burst with it.

And that was the problem—there was too much to feel and not enough me to feel it all. My life already felt strange and unlike my own life simply because Homer was no longer in it. But now, when I woke up, I would spend a good couple of hours walking around in a daze, not knowing how to pick up the thread of the day, where I should start, who I should call, which emails and inquiries and Facebook posts I was supposed to respond to.

Once my days had flowed along a natural, effortless rhythm that I didn’t have to think about. Now I spent a half-hour each morning trying to decide when to take a shower. Did it make more sense to do a little work, then shower, and then get back to work again? Or would it be more logical and efficient to shower immediately, before I did anything else? Half the time I ended up not showering at all. Better to avoid the question altogether, I’d sagely conclude, rather than come up with the wrong answer.

I eventually realized that Laurence had seamlessly taken over most of the essential tasks that kept our lives running. It was Laurence who now fed Clayton and Fanny on their regular schedule. He also cleaned their litter-box, trimmed their claws, and fished their toys out from under the couch. Laurence prepared our meals and made sure I ate, kept us stocked with toilet paper and trash bags and toothpaste, wrote out checks for bills and made sure they were mailed on time.

All the gratitude, all the love, all the sorrow for the pain of others that I felt, overloaded me until all I felt was overwhelmed—overwhelmed and anxious, slipping further behind each day on all the thank-yous and acknowledgments I owed people, which continued to accumulate in new batches by the hour.

Somewhere, underneath this giant mound of stuff that had amassed atop me, was my grief for Homer. I had written about it, blogged about it, emailed Homer’s mourners about it. But sometime in the midst of all that, at some point after we’d scattered his ashes and there was no physical, tangible task left for me to do, I’d lost my ability to feel it.

What I needed was to cry. I hadn’t cried at all since that first wild convulsion of loss on the afternoon of the night when Homer had gone to sleep for the last time. Now I needed to shed the gentler tears of letting go. I had to get back to my grief in order to heal from it and move on.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t find it. I didn’t remember ever having felt as tired as I did now. I was too exhausted even to look.

MY OWN LIFE had been turned inside out, but as far as I could tell Clayton and Fanny were as happy as they’d ever been. They still ate big meals and napped together in sunbeams, still chased crinkle balls and the laser pointer’s ever-elusive red dot with the same joyous abandon. When I piled all the sympathy cards and letters we’d received into the middle of the living room rug—hoping to create some semblance of order from them—Clayton would dive right into the middle of the pile, burrowing into and under it as if he were a child in a ball tank.

It was a few weeks later, in late September, when I noticed one evening that Clayton was having trouble with his litter-box, hopping in and out of it more frequently than was usual. When I checked, however, he didn’t seem to be producing anything. I assumed that he was a little blocked, and I added some olive oil to his moist food for an evening meal. He gobbled the whole thing down with his typical enthusiasm, which I found reassuring.

Later that night, however, it was a different story. Clayton was in and out of his litter-box every few minutes now, his pupils hugely dilated. When he wasn’t in the litter-box, he paced back and forth across the living room in an odd fashion, crouching first in one random spot, then another.

I had been planning to take him to his regular vet the next morning if the problem persisted. But he seemed so very uncomfortable—and was acting in so very unusual a way—that I didn’t want to make him wait another eight hours for relief. If it had been Homer, who’d hated the vet with a furious passion, I might have taken a more wait-and-see attitude. But Clayton didn’t mind doctors, and even though it was 11:00 and our animal clinic was closed for the night, I thought, Better safe than sorry. So, bundling him into his carrier, and waiting for Laurence to grab a jacket so he could accompany us as far as the sidewalk and see us safely into a cab, I headed for the 24-hour emergency animal hospital on West Fifteenth Street.

The last time I’d been in a cab ferrying a cat to an emergency room had been with Homer, and that had clearly been a life-or-death situation. It didn’t feel like that this time, though. I still believed the problem was constipation—albeit clearly a severe case—because, in my range of experience with cat maladies, I hadn’t yet encountered anything else that seemed to match these symptoms. Vashti’s CRF had caused her to be constipated from time to time, and Clayton’s behavior now wasn’t completely dissimilar to what hers had been then.

