Homer: The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

The World’s Cat

The Muse brought to the minstrel’s mind a song of

heroes whose great fame rang under heaven.

-HOMER, The Odyssey

HOMER’S ODYSSEY WAS PUBLISHED ON AUGUST 25, 2009. I had traveled to Washington, D.C. the night before to do an interview on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” on the morning of launch, and didn’t get back home again until the early evening. Homer spent the night of the book’s release feasting on the lobster salad Laurence had prepared for me as a congratulatory surprise, but that I was too wound-up to eat. Scarlett and Vashti didn’t care as much for lobster, but Laurence had bought them a tin of fancy canned tuna from our local gourmet shop—which Homer consumed his fair share of as well. I spent the rest of the night refreshing the book’s Amazon page every hour, so I could watch as its sales rank rose. (This is something every writer does on the day her book is published, and any writer who tells you she doesn’t is totally lying.) Eventually, I moved my laptop computer over to the couch, so I wouldn’t have to keep jumping up to see if the numbers had changed. Homer, full of lobster and tuna, snoozed happily beside me.

With all the pre-publication craziness, I’d thought that life would calm down once the book was out. But, soon after it appeared in bookstores, there came a second, smaller wave of press rolling through our apartment in order to meet Homer—the bloggers, vloggers (those with video blogs), and internet radio hosts who hadn’t required the longer lead times of magazines and newspapers, and who were thus able to wait until the book was on shelves before planning their coverage.

This second wave of press was much mellower than the first had been, requiring far less of Homer and me. Usually it would just be one person with a hand-held recording device, or perhaps one additional person to hold a video camera. Homer was able to interact with these people with nothing more than his usual level of friendly interest—although I do remember one blogger in particular for whom Homer went absolutely wild.

I had never been nearly as aware of different people’s differing smells as Homer was, but this specific blogger had an especially…pungent…aroma that even I could catch from across the room. She smelled strongly of patchouli mixed with insufficiently masked body odor—which is really only worth mentioning because Homer was fascinated by this woman as he’d never been with anyone before, and as I would never see him be with anyone again. It was impossible to keep him off her, to prevent him from crawling up and around her as he tried to take in her scent from all conceivable angles, burying his head in her hair and inserting his nose deeply into more private areas.

“He’s certainly a friendly little guy, isn’t he?” the blogger observed, trying to angle Homer’s nose unobtrusively away from her crotch.

“That he is.” I was mortified. “Homer! Homer! Come…here!” I spoke in the guttural-voice-through-clenched-teeth tone my own mother had used to rein me in when I was small, whenever my childish high spirits had seemed in danger of causing public embarrassment.

Homer, however, was not to be deterred. “I’m so sorry,” I apologized. “I don’t know what’s come over him.” Homer’s head was still immersed in our guest’s nether regions, and finally I went over and lifted him from her, one hand under his breastbone for support while the other took the scruff of his neck in a manner meant to indicate, I am NOT kidding around!

But Homer wriggled out of my arms and boomeranged right back to his intrusive examination of every square inch of the blogger’s body. “I can put him in the other room, if you’d like,” I offered.

“No, don’t worry about it!” I may have been appalled at Homer’s bad behavior, but the blogger herself seemed unruffled. “But maybe we should open a window?” she added. “Your face looks a little red.”

Of all the people who came and went through our home, convinced that during their time with us they’d formed a special bond with Homer unlike anybody else’s, this was the one occasion when that was likeliest to be true.

There were perhaps a half-dozen or so of these visitors over the course of a couple of days, and then Laurence and I hit the road. Publishers weren’t as apt to finance book tours as they’d been once upon a time, but I scheduled a few readings on my own. I did one in New York, of course, where we lived. I did one in L.A. where, after nearly two decades as a film journalist, Laurence had many friends. And I scheduled one in Miami where my parents and some of my old friends still lived. Laurence had given me a necklace to celebrate the book’s publication, featuring a tiny cat-shaped pendant made from small black diamonds, and I wore it for luck whenever I made a book-related appearance.

