THE WEEKEND READ
MATTY & FINN: THE METAPHYSICS OF BREAKING YOUR OWN HEART AND THE TAOISM OF CATS
(Above: Matty’s first morning with Finn and me.)
“I need a grey one so that it matches my loft,” I said at the desk of AnimalKind, the animal rescue place on Warren Street here in Hudson, New York. The dog I had volunteered to foster had been kept by its owners up in Vermont and Katrin, the German-born woman who founded AnimalKind, was trying to convince me to foster a cat instead. I just assumed with that flippant remark that she would assume, in turn, that I was too shallow a single homosexual to welcome a cat into my home. As this weekend has unfolded a few years later, I am realizing that hoped-for assumption might have been correct if she had only made it about me as I am guiltily and sadly now making it about myself. I had recently lost my second dog, Teddy, back then to kidney failure when he died in my arms one sunrise a few days before I had scheduled a vet appointment to ease him into his death during the first month of the COVID pandemic’s lockdown. That sunrise was one of the most beautiful yet difficult in my life as Teddy’s flew from him with one final breath, a long groan that had found a way to the other side of a growl and knew nowhere else to go but heavenward. Teddy and his “brother” Archie, my other dog who had died of cancer in San Francisco a couple of years before, had been in my life for almost 16 years and, alone again, I was bereft when I stood at that counter at AnimalKind and was so selfishly desperate to heal the emotional pain I was feeling that I, a dog person, was suddenly and surprisingly considering fostering a cat.
“We do have a grey one, in fact,” said Katrin who had that day both the air of a saint and a German dominatrix about her. She is probably neither so I have settled in the years since on seeing her as a witch in the Kim Novak mode, one who conjures kindness and magically saves the lives of kittens. But that day she was intent on saving an adult male cat. “His name is Finn,” she continued in her no-nonsense way that has an edge of nobility about it - much like the characteristics (edgy and noble) I was about to discover in Finn when I turned to meet him in the glass-walled room right behind me. Finn seemed either to be overly concerned that anyone could conceive of his ever having been a kitten or, conversely, longed perhaps to be one again. Whichever it was, his longing seemed to be centered on being anything other than who he was at that very moment. I could identify. As our eyes met in that room where he cowered in the corner and I crouched down to get a look at him, I felt as seen as he did. That is the day I brought him home - or, more precisely, brought him back to my loft which his presence made a home once more.
Katrin didn’t know much about Finn’s story before he made his way to AnimalKind but his immediate history had involved being rejected and brought back to them by the woman who had adopted him with another cat, a female one with whom he had bonded. The woman had insisted that neither was affectionate enough for her. Someone else quickly adopted the female one but Finn, whose diffidence could be wrongly defined as arrogance, had been languishing in that glass-walled room until I, orphaned early in my childhood, immediately bonded with him over our shared issues of abandonment. When he got back to my loft with me, however, he immediately ran and hid under the lower towel shelf in my bathroom, and he was not budging. So that first night I put down comforters and pillows and slept on the bathroom floor next to him. I know now that I needed to be trusted as much as he needed to trust. Our love for each other was based on that shared need as much as our shared understanding of what it meant to be abandoned. We bonded because we were damaged in the same way. We relied on the resilience of the other in order to realize our better selves.
(Above: Where I slept my first night with Finn.)
That was June and when Christmas rolled around, I decided that Finn needed a sister to replace the one that had been taken from him. That is when Matty came into our lives. I adopted her from AnimalKind when Katrin told me she had been saving her for Finn and me. I got lots of advice from “cat people” about how to introduce another cat into a cat’s life in my loft but she was a kitten and I just instinctively knew that Finn would more than accept her; he would love her. And he did. Immediately. As did I. They have been inseparable since the first moment she entered our life. Where Finn was stand-offish, Matty was tactile - even sort of savvy - with her purring love. She proved tougher than Finn yet showed him such tenderness. When I’d travel for a couple of months at a time, I’d always tell her to take care of Finn before the latest cat sitter arrived to tend to them both while living in the loft. I don’t think I ever told Finn to take care of her.