Vashti’s physical inverse, Fanny, may have been sleek and

slender, but Clayton was mushy in the middle. He was a bit of a food hound, and had a habit—one we couldn’t break—of finishing his own meals and then tackling Fanny’s. Fanny was always obliging enough to allow him to do so. She was a healthy weight, according to her doctor, and even when I’d secretly put down some extra food for her when Clayton wasn’t looking, she didn’t seem particularly interested. So I assumed now that Clayton had eaten too much of something that didn’t agree with him, and my heart ached with sympathy for his obvious discomfort. I reached my hand through the top of his cloth carrier to stroke his head reassuringly. Poor kitty, I crooned. Poor Clayton. But I also murmured, with a kind of rough affection, Maybe now you’ll learn your lesson, and let poor Fanny eat her meals in peace.

The emergency animal hospital on West Fifteenth was the polar opposite of our regular clinic—a cavernous, fluorescent-lit waiting area studded with row after row of hard-backed chairs. It was close to midnight, and the only other person in the enormous space was a man with a huge German Shepherd, who’d just finished being sick all over the spotless linoleum floor. Another man in a blue orderly’s uniform hurried over with a mop and push-bucket, while the man with the dog patted his flank in a soothing way, helping him into an exam room in the back. The woman at the check-in desk took Clayton’s name, the reason for our visit, and my credit card information with brisk efficiency. We didn’t have to wait more than a few minutes before a doctor approached and summoned us into an exam room of our own.

Clayton didn’t struggle as the vet lifted him from his carrier, but he did mewl in a pained, pathetic way when her hands first went under his belly for support, then gently probed his lower abdomen. I couldn’t remember ever hearing Clayton make a sound that wasn’t happy. And, for the first time, I felt the stirrings of fear in my own belly.

“Have you noticed any blood in his urine?” she asked.

“No.” The question startled me. His urine? “You don’t think it’s constipation?”

She removed the little blanket lining Clayton’s carrier and spread it onto the exam table, so that Clayton could lie down more comfortably. “I think he has something called feline idiopathic cystitis,” she said. “It’s a blockage of the urinary tract. It’s life-threatening if we don’t catch it in time, although,” she hastily assured me, “it’s highly treatable when we do. We call it ‘idiopathic’ because we don’t really know what causes the condition. Generally we think it’s brought on by stress. Have there been any significant changes in your home recently?”

At first, the combination of the words stress and Clayton in the same sentence struck me as so absurd that it was almost comical. Was any cat ever less prone to stress than Clayton was?

But then, unbidden, a memory came back to me. When the vet had come to us on Homer’s last day, she’d wrapped him in a blanket when it was over, leaving only his face revealed. She’d then placed his body tenderly in a bag she’d brought with her—a roomy leather bag with handles.

The bag containing Homer had remained opened and unzipped on the floor while I signed papers and made arrangements for the cremation. And Clayton had climbed into it. I’d thought it merely the natural curiosity of any cat to explore an open bag left on the floor. But, when we’d tried to lift him out, Clayton had clung to the blanket around Homer, whining anxiously as we’d fought to pull him away.

Grief has a way of making us selfish. As many people as had mourned for Homer—and as sincere and deep as I’d known that mourning to be—I’d been sure that nobody’s loss could equal my own. Homer had been my cat, his loss had been my loss—and there was no one, I thought, who could truly know how I felt.

Clayton lay on the exam table between the doctor and me, the gold of his eyes dulled from their usual bright alertness. But when I placed my hand down on the table next to him, he laid one small, black paw over it and looked up into my face.

I had been wrong. There had been another who’d known how I felt. Someone else had felt his happily ordered world run off course, had lost his hero and very best friend, not understanding why that friend was gone and couldn’t come back to play with him anymore.

He just hadn’t known how to tell me.

My voice was gritty when I spoke. “Our oldest cat…” The words stuck, and I realized that, for all the blogs and emails and Facebook posts, I hadn’t actually said it aloud to anyone. Not once. Not in all this time.

I cleared my throat and tried again. “Our oldest cat died a few weeks ago. Clayton was very attached to him.”

I felt the relief of saying it—just saying it as a commonplace statement, to a person who didn’t know Homer or that I was “Homer’s mom,” who would greet the idea with nothing more than ordinary, professional sympathy—pass through me. It felt like having a rusty gate you’d been pushing and pushing against finally begin to swing open, just a crack.

“I’m so sorry,” the vet said. “That could certainly do it.”

“But Clayton will…” I cleared my throat a second time. “He will be okay, right? I did get him here in time?” Not again, I thought. Please not again, not now, not so soon…

“I think he’ll be fine,” she replied. “He’ll have to stay with us for two or three days so we can clear the blockage and get everything flowing the way it should. Let me take him back now and get him started. You can wait up front for the receptionist to bring the papers you’ll need to sign.”