In Miami, I did an in-studio interview at the local NPR station the morning before my reading, and an article about the book and my upcoming appearance was published in the Miami Herald the same day. Still, I wasn’t expecting much of a turnout beyond my family, my friends, and my parents’ friends. Part of the reason why publishers were reluctant to underwrite book tours was because it had become increasingly difficult to get people to turn out for them, even when a book was popular and an author event had been well publicized.

So it was overwhelming to arrive at Books & Books in Coral Gables and find that nearly three hundred people had come. Three hundred people! The lead book reviewer for the Sun-Sentinel, whose work I’d been reading since I was a teenager, was the one who stepped up to the podium to introduce me, and it was one of the great nights of my life.

I don’t think it really hit me until that moment that a lot of people were going to read Homer’s story. It was one thing to see sales figures projected on a spread sheet, but an entirely different experience to see three hundred individual faces turned my way as I read from the book. There was even a cat in attendance—a tiny blind kitten named Galileo, only a few weeks old, with the two people who’d found him abandoned a few days earlier. They’d brought Galileo to the reading in the hopes that somebody there might be able to help them figure out what to do for him—and, sure enough, representatives from several local rescue groups were on-hand and able to take charge of the situation. (Galileo eventually found a forever home with a reader in Ft. Lauderdale.)

I also realized something else that night that I’d never thought about before—the deep chord that Homer’s Odyssey would strike in the animal-rescue community. Homer represented any number of cats who rescuers would cry themselves to sleep at night thinking about—cats who were sweet and friendly and loving, cats these rescuers worked with every day, and who they knew would make a wonderful companion to anyone lucky enough to adopt them. But cats (and dogs) who, nevertheless, were consistently passed over for adoption because they were blind, or deaf, or needed extra care for ongoing medical issues, or simply because they had aged out of kitten-hood and were now “too old.”

I wasn’t the only one who stood vindicated by the publication of Homer’s story. And, despite having cared for him for more than twelve years, I wasn’t even close to being the one who’d put in the most time and effort—who’d fought the most battles or broken her heart the most often—trying to prove that a special-needs animal was just as capable of loving and being loved as any other, and just as deserving of a chance.

Eight days after Homer’s Odyssey was published, I received two phone calls—one from Caitlin, and one from the in-house publicist my publisher had assigned to promote Homer’s Odyssey, both with the same exciting news. After only one week on sale, Homer’s Odyssey would debut at #14 on the following week’s New York Times Bestseller List.

Laurence and I celebrated with champagne that night, while Homer, Vashti, and Scarlett were treated to new catnip toys and Homer’s beloved deli turkey. When the New York Times Book Review in which Homer would be named was finally published, I saw that Homer’s Odyssey had been called out for special attention in the “Inside the List” feature that ran alongside it. “Homer’s Odyssey makes its first appearance on the list in 2,720 years,” the writer humorously observed, before adding, “Oh, wait! Gwen Cooper’s book is actually the story of a tiny blind wonder cat…”

THE NEXT FEW months were a whirlwind. Although I hadn’t been sent on an official book tour, I was invited to speak at shelters and at shelter fundraisers around the country, to advocate for the cause of special-needs animals and of rescue in general.

I hated leaving my three cats as often as I did, traveling more now than I had at any previous time in my life. But, then, I was now firmly self-employed, so when I was home I got to be home. My cats and I had never had so many uninterrupted hours in the day together as we did during the times when I wasn’t on the road. Homer would greet me with pure delight when I returned from a trip—happy I was back, of course, and also eager to make a thorough investigation of my suitcase and my person. Every engagement I traveled to included a tour through the shelter where I’d be speaking, along with plenty of cuddling opportunities with the cats that shelter cared for. No matter how thoroughly I showered before getting on a plane, the shoes I wore home and the bag containing clothing I’d worn while away reeked, from Homer’s perspective, of other cats. It could take hours for Homer to get through as exhaustive an inspection as he liked, until finally it was time to dump my suitcase contents into the laundry and get them ready for the next trip.

Best of all were the gifts I brought back for the cats. Everywhere I went, people sent me home with gifts for Homer, and I was touched by how many remembered to include Scarlett and Vashti as well—hand-crocheted balls stuffed with catnip, little satin-enclosed catnip pillows with each of the cats’ names embroidered on them, hand-knitted and hand-sewn kitty blankets, colorful new bowls for food and water, bags of treats, and noisy playthings, like crinkle balls, by the sack.

