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I’m Only Human
It’s been a month since my cat Babes has gone missing. I am grieving the loss of his physical presence in my life and within our family. Part of my grieving process is to look back at some of my loving memories with him and how he made me laugh, cry, and question my own sanity. I have wonderful memories of his early days, just after he was born, and also some of his more recent shenanigans. We worked on many soul level lessons together in his time with me. Some of those lessons continue to expand, because of his absence.
Aside from grieving Babes being gone, I have been struggling professionally with what this means for me:
How can I be an animal communicator who cannot find their own missing animal? What does that say about my abilities? Is helping to find lost animals one of the things I am capable of? Worse yet, as an animal communicator, do people think my animals should behave perfectly? That I have some secret inside information and should know and understand all the lessons, so this should be easy peasy for me to figure out and move on from?
It’s just not so. I have to remind myself that I’m only human and that it’s ok for me to be having the same experiences my clients are having. In fact, going through the experience for myself makes me better at what I do because I can relate to the situation and have greater compassion for them. And it’s no coincidence that suddenly I have had an influx of animal communication clients with missing animals, so I am forced to address these issues head on. As usual, I am learning about myself through the process of being able to help others.
Communicating psychically with my own animals has always been more difficult than communicating psychically with other people’s animals. There’s a level of emotional attachment to my own creatures and my beliefs about my hyper-responsibility for them and their well being that makes it so HARD for me to trust the information I receive from them. As a result, it has forced me to reach out to my animal communicator colleagues for help in my search for Babes–which is not easy for me to do! Naturally, when you ask for help (and are ready to receive it!!!), the Universe provides!
My partner at the Intuitive Mastermind Academy, Stephanie K. Hopkins, and I recently began the process of writing a book together that includes a chapter about missing animals. Writing this portion of the book has been cathartic for me as I go through my own grieving process with Babes. It is helping me look back at my memories as a way of healing through the grief one experiences over a missing animal. It’s a different kind of grief than when an animal passes, and so I’ve had to again examine what grief looks like for me and how can I move through this in a healthy way.
That being said, I wanted to share a few of my memories of Babes that make my heart happy. They remind me there are bigger picture lessons I am working on with a missing animal than I have worked on before. By focusing on the memories that bring me joy or laughter or gratitude, I can feel my heart healing and expanding to new levels of growth.
Born a barn cat, Babes has never been one to shy away from an adventure. His strong spirit and will to do as he pleases was evident very early on. In an effort to keep him safe in the first weeks of his life (he was the only surviving kitten in the litter), we would secure him inside the barn office with Trotter, who had become the resident surrogate cat dad to any new kittens. Every couple of days, we would open the office in the morning to find Trotter alone. No Babes.
I began questioning my own actions: Did I remember to put him in the office last night? I’m sure I did. Maybe not. Maybe that was yesterday. This went on for a couple of weeks before we figured out what was happening. Babes was escaping during the night through a hole in the corner of the office that the barn rats had made behind a bunch of tote bins. Neither my husband nor I ever knew the hole was there, until I thought I was losing my mind and began investigating further. Yep, that little 1-pound, 1-month old kitten was an escape artist!
As Babes grew, he became more than a barn cat. He was family. My first kitten! When my husband and I traveled racing the horses, Babes would ride along with us. He would sit on the center console of the truck, watching the road fly by, or lie across the dashboard and soak up the warm sun. He would hang out in hotel rooms while we worked and greet us at 1 am, after a long night of racing. Babes sure was a fun travel companion!
Not too long after that, Babes came home to live with us. He was perfectly happy being a barn cat, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the lack of safety and protection that I perceived barn life offered him. Many days, I wouldn’t leave the barn after a long day of work until I found him. My husband would patiently drive me around and around the farm looking for him, singing the bugle call (a “mouth bugle” tune Jim taught them that signaled it was time to eat or come home). I would run and snatch Babes up and either take him home with us or secure him in the office so I knew he was safe at night. (New barn. New office. No rat holes. LOL) The stress of not knowing where he was for even one afternoon or evening was too much for me. Babes’ wandering ways had me in a constant state of anxiety, wondering if the hawks had snatched him up or a coyote had gotten him. We decided the best option for us (ok, really for MY peace of mind) was to bring him home to live full time.