CLAYTON WAS AWAY for three days. I’d always gone to visit our other cats when they’d had overnight hospital stays. When Clayton had his leg removed, I’d seen him at least once a day. He’d had to stay for two weeks then, so he could be crated while his stitches healed. It was impossible to imagine otherwise how we would have kept a rambunctious kitten stable enough not to risk the stitches—or how we would have kept Fanny, who groomed him daily, from going after them herself. Keeping Clayton crated at home—in full view of the rest of us interacting with each other, but not with him—had seemed unnecessarily torturous. But I’d gone to see him every afternoon and brought him treats. And the doctor and other staff members had taken him periodically into an empty exam room for brief bouts of closely supervised play. He’d seemed nothing but happy when I’d visited him then, surrounded by toys that he batted around playfully when he was in his cage, and by adoring humans during the brief times he was allowed out of it.

This time, however, the hospital asked that I not come and visit. It was important that Clayton remain hooked up to tubes and catheters around the clock, and unhooking him long enough for a visit from me was, I was told, an undesirable option. I called three times each day to check on him, and at a minimum I knew that Clayton was still the easy patient, as compliant with staff as he’d always been. The day when I finally went to bring him home, a tech handed over his carrier and informed me, “Clayton is the most adorablest cat ever.” Which told me that his usual sunny charm must have returned during those three days, at least in part.

I was given a sheet with after-care instructions, a case of a new prescription food, and a bill so steep that I almost reeled. (An emergency animal hospital in Manhattan possibly being the most expensive option for veterinary care anywhere on the planet.) It was worth it, though, as I saw Clayton’s soft carrier pop like popcorn when he heard my voice, and realized that I had come back for him.

Clayton was overjoyed to be released from that carrier once we got home—although taken aback by Fanny’s hostile reception. He may have looked like the Clayton she knew, but he smelled like something else altogether, and Fanny backed up and hissed at him angrily whenever he approached. I quickly brought Clayton into our bedroom, which I’d set up ahead of time with a new litter-box, his favorite toys and blankets, and a bowl for his new food. If stress had caused his illness, I didn’t want his recovery set back by the additional stress of rejection. Within a few days, I knew, Clayton would smell like himself again, and he and Fanny could fall back into their established patterns of close companionship.

Laurence came in every so often to check on us, and Clayton scampered over to bonk his head joyously against Laurence’s hand as he bent down to scratch behind Clayton’s ears. Look! I’m back! I’m finally home! But otherwise Clayton and I were alone together for the rest of the night. He bunny-hopped frenetically around the bedroom for a long time, thrilled to be released from the confinement of the hospital, delighted to reacquaint himself with his favorite toys, which he chased with dizzying speed over and under the bed, from one end of the room to the other. Every few minutes he’d jump into his litter-box, releasing a few small dribbles each time, which would have alarmed me if his doctor hadn’t told me to expect this for a day or two.

It was late by the time he’d finally exhausted himself. Switching off the bedside lamp, I crawled beneath the covers and readied myself for sleep. I’d set up a soft pile of blankets and pillows on the floor for Clayton, as he’d never really been a cuddler or expressed much interest in sharing our bed. As friendly as he could be, Clayton wasn’t a lap cat. If I sat on the floor, he’d hop around me in counter-clockwise circles, bumping his head affectionately against my shoulder or back as he went, pausing on occasion to rest in my lap for the briefest of seconds before leaping up and resuming his bunny-hop circles.

I’d never expected that any of our cats would cuddle on demand—Scarlett would certainly have disabused me of any such notion a long time ago. Still, one of the things I missed most about Homer was no longer having a furry little body to curl up with. I missed that feeling of peace that comes only when a small animal trusts you enough to fall asleep in your arms.

So it surprised me, as I got under the blankets, when Clayton climbed onto the bed after me. And then he did something he’d never done before. Hopping across the bed to where I lay, he nosed the covers aside and stretched his body across mine, one hind leg tucked beneath my right arm, while his front paws sprawled out to touch my left. His chest was directly over my chest, his heart aligned with my own. My arms rose from the bed to embrace him, and Clayton nuzzled his nose into my neck, purring gently against my left ear.

It was then—at last, at long last—that my tears began to flow. Not the harsh animal sobs of the day I’d lost Homer, but something infinitely softer than that, an easing, a warm, fluid salt. Clayton’s weight was heavy on my chest, and yet it felt lighter than it had in weeks, as if it were emptying out as the tears ran down my cheeks. They mingled with Clayton’s black fur as he brought his head to mine and, with exquisite patience, licked the tears from my skin with his raspy tongue, as the soft thrum of his purrs rumbled against my ear.

