How Kitten's Death Showed Me Breath Which Showed Me Life

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I was spread out with all my diva needs on my sectional couch, writing and reading, while my 18-year-old cat sprawled next to me atop a plastic garbage bag and cozy bath towel because she couldn’t move, and she might have needed to pee. I didn’t know what was left in her bowels ever since she stopped eating and walking the day before. The vet said to expect this. She would die soon and all I could see was her torso moving up and down, a clear indication of her breath. That day it was so noticeable. All the eighteen years prior, it never occurred to me to notice her breath.

“Today,” I thought, “she breathes. Therefore, she lives. Tomorrow — we’ll see.”

Same with you and me. Today we breathe.

I’ve lived most of my life, or all of it, never noticing my breath. Sure, sometimes my breathing stands out and rattles me — as when I exercise hard, gasp in surprise, hold my breath under water then burst with an exhale as I emerge, or when I’m scared or angry. Otherwise, my breath is relegated to the background of my consciousness.

Yet, breath is the foremost symbol of my aliveness. The quintessential reminder. It’s part and parcel. It sure makes life a lot easier.

I live in my head, but there are moments in my day when I’m catapulted out of my mind and land in my body. This is when my knee or shoulder hollers at me, or my hip screeches, or my eyes get dry and I need to apply more eyedrops — stuff like that. This is when I know I have a body. Oh, hello there, body.

It’s amazing to find out I have a body because it isn’t playing second fiddle to my thoughts — more like fifteenth fiddle. It’s sort of like: thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Then the hip screams, “Help me!” Then I move or stretch said hip. Then back to thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.

This is life in Steph-land. Next year Steph-land will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, and the key piece to its success all this time has been its breath, a hidden asset no one ever noticed. Once I started meditating some years ago, I discovered this secret asset, and it was an existential shock.

When you do meditation, a common initial goal is to shift yourself out of any sympathetic nervous system clamor. This way you can begin to focus on whatever it is the meditation will have you do.

One way to remove yourself from the clamor is to slow your breathing and notice your breath. Super simple, but tricky if you’re stuck in your mind. What you’re really trying to do is shift your brain into its task-positive neural network so you begin to notice something in front of you rather than wild, flowy thoughts flying all around you. The longer you stick with meditating, the easier it is to remove yourself from the clamor. It becomes a matter-of-fact thing, rather than an “I’m failing at this” thing.

Since this is a desirable skill to have, you can imagine there are research dollars allotted to watching how the brain changes over time by teaching yourself how to “keep coming back.” Pro tip: the brain will always wander. It’s what it does. But it gets easier to come back and to stay removed from the clamor.

Being mindful is good for the brain, yes, but it’s luxurious, too. It can feel like a spa vacation as you sit in your car waiting for the traffic light to change.

What hit me years ago as I started to listen to my meditation phone app for a mere 10 minutes a day, was the odd experience of noticing I was alive. I never notice this through the day, the physical reality of it. Yes, conceptually it’s obvious I’m alive. But when you observe it in this thing we take for granted — breath — it becomes a distilled matter of fact.

It’s a peculiar feeling for someone who lives in her head. It’s a stunner. In the mind, the conceptualization of life is infinite. In the body, the reality is finite.

Perhaps this is all silly. Am I even saying anything? I might be, except I see how shocking it is when people come face to face with the finite body of their just-dead loved ones. There they are, hands on a body that seconds ago ceased to breathe. The reality of the body becomes clear. The fact of the limits of the body is undeniable. They are in shock.

For me, when I quiet myself and notice my breathing, it’s similar. I can see my body is not an expansive abstract entity. It’s a body bound by the Universe’s laws of life and death. This is how it was with my cat.

As I sat next to Kitten, I comforted her. I’d write a paragraph, pet her, write some more, pet her. She gave the slightest meow. Her body stretched the length of my thigh. We could feel each other. She was in no distress, only a fading process as she passed onto the next kitty realm. Through it all, I looked down and focused on her torso’s rise and fall, expansion and deflation. But I never noticed my torso rise and fall. I was either in the here-and-now of Kitten or the swirling melancholy in my mind.

Each of our torsos continued to expand for the inhale then release, until later that evening one of them ceased and lay perfectly still.

My two sons were there. The three of us kept petting her despite Kitten’s breath having disappeared. She was soft as she always was. Her form was intact, and our hands smoothed over her like any old day. Her eyes stared straight ahead as they would when there was petting. The concept of Kitten was unchanged in our minds and the fact of our stroking her gently was business as usual.

But there was no breath. The laws of the Universe came down hard and drew the line. Conceptualization is unpredictable and boundless. Physical life is predictable. One day it will cease to breathe.

We buried Kitten next to her mom, Mama, in the backyard. It was a hot day and hard-as-hell ground to contend with. Our effort was sizable to dig the hole and our breath strong and labored. We gave Kitten a nice resting spot. I’ll landscape it soon — pretty ferns and flowering perennials that my grazing cattle (aka deer) hopefully won’t munch. I saw the most magnificent butterfly on the flowering bush on the other side of Mama’s grave. It made me as happy as can be. What a lovely community my kitties now live in.

I said goodbye to my cats, picked up the shovels and rakes, loaded up the wheelbarrow, and turned to go. “It’s the end of an era,” I said to myself.

As I walked toward the shed, I exhaled a deep sigh — and I noticed.

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Friends, hope your summer is going well.