Of course it was really Homer, and Homer’s story, that everybody was interested in. People wanted to hear live accounts of the tales they’d read in the book, to know how Homer was adjusting to his newfound fame. But Homer couldn’t travel or deliver speeches himself, so I went as his proxy. I also did interviews with, and wrote articles for, animal-centric magazines and websites, encouraging the adoption of special-needs animals like Homer. As few “famous cats” as there were at the time, there had never (to my knowledge) been a famous special-needs cat, and so Homer became something of a “poster kitty” for the cause of adopting animals once thought unadoptable. I would eventually hear from people who wrote to say that Homer had inspired them to take a chance on a blind—or otherwise disabled—cat. I can honestly say that I’ve received no fewer than two hundred of these emails over the past few years, and they’re always the greatest letters I get.

I traveled to parts of the country I’d never seen in person before—the Deep South, Texas, the Heartland, the Pacific Northwest, the Rust Belt. I traveled from Minnesota to New Mexico, to Arizona during a heat wave so intense that I could literally feel my eyeballs grow warm when I stepped outside. The landscapes would change dramatically each time a plane I was on would land, as would the regional accents, the style of dress, and the local cuisine.

Yet certain things remained constant. I met people of all ages, sizes, religions, and ethnic backgrounds—people who likely would have disagreed vehemently with their counterparts in other regions on everything from politics to place settings (because one would surely consume Alabama hominy grits very differently than Seattle sushi). But the one thing everyone I met agreed about—passionately—was the cause of animal rescue. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard, over the last six years, say how much better they think animals are than people. But, personally, I think it’s that animals bring out the very best in people—until you can’t help but realize how ultimately insignificant the rest of the differences are.

Despite my hectic travel schedule of those few months—and despite the fact that those crazy days of video and promotional shoots were essentially over—“managing” Homer was still my full-time job. I had to answer his fan mail, oversee his social media presence, regretfully inform those who wrote to say that they would be vacationing in New York—and could they possibly drop by our place to meet Homer in person?—that, unfortunately, Homer wasn’t available for personal appearances. “As if Homer were another New York tourist attraction, like the Statue of Liberty,” I would say to Laurence.

And somebody had to write the thank-you notes for the many gifts Homer received in the mail—as various and plentiful as the gifts I brought home with me from trips. Scarlett and Vashti got their fair share of the bounty, and may, I think, have enjoyed it even more than Homer did. All the soft kitty blankets—that were just her size!—were a profound joy to Scarlett, who’d always loved anything plush and luxurious. To have something soft and warm to claim for her very own, small enough for her to guard from encroachment by the annoying other cats she was forced to live with, was a gift from above. And Vashti loved catnip even more than Homer did. People sent us catnip they’d grown themselves, on hobby farms or in backyard gardens, and the purity of this home-grown ‘nip seemed to make Homer, and especially Vashti, super relaxed and flippy.

For his part, Homer was most enamored of the boxes these gifts came in. He enjoyed them all so much that I couldn’t bear to take any away from him—until our living room looked as if we were moving. It was at this point that Laurence tactfully suggested that it might be time to throw at least a few of them away.

As it turned out, there were also quite a few younger readers of Homer’s Odyssey—elementary and middle-school children who were already passionate about animals, and for whom the message that different doesn’t mean bad carried more relevance even than it did for adults. One evening, long after the book had been published, a sixth-grade girl came to our apartment with her father, to meet and photograph Homer for an article about him she was writing for Time For Kids (Time magazine’s children’s imprint). She took such a grave, shy pleasure in his presence—and Homer was so very gentle with her in his rubbing and head-bonks—that I had to smile at seeing them together. But well before then I’d been hearing from children of about her age who were writing book reports about Homer and wanted me to answer questions they had about the book, or to know what kids like them could do for other special-needs animals. Sometimes they emailed so they could send me pictures of drawings they’d made of Homer, or of Homer-themed arts-and-crafts projects they’d created for school.