Babes adjusted relatively well to living at the house. I think he liked having all the attention and the whole house to himself. However, he was not great at being on lock-down. We always had to be careful he didn’t escape the second you opened the door. It was like he heard that door from 3 rooms away and would come running at just the right moment for him to slip out without notice.
Late one night I stepped out onto the back porch to put the garbage in the bin and didn’t know he slipped out. About 4:00 the next morning, I heard the terrifying screams of my other cats (this was after Jim died and I brought the other 3 cats home as well). It sounded like someone was being murdered in my living room. I shot out of bed to the dining room to find the cats hissing and snarling at a black cat outside the window, trying to get in. Upon closer inspection, I saw it was Babes! The cats were repelled and distressed by the skunk smell he was now carrying…(apparently an adventure within an adventure that night!). I spent the next 3 hours repeatedly washing as much of the skunk scent off of him as I could. I used only what I could find in the house since there were no stores open to get special skunk smell removal soap—which I now keep on hand but have never needed since. Poor Babes was not a black cat after that. All the peroxide and dish liquid had turned his fur brown!
Another time I ran out to the grocery store. As I drove back up toward the house, I noticed a black cat along the side of the house and thought, “oh, there’s that stray cat again! He better not be bothering my babies!” (Recently to that, an actual neighborhood stray would come around and cause great upheaval in the night by visiting our windows.) I parked the car and headed up toward the house and here comes Babes from around the corner, meowing at me. “Where have you been?” Haha! “Babes! How did you get out of the house?” When I got inside, I saw that somehow one of the 5-foot tall window screens had fallen out of the window and was laying on the floor in the living room. Three cats were staring and sniffing at the confusion from the inside. Babes was not one of them. He wasted no time making a break for it and going on a little romp!
Babes could be kind of an asshole, mostly to Jim. He would be snarly and try to bite him all the time. They had a different kind of relationship than Babes and I had, but Jim had a different personality and Babes had different lessons he was working on with him.
One of the memories that stands out the most for me was a couple months after Jim had been diagnosed with Stage IV gastro-esophageal cancer. Jim had been trying to be strong for me, masking and denying the daily excruciating pain he was in every time he drank or ate something. We had no idea how bad the tumor had gotten at this point. Jim was sitting on the couch watching television and, out of nowhere, Babes took a giant leap off one piece of furniture, right onto Jim’s chest where the tumor was. He then used Jim’s chest as a catapult to leap off of and onto the floor. The yelp of pain Jim let out (not to mention a few expletives) was like I’d never heard from him before.
It turned out Babes was not just randomly jumping on him to be a jerk, he was actually drawing our attention to what was going on internally for Jim. The tumor had grown and was causing internal bleeding that we didn’t know about. About a week later, Jim passed out on me in the truck due to having lost so much blood. On the surface, it was easy to chalk that Babes moment up to him being an ass-hat or just coincidence, but in retrospect I was able to communicate with Babes and ask him about that. It was Babes’ intuitive way of drawing our attention to something bigger going on under the surface that Jim was trying to mask to protect me from being scared about his dying process.
Medic Alert Cat? Maybe! Last summer I was working out in the pasture pulling weeds and was having some light headedness. Babes came running over and began yelling at me until I stopped to sit down and rest. I sat for a bit but each time I tried to get up before my body was ready, he started yelling at me again. He did eventually let me stand, but only when I promised to stop working and go back to the house. He stayed with me the entire time–even as I pulled a few more weeds on my way back to the gate–meowing annoyingly at me the whole time. A few weeks later, I was out doing yard work again, and before I even felt the dizziness, Babes came running over to yell at me, “Sit, sit, sit!!!” Wouldn’t you know it, moments later I nearly passed out! From that point forward, Babes became my medic alert cat, warning me when my blood pressure was dropping too low and that I needed to sit before I fell over!
I could go on and on about memories and lessons with Babes in his 8 years with our family. There are new lessons and deeper lessons I am learning from his absence. Things I need to continue working on for myself, like learning to trust intuitive information and the connection I feel with my own animals. I continue to tune in with Babes and can feel his presence and our ongoing heart to heart connection.
As a Soul Level Animal Communicator®, I honor that he is in a new chapter and possibly has additional soul contract work to do with someone else at this time, in addition to how he is continuing to work with me. As a fur-mom, I long for his snuggles and to feel his comforting purr as we fall asleep together, my face smothered into his fur. With gratitude for the time we had together, I send him eternal love and hold hope that he makes his way back when the time is right for our next chapter together!