I am writing about them now in the past tense because my travel schedule has turned into my setting out to begin a new kind of life starting in November, one for which I am selling everything I own and donating the rest. But then there were Finn and Matty. The one thing that gave me pause as I answered the instinctive call I was feeling to live such a life was my having to re-home them in order to do it. But I made the decision that I had to answer that pilgrim’s call completely to simplify my life and set forth and therefore I had to find a new home for the two of them. Finn and Matty had more than saved my life. They had renewed it. They had put hope into it. Indeed, adopting cats for a dog person like me had even inserted an unexpected sense of adventure into it. To honor what Matty and Finn had conjured in my life by being in my life they no longer alas could be in it. That was finally the conundrum, the heartbreaking one. That was the final lesson they were teaching me, how to break my own heart. I told friends that living with them had been almost a metaphysical experience of watching them shape-shift at times. But all that time I thought I was seeing them do so, they were patiently causing me do it for that is what I now realize I am actually doing: I am shape-shifting my life. Their presence in it as it began to do so was a physical sort of wisdom with which I was imbued because they were generous enough to allow a bit of themselves to come to rest inside me. I could not be doing this without Finn and Matty guiding me to this very moment. They were not guileless as guides but their guile was generous and honest. Some say cats are our familiars. I like to think of Finn and Matty finally instead as my guides, carnal creatures but spiritual beings.
The other important lessons they taught me were to acknowledge need without being needy, to acknowledge the depth of sentiment without polluting it with sentimentality, to acknowledge discernment as different than judgement. So to honor them, I have deleted the paragraph I initially had imagined writing here to justify my rehoming them by making my readers tear up at how valiant I have been in the face of such an awful task. That is something else they taught me to do that comes in handy as a writer: delete the unnecessary before wasting your time in an attempt to convince others of its necessity.
Finn and Matty’s rehoming however was just that: a necessity. But how to go about it with as much love as possible? I prayed to Bastet a lot to be a conduit to an even better home for them - I was determined not to separate them, did not even consider it as a possibility - and I conferred with Katrin who asked me to send her some photos of them and to write a little narrative about them. So I sent her that first photo above along with a couple of others. And I wrote, “Meet Finn and Matty. I brought Finn home from Animal Kind to foster him after I lost my dog, Teddy, and needed to heal from that loss. Finn and his healing presence stayed. So I'm not sure if I adopted him or fostered him, but I do know he did both to me. That first Christmas he was with me I brought Matty home from Animal Kind as a kitten as a gift to us both. That photo of them hugging was their first morning together. Finn accepted her immediately - that is the kind of open heart he has. Where Finn is rather the silent aloof type, he certainly is not with her. He adores her. She is talkative and more tactile with her love for him and humans. I love them dearly but my life is changing and can't take them with me. I pray that they find a good home together. This is breaking my heart but Finn and Matty healed that heart so it could break again. Indeed, they proved to me that I had one. I hope that someone finds it in their own heart to give them a home together and that their life with me proves to be a conduit to an even better one with someone else. Thank you for thinking about loving these two loving creatures.”
Within a day, Katrin emailed me: “CALL ME!!!!! I found a GREAT home!!!!” And she had. She told me that there was a single guy who lived alone over in Chatham - isn’t the French word for cat “chat”? - who had recently lost the second cat of the two he had had for a long time. He had not, in the deepness of his grief, wanted to adopt so soon another two cats but he was moved by what I had written and loved their photos. Katrin told me it was a miracle to find a home so quickly for two adult cats. I met him last week and he was so sweet and soft spoken and empathetic and such a cat person. Even cute. Matty adored him instantly and Finn came out of hiding - unheard of when a stranger was amongst us in the loft - and became affectionate with me so he could see that side of him. He fell for them instantly. And before he left he told me that his best friend is named Matty and that Matty has a son named Finn. You can’t make that shit up. Well, you can. But I haven’t. There might not be a God, but there certainly is such a thing as a Goddess’s grace for I believe with all of that heart, which Finn and Matty made me believe I had again, that Bastet heard my prayers. Their new home is an answered prayer and I am trying to live in the gratitude and not the sorrow that I was a conduit for it and the person who prayed the prayer that was answered for them.