It wasn’t just in the U.S. and Canada where Homer was gaining a following. Foreign rights to Homer’s Odyssey had sold in nearly twenty countries before the book was even published, and some of those translations began to appear right around the time the U.S. edition did. I always got a kick out of the foreign editions, the different artwork of their covers, all the various iterations of Homer that differed so greatly from country to country that it was hard to believe they were all publishing the same book. Some countries—like Brazil, France, Russia, and China—used the literal translation of “Homer’s Odyssey” as the title for their editions. Others took more of a creative license. In Italy it was Omero Gatto Nero, in Germany Homer und Ich. In Finland, the book was called Homer – Kissan Uskomaton Elama, which meant, Homer – A Cat’s Incredible Life. The Dutch went with a straightforward Wonderkat!, and in Hungary it was simply Homér—the book’s cover a stark block of solid red, with Homer’s name in huge white letters, and in the middle of the cover a very small silhouetted profile of a black cat with a curled tail.

The Japanese title translated roughly into I See Happy Love. I’m still unsure as to what the Korean title meant, although I adoredthe artwork they included. At the end of the book were several pages of prints depicting vividly hued watercolor paintings, like something from a book of fairy tales. One of them showed a girl who I think was supposed to be me—although she looked like Alice in Wonderland—being borne aloft into a starry night by a tuxedoed, flower-bearing, eyeless black cat, trailing a little gray tabby and an even smaller white kitty in the air behind her. A smiling man (Laurence?) waved them all off from a bedroom window.

Homer soon began to receive cards and letters and gifts from the other countries where his story had been published. Somewhere along the line, I realized, he had become not merely my cat, but the world’s cat.

And yet, he was still just our happy little boy. He had been with me for so long—and while I couldn’t say that I took him for granted, he had become as essential, yet also as everyday, as the beating of my own heart.

I would look at Homer sometimes—as he chased a bedeviled Scarlett down the hall, or jumped onto my desk and did his best to keep me from typing, or rolled onto his back to groom the chocolate-and-black fur of his belly—and I would marvel. It was an impossible, an incomprehensible, thing to try to fathom, that so many people all across the globe knew him. Knew him and loved him.

NATURALLY, HOMER HAD his own Facebook page. It was just a regular personal page at first, but when he reached his 5000-friend limit, I started a “fan” page for him—although I never thought of it that way. Only about a thousand of Homer’s Facebook friends followed us to this new page—and even though it grew incrementally, adding perhaps two hundred new followers each month, it still felt like a small, intimate community.

It was Homer’s page, and so I wrote there in Homer’s voice—not his actual voice, obviously, but the way Homer had always sounded in my own head. I’ll admit that I’d never been much for personal photographs, but now we were snapping photos of Homer, Scarlett, and Vashti constantly. I tried to mine our everyday lives for the kinds of things I thought people who’d read the book, and now wanted to keep up with Homer on a day-to-day basis, might find entertaining. Oh boy! Turkey for dinner!, I’d write, above a snapshot of Homer doing his best to steal a bit of food from Laurence’s plate. Or, *My* little bag of catnip! MINE! along with a photo of Homer crouched protectively over one of the small bags of home-grown ‘nip a friend had sent from her Tennessee farm.

I had a hard time explaining to my mother, when she asked what my workdays now consisted of, that I spent a significant portion of my time pretending to be my cat online.

“But people do know that it’s really you posting these things, right?” she asked.

“No, mom,” I deadpanned. “People think that Homer is climbing onto the keyboard of my computer and typing these things himself.”

It was a difficult thing to explain to a parent—although it felt perfectly natural and right to me. People would laugh at “Homer’s” daily dispatches, and I was just as apt to laugh and sympathize with the comments and photos they posted themselves. Our regular readers would comment amusingly on my posts detailing Homer’s doings, and they would also post pictures and updates about their own cats. I knew more cats on a first-name basis during this time than I ever had before. It might not be strictly accurate to say that I “knew” them—seeing as I’d never actually met them. But, then again, I knew them in the same way our readers knew Homer, through the stories their humans told, the concerns they shared, and the insights they offered when one or another of us would ask questions about preferred litter brands or appropriate diets for aging cats.

