The Cat Who Misses His Family

There are four pictures on the door to my mother's room. Cut from the last calendar she hung in her home these pictures are drawings of cats, her favorite animal. Her cats rest against the backgrounds of the four seasons, and daily she mentions to me how much she likes to look at them. I like them, too, although we disagree on which one we like best (for me it's winter, she claims summer).

We play a game with these cats, a "Which One's Your Favorite" game. I watch her look at them in the same way you look at a newly hung picture on your living room wall, a studious look, a look that gives thought to placement, balance, color. She does this every afternoon and even though I choose a different cat each time, she does not. She always chooses the cat of Summer.

In this picture her cat has yellow yarn wrapped around his paw, the ball sits to his left. In the window behind him, daisies and sunshine. She likes this cat because to her he is sad, visibly sad with eyes focused on the yarn. She watches him as I ask why he is her favorite. Her answer, "Because they've gone to the beach without him and he knows it."

Her ability to weave a story, to imagine stories behind pictures appeals to me and I ask her about the others. The Winter cat, staring at the cardinal through the window crusted with snow "wants to bite the bird". The Fall cat sitting in the basket of leaves "is happy", the Spring cat surrounded by tulips is "glad to be outside". The stories, her stories of her cats, as immobile as the pictures themselves fill some of our time together and with each day that passes these stories, her stories, remain between us. Between us and the cats.

Last night, when sleep wouldn't come for me, I thought about all she has forgotten and the new memories that fail to take hold in her. Her great-grandchildren, visitors, friends and even the staff who care for her day after day arrive new to her each day. But her cat, this summer cat with his sadness based in loneliness, she remembers. I can't help but wonder if she remembers this because it is what she lives and can't voice. That when we come into her room it is for fleeting moments, short-lived stretches of her life interrupted by extended hours without us. Those hours when we are at the beach without her and she knows it.