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On Christmas Eve, the Warring honored the Blood. I don’t understand it, myself.
The previous Christmas, I’d sat in the dark in a Hampton Inn, writing an obituary for a cat. Her small paprika body had filled with fluid. Strangers were tearful across longitudes, never having touched her.
The news came by text message while my family was eating nougat. I peeked beneath the table and stepped into the stream: “We need to let Consetta go.” “Oh God.” “RIP baby girl.” “Please kiss her for me!“
My uncle, suburbia’s secret Toscanini, was ad-libbing an oratorio. Wouldn’t it be grand if we could all tour Italy together? Just picture a six-week odyssey across our ancestral lands, sharing every meal and glimpse.
I crawled back under the table. “My heart is breaking. I’m grateful she was ours, and we were hers.”
My boss confirmed, “Angela, you’ll write her ‘Forever Loved?’”
“Of course.”
My lovely cousin was talking about her marathon times, and my baritone cousin was talking about NASDAQ. I did not know what that stood for. I passed the nougat a third time.
I wondered how quickly my blood sugar would vault if I snatched a square of citron imprisoned in corn syrup. I wondered how my kin would answer if I leaked, scratching tears in the curtain. I did not want to eat scallopine in Milan. I did not want to talk about television and power rankings and pie. I wanted to go home to New Jersey with my unwashed friends and ragged cats and reckless donors and sugar-free hard candy.
My family never said anything impolite. My work was neither secret nor shameful. It was acknowledged every year, here in the house where no white hairs had ever coated a couch. Angela worked for the cat sanctuary. Angela still worked for the cat sanctuary. Angela ran Capital Campaigns, which were chewy and commendable. But they were for cats. Angela was still at this after sixteen years.
Some years, I subpoenaed my mettle and said too much over the artichoke dip. “The shelter is a parable. We live for the broken. All my little cat stories are in service to a big story.”
One year, I told my lovely cousin that “we are trying to increase the sum total of love in the world.”
She looked afraid. She complimented my necklace. She asked if I had considered applying to a big nonprofit in New York. She suggested increased physical activity would assist with my blood glucose control.
She never said, “but they’re just cats.” She never asked why I wasn’t raising money for children, or why I called the cats children, or if I considered online dating. Such things are better said to your father from Juilliard after the tattooed diabetic cousin has gone back to the Hampton Inn.
At the Hampton Inn, I flipped through the Psalms and 150 free channels. My mother knocked on my door with a Diet Coke in each hand. “You didn’t drink enough today. You didn’t come up for air.”
“I never do.”
“I know.” My mother was the one who had taught me that the analgesic for shyness is to ask everyone else about themselves.
“I have to write an obituary.”
“Oh, honey. Christmas Eve?” My mother almost understood.
“I have to write while my heart is freshly broken.”
I took the Diet Cokes and gazed over the parking lot, past the Longhorn Steakhouse and the Ross Dress for Less. My friends would be filling ketchup cups with turkey baby food now, distributing them to paraplegic cats. The inscrutable and the ungrateful would feast. People who could be making real money were sitting on the floor with unadoptable animals. People on fixed incomes were writing ten-dollar daisy checks to Cat Haven. People who refused to pray were pressing their foreheads against the holy.
People who had read about Consetta were soaking Facebook with weeping. My uncle was impressed that the blog received five hundred to a thousand hits a day, but “your writing deserves a stage. Have you thought about a book?”
I was thinking about how to bear witness to a speckled life.
I was thinking about the storming of standards. I pecked out terrible prose about immortality and string theory and the light that is content to be misunderstood. I backspaced it all and wrote about the cat. I was not submitting to The Paris Review. I was handing Kleenex to saints in sweatshirts. I didn’t understand it myself.
A year later, the shelter people remembered Consetta, and they instructed this December’s children to survive the holiday. I yammered with donors. They sponsored diabetic cats and honored each other with donations of twenty-five dollars or more.
The day before I was due at the Hampton Inn, we received a donation that made me look around for Dickens’ ghost. A woman with the last name “Warring” donated in honor of a man with the last name “Blood.” The subject line in my inbox: “Warring In Honor Of Blood.”
I could not make this up, any more than I could make gracious people understand sixteen years at a shelter. With raw broccoli in my teeth and white hairs on my sweater, I would ask my relatives about themselves. I would hydrate. I would try to understand that we are in a fight for our lives. I would make peace.
Angela Townsend
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Cagibi, Chautauqua, Fathom Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Penn Review, The Razor, and Still Point Arts Quarterly, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately. She lives just outside Philadelphia with two shaggy seraphs disguised as cats.