This all sounds about as “cat lady” as it gets—so I’ll also add that, on occasion, our little community was able to do some real good. Every once in a while a shelter would write to me about an impossible-to-place blind cat and, inevitably, among Homer’s community, we would find the perfect home for him. An acquaintance of mine living in Queens discovered two neglected cats in the basement of her apartment building. The building super had put them down there a year earlier, when they were only kittens, for the purpose of keeping the building rat-free. He’d barely thought about them since, and now my friend wanted to find a real home for them—one from which they could see the sunlight they’d never once experienced in their lives.

Homer will never be able to see sunshine, but these two cats can…my post about them began. Within only a few days, we had half a dozen firm offers of forever homes in the New York area alone. Geoffrey Jennings from Rainy Day Books in Kansas City—a passionate cat lover—offered a trove of autographed, first-edition, collectible books to go along with the cats to their new home. Five days later, all of us in Homer’s community were rewarded with a picture of the two cats basking in the sunlight streaming through the bay window of a Brooklyn brownstone. The woman who adopted the cats named them Ellis, after Ellis Island, and Morgan, after the Morgan Library in Manhattan’s East Thirties, because the cats had come to her with a library of their own.

We also chipped in small donations, in Homer’s community, and were able to raise maybe a thousand dollars or so when natural disasters struck in various parts of the world—the kinds of tragedies that so often affected animals as well as humans, yet during which animals tended to be forgotten. My philosophy was that when you helped animals, you helped people, too—always remembering that the ASPCA, when they’d organized a rescue effort for pets in the wake of 9/11, had also helped people like me in the process. We collected food and other essentials and sent them to where they would do the most good.

Mostly, though, we simply enjoyed each other’s company.

Not that everything was all positivity and sunshine. I soon learned that whereas novels are works of fiction, memoirs are true—and while (having written one of each) I’d always been aware of this technical distinction, what I hadn’t thought about is that when readers don’t like the “character” in your memoir, the person they actually dislike is you, yourself.

I heard from people who thought I was a heartless monster for having thought about my cats on 9/11, a day when so many human lives were lost; I heard from people who thought that I’d married a man who wasn’t worthy of Homer; I heard from people who accused me of having adopted Homer twelve years earlier just so I’d someday be able to write a book about him. And I received one very long, very earnest email from an anonymous woman who was convinced that Homer had fallen ill in the months before my wedding because Laurence was slowly poisoning him with a household cleaning agent—in order to get rid of the competition, as it were, for my affections. Calling Laurence a “charismatic and sophisticated alpha male,” she warned that he was likely to reveal his true, abusive nature at any moment, and advised me in the strongest possible terms to hire a private investigator to follow him—presumably so as to catch him in the act of being unfaithful.

“Follow me where?” Laurence seemed perplexed when I shared this email with him—albeit tickled at having been described as a charismatic alpha male. “You and I both work from home.”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I’m going to start marking the levels on the Windex bottle—so don’t get any ideas.”

Poor Laurence! If only this letter-writer could have seen the grace with which—on the occasions when he joined me on one of my trips—Laurence accepted being referred to as “Mr. Cooper.” (His last name is Lerman.)

But these were only a handful of negatives floating in an overwhelmingly positive sea. I had the daily joy of hearing every day from other animal lovers, from rescuers and people who were every bit as crazy about their own cats as I was about mine.

Homer’s social-media community would continue to grow over the next couple of years. There was a big jump, after the paperback was published in 2010, when Homer’s Facebook following expanded from two thousand to five thousand people within only a few months. But a lot of people seemed to “like” the page and then forget about it—so even when the numbers would appear to indicate otherwise, our core crew stayed more or less the same size.

And, to tell the truth, at the time I liked it that way. Homer didn’t have the kind of huge following that seemed likely to sell many books. Then again, I’d never really seen Homer’s Facebook page as a place to sell copies of Homer’s Odyssey. It seemed probable that the only reason someone would follow the page was because they’d read the book already.

And, by then, Homer had gotten to be such a pro at posing for pictures, it seemed a shame to let his talents go to waste.

HOMER’S ONLINE COMMUNITY was always enjoyable, a place where I could post ongoing tales of Homer’s amusing antics, a sounding board off of which I could bounce ideas for blog posts or new books as they came to me. But I’ll always be truly grateful for the way our internet friends rallied around our family over the next two years, when first Vashti and then Scarlett fell to age-related illnesses.