Baby boy, I whispered. My little baby boy.

I wept for Clayton, for having nearly lost him. I wept for the relief of holding him again now, safe and healthy and returned to us.

And I shed the tears I’d needed to shed for so long—for Homer, so that I could finally let him go.

Homer may have been the blind one, but I’d been the one who couldn’t see. I had tended to dismiss Clayton’s simplicity—the ease with which he found joy in absolutely everything around him—as simple-mindedness. I had thought it incompatible with depth of feeling. Sometimes (it shamed me to admit), I’d wondered if, perhaps, Clayton wasn’t very smart.

But Clayton knew things that I didn’t know—things, I realized, that Homer had known also. Perhaps that was why Clayton had clung so fast to Homer from his first day in our family, refusing to leave Homer’s side even for a moment, not even at the end.

Clayton was always happy because happiness was an essential pre-condition of his life. Everybody wants happiness, and everybody tries to capture and hold it, and everybody feels the emptiness when it’s gone. But Clayton spun everyday life into happiness—all of it, even the bowl of food that might not be his favorite flavor, or the unpleasantness of shots at the vet’s office—the way trees turn sunlight into food, without thinking, without any deep philosophy, but as a reflexive action, simply because without it, they can’t live.

In this, he was infinitely lucky.

When Homer left us, it was the first time in Clayton’s short life something had happened that he couldn’t spin into happiness, and he had despaired. But now, returning home after the three days in a cold, impersonal hospital, feeling loving arms around him, feeling healthy after days of being sick, he was happy once again.

I may have understood that his happiness was only the flip side of his sadness, that it only existed because of that sadness—but all Clayton knew was that he was happy, now, in this moment. Happy and loved. And that was enough.

Much like Homer had taught me things about life—things so simple that I should have figured them out on my own, yet might never have without him—Clayton was teaching me something now. I learned from him that happiness sometimes leaves, but that it does come back—even if it comes in a different form than the one you’ve lost. Loss wasn’t scorched earth. It was a clay from which good things could grow—things that were strange and different from what had come before, things it might never have even occurred to you to want, but things you couldn’t bear to part with once you had them.

Even if you knew you’d only gained those things by losing others that you’d have killed and died to keep forever.

THESE ARE ALL fine, lofty-sounding ideas. But for me—for me, personally—they form the very real substance of my everyday life. At the time of Homer’s death, his Facebook page had roughly thirteen thousand followers. Today, only two years later, that number is nearly 750,000 and counting. Having such a large audience isn’t just a “cool” thing. It’s a mighty thing. Shelters write to me about special-needs animals who’ve been with them for years, who they can’t find homes for, and Homer’s community gets the word out and finds them homes within days, making way for new rescues and additional lives to be saved. “Homer’s Heroes” have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to save the lives of animals in the wake of disasters both large and small across the globe. Everything from earthquakes and tsunamis to hoarding situations, or fires at shelters so tiny and volunteer-run that they don’t have a single official employee. In July of this year alone, Homer’s Heroes raised over forty thousand dollars to save animals in Nepal, cats being hoarded in West Virginia who stood in danger of being destroyed, and lions on a wildlife preserve in Africa. All of the money comes from small, individual donations, and one hundred percent of the funds go directly to those for whom the funds were raised.

People share their own rescue stories on Homer’s page, rescues that occur in quiet, out-of-the-way places against seemingly impossible odds. Stories that inspire others to try a little harder, to save a life they might not have thought could be saved, to give a chance to an animal whose chances might otherwise have appeared exhausted.

The greatest gift Homer left me with when he left me for good was fresh evidence every day—every single day—of the innate goodness of most people, even when news headlines make it far too easy to conclude otherwise.

In a very literal way, Homer’s passing brought life in its wake. There are countless animals alive today because of Homer’s loss, and the community that grew and flourished from our shared grief—which doesn’t make it “worth it,” but does assure me that even in his physical absence, Homer’s spirit hasn’t gone anywhere.

As I write this, Fanny is doing her best to insert her head between my hands and the keyboard, and Clayton is lying in my lap, flipped onto his back with one paw reaching up in his sleep to touch my face. It’s a gesture that’s become everyday for us, but one that never fails to knock me out anew with all the profound trust and serenity it implies.

Clayton and I might never have found each other if we hadn’t lost Homer. And as much as I know that if I could wave a magic wand and undo Homer’s death, I would do so in a heartbeat—in a nanosecond—I also know that I would never trade any of the things I have in my life today because I loved Homer, and also because I lost him.

Not for worlds.