Broken Pottery and Sick Cats
When It’s Ok To Be Shattered
This summer, after a 12-year absence, my family (my wife, daughter, myself, 2 cats, and 1 goldfish) moved from Los Angeles back to our hometown of Nashville. We did this primarily to be closer to my mother, who suffered a stroke several years ago and who now lives in an assisted living facility. I accepted a new job that came with a promotion and significant pay raise, and we packed up our condo in Sherman Oaks and drove 2,000 miles to our old neighborhood.
It all happened quickly — too quickly, I now realize.
In January, my wife and I began considering the idea, and we started the job search, thinking it would take a year to find an opportunity in either of our fields that would be sufficient to bring us across the country and set us up in new lives in our old town.
To our surprise, a design firm took swift interest in me, and by April I was leaving my job as a corporate copywriter to work as the senior writer and content manager for a rapidly growing company. I would work long-distance from Los Angeles until we could make the move in the summer. We found a rental house in our old neighborhood, bought a new used car, and began jettisoning possessions and bidding wrenching goodbyes to friends.
- June 3 was my daughter’s last day of the 4th grade.
- June 6 the movers came and we drove out of Los Angeles. My 13-year-old cat, a big, sweet flame point named Cool Hand Luke, who hated not being under what we called “Luke Power,” peed all over my daughter before we’d even reached Arizona.
- June 9, we arrived in Nashville, road weary and hopeful.
- June 13, I started my new job.
- June 27, Cool Hand Luke died.
When the temperature of a kiln is raised too quickly, the pottery inside it explodes.
I’ve only stolen one thing in my life, and it was a book. When I was in high school, backward rebel that I was, I stole a copy of Emerson’s essays from my school library (I still have it, sorry DCA) predominately because of this statement:
“There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former.”
In my limited experience as a 16-year-old, I conflated this with church talk of humans as earthenware vessels for the spirit. I read it and pictured our bodies as ceramic urns into which the fire of the soul is poured, to be carried with care through the hurly-burly of an adult life that I couldn’t yet fully imagine.
By the time we arrived in Nashville this year, my urn already showed a network of cracks from 43 years of rough handling—a turbulent early life, brief and ultimately unsustainable careers as a musician, journalist, and actor. Two unpublished novels and heaps of unpublished stories and scripts. A battle with alcoholism and four years of sobriety. A creeping sense of failure.
I returned to a hometown in the throes of boomtown transmogrification. The wholesale razing of the old amid a spate of rapacious development. Weird, spindly gentrifier mansions springing up like hydra heads, two on every lot where one old Tudor or ranch once stood. The names of neighborhoods had changed.
The new job was challenging, and utterly terrifying. I joined a company also in the throes of a boom, and found myself with an overwhelming workload and the realization that being the guy who makes the decisions isn’t nearly as romantic as it seems when you’re the guy taking the orders.
My wife, ever more pragmatic and intelligent than I, immediately adjusted to the move and to her changed hometown. My daughter bloomed. The ability to walk out the front door and into a yard with a picket fence and trees gave her a new kind of autonomy. She adores my father, and had him at our new place starting a vegetable garden with her by our second week.
Even the goldfish adjusted.
It was Whiskey, our 14-year-old tortoiseshell cat who I was the most worried about. Both of our cats were adopted in Nashville, and had moved with us from there to Washington, DC, then Maryland, then Los Angeles, and now back to Nashville again to live less than a mile from where they were adopted. Whiskey is a tiny cat, ornery and prickly, and very resistant to change. She didn’t leave the closet for her first several days, but eventually ventured out.
Cool Hand Luke, on the other hand, adjusted immediately, as he was wont to do when under his own conveyance. He found his old floor pillow next to a new fireplace (in Los Angeles, he spent hours on the pillow, gazing at his reflection in the glass of the fireplace there — we said he was talking to The Cat Who Lives In the Fireplace). He curled up at our feet in bed at night, he jumped on my chest in the mornings and shoved his whole nose into my nostril, purring like a muscle car underwater.
It was me who didn’t fit in. It was within me that the pressure was building and the cracks were widening.
Cats get sick in secret.
This is a thing that we all know, but that we rarely fully comprehend until we experience it firsthand — they do it in secret, and it’s a slipping away so quiet that you almost don’t notice.
- On Friday, Luke greeted me at the door like he always did, and followed me to the kitchen where I stopped to talk to him before putting my things away, and then to the couch, where he climbed on me for his evening conversation and pets.
- Saturday, I unpacked the books and put them on the shelves. The neighbor kid came over and played with our daughter. My dad dropped in for a visit. Luke spent the day in the bathroom, his belly flat on the cool tiles. It was Tennessee in June, and we thought little of it.