Ultimately, this is Homer’s story. I won’t take you too far with me down the paths of confusion and sorrow that Laurence and I traveled during that time—paths well-trodden already by anyone who’s loved an animal.

Suffice it to say that between the time when Vashti was diagnosed with chronic renal failure in late 2009, and the time when we lost her in August of 2010, there were many months during which she lived—a life that could only be sustained by a strenuous schedule of home treatment, which seemed overwhelming and impossible for me to undertake when her doctor first explained it. I was positive that I would fail Vashti in ways I couldn’t imagine yet.

But, no matter how anxious or bewildered I felt, Homer’s community was an unquenchable source of strength and insight.

By far the hardest part of Vashti’s new care regimen was administering her every-other-day subcutaneous fluid injections, meant to help her body compensate for her failing kidneys. Vashti was a sweet girl who would tolerate just about anything we did to her, but it was easy to see how much she hated those injections—which weren’t simply a shot, but a slow drip that had to be administered over the course of several long minutes. The subQ injections were the only thing Vashti really fought us on (and, bless her heart, she didn’t fight hard—she merely struggled). Laurence had to hold her down while I inserted the tiny needle into the back of her neck, and sometimes she squirmed enough that the needle inadvertently hit a tender spot. Her tiny squeaks of pain whenever that happened left me ready to throw in the towel.

Many in Homer’s community were old hands at the subQ routine. A few of them suggested a brilliant fix for us—heating the bag containing the solution in a pot of warm water until it came to Vashti’s body temperature. This way, Vashti’s experience would feel less like being immersed in a cold shower from inside her own body, and more like the pleasant relief of a warm bath.

It was astonishing how immediate the difference was. After our first attempt with this new method, Vashti began to like her fluid injections. She would practically bounce with happiness by the time they were over, ready for a recently instituted ritual known as Vashti’s cuddle time. “It’s cuddle time!” Laurence or I would exclaim when the subQ was finished, and we’d climb into bed with Vashti eagerly following. Alone in the bedroom with us—the door closed to keep the other cats out—she would enjoy one uninterrupted hour of exclusive time with both her humans, crawling first onto my chest and purring into my face for a few minutes as I stroked her back, before walking over to Laurence and doing the same with him. She’d spend the whole hour migrating back and forth between us while the warm fluids we’d just injected spread throughout her body, and when the sixty minutes were up she’d rejoin Scarlett and Homer, cheerful as ever.

It’s hard watching an animal you love grow frailer—but Vashti was beautiful right up until the end. She did lose quite a bit of weight, but with her thick, lustrous coat of white fur it was nearly impossible to see, unless you knew her very well. And that fur never lost its silky luster. I have a picture of the two of us taken just days before the end, and in it Vashti literally glows, as if spot-lit from an unseen source.

The eternal feminine was what Laurence said of Vashti on her last day. It was something Lee Strasberg had said about Marilyn Monroe at her funeral, a way of describing the timeless, imperishable quality of her beauty—a beauty so overpowering, yet also so vulnerable, that it could reach right out and squeeze your heart until it ached.

Camille on her deathbed had nothing on our Vashti.

The paperback edition of Homer’s Odyssey came out less than a month after we lost her. This time around, my publisher did spring for a small book tour—and, even though it wasn’t near any of the four cities they’d originally planned to send me to, I insisted that the first stop be at Blind Cat Rescue & Sanctuary in North Carolina.

I’d seen pictures of many other blind cats since Homer’s story was first published, but I still hadn’t met many in the flesh. It was a moving experience to walk through Blind Cat Rescue, to enter room after room full of cats—cats who were young and old; white, gray, tabby, and calico; cats who were large and cats who were small; some who had long silky fur like Vashti’s, and some who had practically no fur at all—but who all, nevertheless, looked like Homer. They raised questioning noses into the air just like Homer did, turned their heads from side to side like sonar dishes as they tried to “see” with their ears. And, even without eyes, their faces still managed to convey the joy they’d found in their life with each other, and with their human caregivers.

