What is a comfort cat?
How did my cat Tasha become one?
Why didn’t we find out until long after it happened?
It’s a mystery to us.
But, when we finally heard the story, we felt so proud.
Here’s what happened–in those long ago days of early COVID-19 lockdown.
Had anyone seen our cat?
Tasha went out every morning, checked the yard, and then jumped the back fence to disappear into our neighbor’s overgrown vegetation on the other side.
She generally returned for “cat curfew” around 6, when we let her in and locked the door.
Tasha glared when we wouldn’t let her out for a night prowl, but so what?
We’re the ones who fed her, etc.
Her nightly agitation, however, made me suspect another family claimed her heart.
My husband laughed. “Why?”
“Because she doesn’t gulp down her food.”
He scratched her ears. She nestled beside him on the recliner and glared at me.
One day, I walked up the street behind ours. I came across her lounging in the front bushes of the house behind our back fence.
As I questioned her (Tasha licked her paw), the mother and son whom I’d not met before, came out of the house.
“Is that your cat?” they asked.
I explained.
Then they told me a poignant story of Tasha as a comfort cat.
What did a comfort cat do?
Husband and father Chris, whom I’d met, recently died.
Tasha was his comfort cat throughout a long illness.
I glanced down. She washed her paw.
“She’d hop the fence every morning,” the wife explained.
“If I took Chris outside, she sat beside his wheelchair, and put her paw on his foot. It was so comforting.”
Our cat?
“Sometimes she let him pet her.”
The woman’s voice broke. “One day Chris had a stroke. She kneaded his leg, as if for comfort.”
At my feet that day, Tasha rolled over and yawned.
“We meant no disrespect. We sent her home at night. But . . . “
“I’m so happy she could help,” I broke in that humbling day. “Had I known, I would have sent her with treats.”
They laughed and told me more about Chris.
I went home thankful that while I didn’t know about the tragedy across my back fence, my cat did–and she helped.
A comfort dog, yes, but a cat?
I’d heard about comfort dogs–they were very helpful for children during our Sonoma County fires.
But I’d never considered an aloof cat like ours might have a sensitivity towards others she never showed at home.
Indeed, she reaches out and swats at me all the time.
But history is replete with stories about animals with an uncanny sense of how to help.
It may be a lonely child who needs comfort. Nursing homes have found the presence of animals perk up their patients. Several widow friends adopted dogs to keep them company.
I got one myself when we lived alone in the woods and I wanted an animal who would alert me of danger at night.
A friend has a dog who senses her diabetes numbers–and has saved her life more than once.
And the purr of a contented cat on your lap can lower your blood pressure.
Tasha loves my husband–maybe she prefers males–but rarely sits on my life and purrs.
Still, during one season of a dying man’s life, she served as a surprising sensitive comfort cat.
We marvel when we think of it.
But we still think she needs to be in for curfew.
Right?
This post originally ran in a slightly different format in my October 2021 newsletter.
For other stories like this, or about other adventures, consider signing up for my newsletter. It’s easy, free, and designed to be reading in about a minute on the 15th of the month.
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The poignant story of a comfort cat for a dying man. Click to Tweet
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Barb, she went to PetSmart,
for that is where best dog food’s at,
but scarce thought she’d lose her heart
to a little psycho cat
who with others played not well,
would hiss rather than purr,
but something ’bout my wife did tell,
cat took a shine to her,
but Barb was hesitant to bring
to our home another beast,
and so I said, “Adopt the thing,
for doing so’s the least
we can do, and please make haste
for a feline with good taste.”
It worked!
Yeah! Thanks for a lovely poem, too!