Conscious Choice: Compassion’s Best Teachers: SophieandCelia

January 2006 | BackWords

Compassion’s Best Teachers: SophieandCelia

By Becky Allen

SOPHIEANDCELIA. One name together, because they came as a set.

I was in the market for just one kitten, you understand. Emmylou, Number One Cat, needed a companion and my friend had rescued kittens that now needed homes.

I went to visit this little ragtag family whose first home was a garage where old cars lived under the threat of restoration and most everything was covered in lead paint. The mother cat was obviously overwhelmed, not much more than a kitten herself. Her son was her new litter’s father.

I spent plenty of time observing and trying to connect with the tiny cats. Life in and around the garage with little human interaction had given them the idea they were wild. Once rounded up and ensconced in my friend’s upstairs bedroom on the farm next door, they became less suspicious of people, though they continued to run from hands reaching to pet them. It didn’t matter how many times those hands delivered their favorite food.

I was looking for your basic gray-striped model, of which there were four in this group, along with two solid blacks. I concentrated on the four stripers, discerning the subtle differences in appearance: This one had gorgeous eyes. That one had excellent face markings. The one over there had a nice peachy-colored belly. Then there was the one who had just the right stripes, gorgeous eyes and the best peachy belly: my Sophie. I stuffed her into the front of my zip-up sweatshirt and down the road we went, her little head poking out like a turtle from a shell.

Emmylou’s distinct lack of enthusiasm for the new baby inspired me try a gradual introduction, and I brought Sophie home only when I knew I was going back to the farm the next day and could let her back in with the other kittens. While there, I noticed every time I went to find Sophie she was curled up with one of the black ones.

It was soon obvious this was a package deal. I began to see the wisdom in adopting two kittens. Sophie would have a pal, and Emmylou would have two subjects over which to reign. The kittens could wear each other out with their boundless energy.

And so began life with SophieandCelia. At some point, it became apparent my two little angels were cut from very special cloth. Unlike Emmylou, they didn’t appear at their food bowls at the first sound of a can opening. They found the one step down into the living room virtually impossible to negotiate. Finding and using the litter box was a challenge. They never jumped into my lap, or onto anything, for that matter. And once picked up, they never, ever tried to squirm down. They would, however, upon occasion, chase each other madly through the house, leaping onto things and performing all manner of physical feats flawlessly. I deduced there was some neurological malfunction, crossed wires, if you will — some aberration that caused their synapses to fire correctly only when they were in motion.

With that understanding, I set about making their lives as safe and easy as possible. I was rewarded by absolute unconditional love and preciousness. I had eternal kittens, who slept in each others’ arms at night, who revealed — little by little — two distinct personalities, seemingly driven by one brain. They understood each other perfectly, and two heads moving in perfect unison observing some thing or other was a common sight. People thought I was crazy once they knew the level at which my babies functioned. Then they met SophieandCelia and got it.

I asked my friend, who’s an expert on all things animal, why no one seemed to have come across this phenomenon. She pointed out that usually little ones of that nature are at the mercy of a world demanding certain skills absent in my girls.

Then I saw the bigger picture. I recognized I had been entrusted with these two unusual beings. I didn’t choose them so much as they chose me. They came to me during one of the most challenging and difficult times of my life and suffice it to say, I’ve always known that they were both compromised physically. But SophieandCelia became my teachers. I found a level of patience I had never believed possible. I learned what it was like to be still and observe — to see what was needed and figure out how to provide it. I learned to ask for help shamelessly. I felt the joy of caring for my not-so-dynamic duo. I experienced compassion at depths I had not explored before. In short, I learned about unconditional love. Humans talk about it but rarely are so successful in the actual delivery. And the biggest lesson of all was in realizing that each of them was wholly content within themselves, with no idea of anything less than perfection. My healing came in the loving service to two small cats that, by all conventional wisdom, shouldn’t even be here.

So it was not a good day when I came home and found my beloved Sophie, only 3, lifeless in the bathroom. She apparently had expired from heat exhaustion that probably wouldn’t have killed a normally constituted cat. In fact, I thought she had pulled through it.

It was a hard transition from SophieandCelia to Celia, especially for Celia. For a long time, she went to the door and looked. And cried a little. She stood in the middle of the floor and scanned the room, stopping if she heard a noise anywhere. For a while, she ran the kitty racetrack, inviting her pal to come out from wherever it was she was hiding.

And I cried a lot. Because, you see, there never was another cat like our Sophie. It may have appeared to the rest of the world that her “thinking” was compromised, but I know differently. She knew she was a short-timer here on this plane and her parting assignment for me was yet another lesson in love, to look after her Celia.

Look after each other with love … where have I heard that before?

Becky Allen, who lives in Virginia, continues to appreciate the furry teachers in her life and write about the boomerang effect of loving service.

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