Vashti may only have been a supporting player in Homer’s Odyssey. But in our lives—our real lives—she’d always had one of three starring roles. Reading from Homer’s book now, choosing a passage that included Vashti and Scarlett as well as Homer, and having just seen so many other “unadoptable” cats like Homer who’d nevertheless found happiness in loving arms, was the first time I felt truly whole since Vashti had left us.

THERE WAS DECIDEDLY less Homer on Homer’s Facebook page while all this was going on, but those core few who’d been with us from the beginning never complained or abandoned us. And they remained with us still in February of 2011, when Scarlett developed a sarcoma high on her left hind leg, the result of the rabies vaccination she’d gotten years earlier in Miami. (The specific formula that caused this sarcoma in some cats has been discontinued, by the way; you should always vaccinate your cats against rabies.)

In some ways, it was harder with Scarlett as her illness progressed than it had been with Vashti—not because it was so much worse or made her suffer more. But Scarlett had always been such a surly, feisty, irascible girl. She’d been born irritated with everybody and everything—even in her youth, she’d been the mean old lady who yells, Get off my lawn, you kids! Our other cats bothered her. Laurence’s mere existence—his insistence on living with us, despite her having made it perfectly clear that she’d prefer he left—was an ongoing annoyance. Guests in our home had obviously been sent by the devil himself, just so they could coo at her and make other friendly, insulting gestures until she was forced—in a state of high dudgeon—to harrumph her way into the seclusion of a bedroom. There were only two things in the world that Scarlett truly enjoyed—one of them was food, and the other was me. Anybody else, human or feline, was quickly reminded with a sharp rowr! and disciplinary smack of her paw to maintain their distance, leaving her to enjoy her wide berth of personal space in dignified peace.

Scarlett mellowed a great deal, however, during those last months—and I’ll admit that it made me sad to see her become more accepting and tolerant as her health failed. I do think, though, that this change was partly because Homer was so considerate of her. He slept nearer to her than he’d ever dared before. But he no longer chased her, no longer tried to insert himself into her games of “chase the paper ball,” no longer bothered her in any way. He stayed closer to Scarlett than he had in earlier years, but his closeness was far less intrusive.

We’d hoped that surgery to remove her tumor would solve the problem—and, when it didn’t, we had difficult decisions to make. There were many in Homer’s community who advocated for removing Scarlett’s leg altogether. But Scarlett was nearly seventeen, and arthritic, and she’d always been so poised and self-possessed that forcing her, at this point in her life, to adjust to getting around on only three legs seemed almost cruel. The same was true of chemotherapy. Others among our online friends had made different decisions for their own cats under similar circumstances. But everybody understood that Scarlett was Scarlett, and that there was no one-size-fits-all solution to these kinds of problems.

Scarlett had become so quiet and tractable by the time we knew it was over, in December of 2011, that it was almost as if she wasn’t there anymore. She was the first cat I’d ever lived with, and there was a special pain in her loss. When I brought her to the vet for the last time, I couldn’t even give my name to the receptionist without bursting into tears.

But Scarlett had one last gift for me. She’d been so silent and immobile in her carrier that I wasn’t even sure she was still awake. But when the doctor very gently inserted the needle into her neck, Scarlett’s eyes—which had been glazed and unfocused for the past day—quickly sharpened and narrowed. I knew by now that a needle so small, injected into the relatively insensitive scruff of her neck, wouldn’t hurt her. But Scarlett still had enough of her personal dignity left to resent that a stranger had dared touch her at all. With her typical churlish rowr! of old, she reached up out of her cloth, blanket-lined carrier to take an annoyed swipe at the vet’s hand. Get off my lawn, you kids!

It was so quintessentially Scarlett that I couldn’t help but chuckle through my tears. There’s my surly girl! For that brief moment, she wasn’t the ailing, compliant Scarlett of the last few months. She was once again the crusty curmudgeon I’d loved so well for so long.

I would always say after that, in describing her final moments, that Scarlett had gotten to die as she’d lived—really, really pissed off.

HOMER TRULY GRIEVED when we lost Scarlett, and Homer’s community grieved with us. After about three days, when it became clear that she wasn’t coming back, Homer seemed to age overnight. His customary run slowed to a walk, and his walk took on the stiff, wide-legged gait of an old man. He was no longer interested in chasing crumpled balls of paper across the living room, or in demanding bits of turkey from Laurence’s sandwiches. Even a fresh sprinkling of home-grown catnip on the rug would leave him apathetic.