- Sunday morning, he only left the bathroom once, and that was to smell his food and then huddle under the dining table for a few minutes. I noticed that he’d urinated on the floor of the bathroom and the dining room. My wife called the pet emergency clinic and took him in. When we picked him up to put him in his carrier, it was evident that he’d dropped a drastic amount of weight in a very short time.
The clinic ran tests and concluded that Luke was diabetic, and that he probably had a minor infection of some sort. They just needed to get him hydrated, get his fluids and blood sugar right, and then he could come home and we’d begin the business of managing life with a diabetic cat.
But he didn’t get better. On Monday morning, we transferred him to his veterinarian. That afternoon, my wife called me at work, solemn and quiet, and asked me to call the doctor. Luke’s condition was far more serious than diabetes, and it was most likely liver cancer. The doctor suspected that he had been sick for a very long time, with little discomfort, but deteriorating steadily. We had all the discussions about treatments, ran the percentages. I cried and yelled and grew quiet, and we made the appointment.
My daughter didn’t want to be in the room when Luke died. So, my wife went in and said goodbye to him, then took our daughter home. I sat with Luke while the doctor administered the sedative and then the final shot. I sang to him and recounted our many adventures. I called him all of his nicknames, and told him how handsome he was and how much he was loved, both of which I think he knew.
We were looking into one another’s eyes when he died.
He passed away at his very first veterinarian’s office, directly across the street from where we adopted him 13 years ago.
Monday night, Luke died. Tuesday morning, I went back to work. Because that’s what we do. We get up and go to work.
In my stages of grief, I never felt a quantifiable anger after Luke’s death, but I did feel incredible, paralyzing guilt. And guilt is, I suppose, a form of self-directed anger. Why hadn’t I known he was sick? Why did I move him across the country? When was the last time I petted him when he was well? Had I been impatient or short with him? Did he know he was loved?
I listened to Buddhist podcasts about impermanence and death. I avoided music. I hugged my family and cried. I worked. I split apart. I saw Luke in my peripheral vision. I stopped reading Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings because it was too good and made me have too many feelings. Instead I picked up The Cat Who Saw Red, one of Lilian Jackson Braun’s sweet and literarily unredeemable books about an intrepid reporter and his Siamese cats who help him solve mysteries. It was in this book that I learned that pottery breaks when the kiln heats it too rapidly.
Water in the clay turns to steam and, if the pressure builds too rapidly and cannot escape, the vessel comes apart.
In my grief, I identified with this. In times of great stress, I tend to hyperfocus on the minutiae of unrelated things, and I began to search in earnest for the proper type of Japanese ceramic in which to store Luke’s ashes. It became a week’s obsession for me, and this was when I stumbled upon the idea of kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing cracked pottery with gold. The metaphor here is obvious, and I won’t belabor us with it for long. The vessel is restored, and the cracks are highlighted and made precious, showing that the thing is still whole, and that the breaks have made it stronger. Et cetera. You’ve seen the memes.
For a brief, ecstatic moment, this was my solution. Yes! The broken vessel repaired. This was me. My family. The wild, massively insane experience of the past months summed up in one elegant urn. Was it a case of “E concrematio. Confirmatio,” as the potter Charles Fergus Binns said? “Out of the fire comes firmness, through stress we pass to strength?”
No. I was not. I was not repaired, not whole, and certainly not yet stronger.
It was in my week of obsessive pottery research and bad mystery reading (ends up the Siamese cat figures out the potter murdered his wife and cremated her in his kiln, which made an incredible glaze on his pots), that I came upon ostraca — shards of ancient, broken pottery with words inscribed upon them.
In the ancient world, broken bits of pottery, ostraca, were cheap and readily available. They became common for writing use, employed in voting, exile (this is where the word ostracism comes from), commerce, and communication. There are 4,000 Greek ostraca alone in the British Library. They were used for everything from receipts to the recording of dreams by the scribes of pharaohs.
Ostraca are broken and usually mundane. But, they persist. They remain.
This is me. I am broken and mundane. But, I persist.
Pieces of clay dug up thousands of years after they fell by the wayside, still bearing their inscriptions. This is the persistence of words. The persistence of names and language. The persistence of we animals who feel and name and remember.
That is what remains of us when we are broken apart by personal grief or loss. We do not become the same vessels again, repaired with gold and tidy explanations. We are broken apart by small, private losses, never to be whole again. Every time. Whether we lose a pet, parent, or partner. But that’s ok. Because the piece with that lost one’s name upon it remains, and we can hold on to it as we go back to the wheel and start on a new vessel — one that will be broken again and again. And we will continue to collect the ostraca of our lives until we ourselves become one for someone else.
In the end, the crematory delivered Luke’s ashes in a carved wooden box, and not an urn. Whiskey, our crotchety old tortoiseshell, became more loving. As I type, she’s pressing her face against mine. And my daughter very cautiously asked for a kitten. I agreed, because that is what we do for our children.
But I put Luke’s box on his old floor pillow by the fireplace.
