Having recently moved into a place all our own, Husband and I knew it was time to finally get a cat or a dog. We both love animals, and I was beginning to sorely miss having a four-legged friend around. The lion happens to be both of our power animal, so it’s very fitting that we would get a cat as our first pet together.
We knew that whatever animal we ended up with, it had to be adopted, and we wanted one with special needs that had a lesser chance of finding a home. Husband and I both made our careers helping people with disabilities, so it felt natural to adopt an animal with a disability, too. I was hoping to find one that we could turn into a therapy pet.
We spent more time looking for the perfect cat than we did for our apartment. One day at an adoption corner in Petsmart, something caught Husband’s attention. It was a cat, fat and fluffy, alone in a metal cage. Unlike the other cats, he paid little attention to us. He seemed indifferent to humans, as if he’d lost faith in them. On his information sheet attached to the bars of his cage were the words “HEART MURMUR,” in big bold letters.
“He’s old…” The adoption volunteer said wearily. But he was only three.
“He’s slow. He’s mellow.”
She tried to steer us away from him, but we persisted. Finally, she pointed to his sign and said, “He has a grade 6 heart murmur. That means it’s the worst it can get, we’re amazed he made it this long. He’s hard to adopt because, well…he could pass at any time. His heart will just stop. You could spend the money to adopt him only to find him dead the next morning.”
That didn’t deter us. Though the thought of losing something dear to me is always a frightening one, I didn’t feel intimidated by it. Death doesn’t scare me. To me, it is as natural as being born. Perhaps the two aren’t that different. Essentially, when a person is born and when a person dies, they enter another realm of consciousness, another way of being. Doesn’t that make death just a different kind of birth?
Author of On Death and Dying, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, explains how poorly death has become misunderstood:
“The great advances in medicine have convinced people that life should be pain-free. Since death was only associated with pain, people avoided it. Adults rarely mentioned anything about it. Children were sent into other rooms when it was unavoidable. But facts are facts. Death was a part of life, the most important part of life. Physicians who were brilliant as prolonging life did not understand death was a part of it. If you did not have a good life, including the final moments, then you could not have a good death.”
If this is so, then how could this creature, which had been caged for nearly a month, live or die in peace? If he were going to die tomorrow, why couldn’t his last moments be in comfort and love?
We took him home the next day, and he quickly became a valuable member of our little family. We contemplated for days on a better fitting name for him than the one from the shelter, one that captured his courage and how blessed we felt to have him. Eventually, his name found us, not the other way around. Olivander, meaning protector of mankind. Sure enough, in the short time he has been with us, he has shown himself to be our little protector. From the way he growls like a dog when he hears a threatening sound, to the way he snuggles me when I’m feeling tired or sad, Olivander has taken it upon himself to guard and guide us as much as we do the same for him.