It was heartbreaking to see the transformation—made painfully ironic by the certainty I felt that Scarlett herself would have been perfectly content to be the last cat standing. As far as Scarlett was concerned, the best days of her life had been the earliest ones, when she was an only cat.

But Homer had always thought about his relationship with Scarlett very differently than Scarlett did. In Homer’s mind, Scarlett was the (unwitting) supporting player in a thousand stalk-and-pounce adventure tales Homer liked to tell himself. She was his foil, his muse, his great nemesis, and he was never happier than when he’d finally succeeded in irritating her to the point that she would swat at him, nip at his neck, and then chase him down the hall before turning around to let him chase her back into the bedroom. While she hadn’t been especially playful during her last months, she’d still been there—a comforting presence and warm scent, familiar for as long as he could remember, against which Homer could curl up and doze contentedly.

But it wasn’t just the loss of Scarlett herself. Equally hard on Homer, I think, was the fact that he was now alone whenever Laurence and I were out. We had the luxury of spending far more time with Homer than most cat parents could with their own, simply because we worked from our apartment—but, still, we couldn’t be home all the time. A trip to the vet, while unpleasant for all concerned (Homer’s deep-seated hatred of the vet’s office having only grown more intense with time), revealed that—physically, at least—he was in fine health.

What Homer needed more than anything was a new friend.

I thought that an older, more seasoned adult cat might make an ideal companion for Homer. Accordingly, I pulled first one owner-surrendered cat—and, when she and Homer didn’t “click,” another—from the euthanization lists at a New York open-intake shelter. My plan was to foster these cats and, if things worked out, to let them become “foster failures”—permanent members of our family.

There’s always a period of adjustment when two adult cats get to know each other. Even in understanding this, however, things seemed particularly rough between Homer and first one, then the other, of the new cats we tried introducing him to. Poor Homer was utterly incapable of picking up on the visual body language of a wary cat. He had no way of seeing the arched back, the puffed tail, the backward steps of a cat who was unsure if Homer’s approach was friendly or hostile. Scarlett and Vashti had known him since he was a kitten, and had grown accustomed to his seemingly odd ways. But to the cats we brought home now, Homer’s eyeless black face must have appeared completely expressionless. He would approach them for a friendly, how ya doin’? mutual sniff, and was met with nothing but aggressive rebuffs.

Truth be told, I probably could have made it work with at least one of the cats if I’d really put the time in. But I didn’t have the heart to subject Homer to any more stress after the loss of his two best friends. So I worked with a couple of the no-kill shelters I’d developed relationships with, and eventually we were able to find forever homes for both our fosters. (I still get pictures of them from their happy adoptive humans, and it always makes me smile.)

And that was how, early in 2012, we ended up adopting two little black kittens—litter-mates named Clayton and Fanny. Clayton had a damaged hind leg that we knew from the beginning would most likely have to come off sooner or later. (As it turned out—sooner.)

I’ll tell their story in full later on. For now, it’s enough to know that, even by kitten standards, Clayton and Fanny were ridiculously cheerful and high-spirited. There’s probably nothing more irresistible than a kitten who adores you—and our kittens adored their new big brother immediately, right from the start. They were so playful, so eager to please, so ready to worship Homer in an abject, shameless way, that Homer would have had to be much more hard-hearted than he was to resist their charms. Homer couldn’t see the goofy way Clayton would excitedly bunny-hop beside him on his three good legs, but I think Homer could sense it—and before long he was running, leaping, and chasing after toys, over the furniture and off the walls of our home, with all his old zest.

Ultimately, Homer recovered because he wasn’t made for grief. It wasn’t just that he was too innately happy—he was also too strong. Homer’s strength was a force of nature, his will to live indomitable, as we would soon come to learn. All he needed in order to heal was a reminder that the world was still full of joy—that joy itself had been, and always would be, the very substance of his life.

I, of course, had known this about Homer all along. I’d written an entire book about it.

Playing the role of big brother was a new adventure for Homer. And new adventures were what Homer had always lived for.