Yesterday I said goodbye to Finn and Matty with a broken heart but a revived spirit and new view of life. I haven’t sobbed like that in a long time, the sound was like a groan on the other side of a growl that had nowhere else to go but inward where the deeper sense of abandonment and loss I have carried around with me all my orphaned life was being lanced just a little more. It was harder than I had imagined but the only thing worse than sobbing like that would have been not to have sobbed. They were not sentimental tears but flowed from the deepest and truest of sentiments. I won’t go into that any further and keep it private and thus - yes, mam, Bastet - sacred.
The night before I said goodbye I cleaned their litter box for the last time. It is hard to describe how much I hated cleaning their litter box. I confess that tonight. I had not cleaned it in two or three days because of the physical pain of oral surgery I had suffered recently as well as everything else on my organizational plate as I move to London and Paris on November 1st for the next six months. There was a lot to scoop out but I wanted them to have a clean litter box their last night here. With each clump of piss and each bit of shit I scooped out I said this: thank you. I said this over and over and over. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. It was a last act of gratitude and humility in my old life and the first act of both in my new one.
John N. Gray in his book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, writes, “In In The Sage and the Way: Spinoza’s Ethics of Freedom, its author Jon Wetlesen writes that Taoism ‘does not aim at becoming what one is not, but in being what one is.’ …Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live. Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not.”
I am not a cat person but I am a person who continues to love two extraordinary sentient beings who happen to be cats. I am no longer a person who needs the aesthetics of things and stuff to prove my worth. I am worthy enough in my sentience. I do need a home but it is now what I carry within me. Matty and Finn taught me, a person who is not a cat person, to be more like a cat.
Here is John Gray on the 10 Philosophical Hints from Felines on How to Live a Contented Life:
Never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable.
It is foolish to complain you do not have enough time.
Do not look for meaning in your suffering.
It is better to be indifferent to others than to feel you have to love them.
Forget about pursuing happiness and you may find it.
Life is not a story.
Do not fear the dark, for much that is precious is found in the night.
Sleep for the joy of sleeping.
Beware anyone who offers to make you happy.
If you cannot learn to live a little more like a cat, return without regret to the human world of diversion.
Living like a cat, according to Gray and Finn and Matty, means wanting nothing beyond the life you lead. I can hear Finn now in that low, lovely voice of his that I invented for him, “You’ve got this, Kev. Read that again: want nothing beyond the life you lead.” And then there’s Matty’s more lowdown yet somehow refined one, an incongruous cadence of care and so much grown-up allure: “I’d re-read #6 if I were you, dear boy. But thank the Goddess Bastet in spite of invented voices and described attributes, I’m not. Now I have to go take care of Finn. Goodbye.”
Thank you, Finn and Matty. I hope a bit of me came to rest inside of you as well. Here’s to the metaphysics and the Taoism of our having met each other then set forth to continue our lives lived in better ways because we lived a bit of those lives together. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you …
(Above: Matty photographed by Joshua Bley.)
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(Above: Finn and Matty photographed by Everett McCourt)
(Above: Finn)
I’ve followed this story since the beginning: what I know - they now know unconditional love because of you, they know each other because of you - you gave them a new life & now they’re rooting you on on your pilgrimage! So much love.
The depth of your connection with Matty and Finn will always exist in the present tense as all of you embark on new journeys. Your devotion and love for them is stunning - they’ll be with you in Europe, curled up within. All love.