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.
GWEN COOPER is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat; the novels Love Saves the Day and Diary of a South Beach Party Girl; and the crowd-sourced collection of cat selfies, Kittenish, 100% of the proceeds from which were donated to support animal rescue in Nepal following the 2015 earthquake. She is a frequent speaker at shelter fundraisers and donates 10% of her royalties from Homer’s Odyssey to organizations that serve abused, abandoned, and disabled animals. She also manages Homer’s ongoing social-media community, which reaches nearly two million cat enthusiasts and rescuers around the world each day.