The past few days have been filled with emotions. My heart has felt like it’s on a pendulum, swinging from heartache to joy so quickly that sometimes it’s difficult to unravel the two emotions. Maybe that’s always what it’s like when you miss someone you loved so much and start falling in love with new someones that remind you of the lost one in many ways?

About a month after Jake had passed, Dean and I were talking about him. I had probably said that I missed him. I’ve said that often since he died. Sometimes I think I hear him or see him out of the corner of my eye. Or sometimes I’m just hit with wishing he was there. We have a little shrine to him on a bookshelf in our room and when we’re really missing him, we light his candle and sometimes burn some incense. Dean told me that he really missed having a third presence in the house.

Now that I’m back at work and Dean is still working from home, he’s alone often. We’re still pretty much quarantining and he’s an extrovert, so he feels the emptiness of the house differently than I do. He was ready to start looking at adding another family member earlier in June. I didn’t think that I was, but I also understood his feelings. So I looked at a few websites and showed him a few kittens. One website was specifically for kitten adoption, you had to fill out an application form, and if you were chosen as a match, you would be contacted. Your form would not carry over from litter to litter, you had to keep applying. I filled out the form (thinking it wouldn’t happen immediately and being okay with that) and then we looked at the Humane Society. For kittens, you were required to book an appointment and go down to the shelter to look. There were no appointments left for June at all. The first one in July we were able to make was on a Tuesday when I didn’t have to go to work until late. Dean immediately said he would take a few hours off work and to book it. I told him that if we didn’t connect with any cats, we were leaving without one. He said that was fine. We booked the appointment.

There can never be too many pictures of Jake.

We were never called by the kitten agency. I added more framed pictures of Jake to the household decor. As the day approached for our visit, I started watching the KittyCam at the Humane Society. They had seven black kittens in the KittyCam play room. I watched over the days as the kittens disappeared. By the day of our visit, there were three left. Dean and I checked out the profiles of the adult cats on their website just in case (the kittens move in and out so fast, they don’t throw them up on the site), but I told Dean I was pretty set on a kitten unless some cat really grabbed us. I felt that if we got an adult cat, I would want them to be just like Jake and it wouldn’t be fair. A kitten I could let grow into its own personality.

The Sunday before our Tuesday appointment, I began considering the practical aspects. If you’re going to get a new pet, you should have food and litter already set up for them. But we might not get anyone, I thought. I also mentioned bringing Jake’s stuff down the night before. “But then if we don’t get anyone and we just have to put it all back up again, we’ll be sad,” I said to Dean. He agreed, we left it up there. Before bed, I read through all of the adoption protocols and the online adoption form just so I could prepare myself for their safety protocols, what we might need to bring and what they might ask us. There was a space on the form that asked about the pets we had currently at home, “if your pet is deceased, please include that in the ‘age’ column.”

Jake at 4 months. July 14, 2004, the day I brought him home.

Tuesday morning, I went for my run, thinking of our upcoming appointment. Going through what I would say in the adoption interview. My thoughts came to Jake over and over. How would I get through an adoption without crying when I told them about him? Would I even be able to visit the place without crying? Of course I thought back to Jake’s adoption. The happy memories and sad feelings just kept pulsing through me, sometimes it felt like they were happening at the same time. I was nervous to go to the shelter.

Many people have asked me, “could you actually just go to the shelter and not bring home an animal?” I very nearly did that sixteen years ago.

I had convinced my boyfriend at the time that our cat, Hedwig, needed a friend. (He was drunk during said convincing.) When we got down to the AntiCruelty Society in Chicago the next day, I knew that this was probably my one shot at an additional cat. We walked through the cat area twice and I wasn’t connecting with anyone. He eventually sat down and said, “Do you wanna go, hon? I’m really not seeing it happening with any of these cats.” I said I wanted to look through just one more time. I slowly walked the cages, really trying to see if anyone gave me a spark. Just when I was finishing the final, sparkless circuit, a woman wheeled through small, stacked crates with a kitten inside each one. Jake was in the second to last crate. As soon as she had stopped moving, I knelt down next to him and we knew.

My first picture of Aang and Cloud. 9 weeks old. July 7, 2020.

We arrived at Nashville Humane for our appointment and it was a little less formal that I had initially thought. Everyone was required to be masked and to social distance, but we were pointed toward the cat area and told just to let someone know if we wanted to meet any of the kitties. I saw the three black kittens that I had been watching on the KittyCam. They were cute and playful! We watched them for a moment and I asked Dean if he wanted to go look back at the other cats, thinking that they were all the older ones, but that we should at least walk through. As soon as we walked in, we saw more kittens. I looked to my left and an orange and white kitten was mewing frantically at us. We walked over to him and he stuck his arms through the bars. A black and white kitten was sitting just behind him, watching over his shoulder. We talked with them a bit and made to check out some of the other cages, which Orange Kitten did not like. We came back to him and Black and White Kitten. I asked Dean what he thought of them.

We looked at their charts and it said they were both boys. Dean said that if they were brothers, he would hate to separate them. We had discussed the possibility of two before arriving, joking that each of us could ‘have one’ and that we could each choose a name. Dean said he wanted to name the black and white one. I definitely wanted to name the orange one. We asked to see them and the employee handed orange Aang to me and black and white Cloud to Dean without even asking. We played with them for a few minutes and decided to go for it. I had not teared up once. After that, other than standing in line, the adoption was quick and easy. We got a cardboard carrier with two kittens in it and were on our way!

We tried to stop at a nearby PetSmart to get a bag of food and litter, but the traffic for some reason was pre-COVID levels of horrible and we could not make the left turn necessary to get to the store. Aang was also furious at being placed inside this cardboard thing and was doing his best to chew his way out. Cloud mostly wanted Aang to stop stepping on him. We decided to just head home and one of us would run into the Kroger while the other one stayed in the car with the kittens. However, on the way, we saw a boutique pet store and I told Dean to pull in. I knew it would cost an arm and a leg, but we could bring the frantic kittens in with us and just grab what we needed and go home.

Who knew there was a new adoption special? The girl working saw our cardboard carrier and told us about it. We ended up grabbing a 4lb bag of swanky cat food, a 7lb bag of swanky cat litter, a pack of swanky treats and a goats milk supplement (that I didn’t know was a thing) all for $10. Huzzah! Kittens were situated!

When we got them home, there was no hesitating. We had to bring down Jake’s things and bring them down now. I got emotional. I had taped up the boxes and labeled them “Jake” and had drawn a heart next to his name, thinking they’d be up there for years rather than two months. I told Dean I was feeling sad and cried a little bit and then the kittens tackled each other and began leaping around and I had to laugh at them. They were wired throughout the day and weren’t interested in stopping to cuddle or eat or check out the litter box or anything. They did drink some water from the fountain. (Aang first, then after watching him a few times, Cloud tried it. Which is usually what happens when they’re introduced to something new.) I lit Jake’s candle.

I went to bed early, as I had to wake early, and Dean and the kittens stayed up for a while. I woke up at around 11pm when Aang was trying to climb my face. I pulled him off and then hugged him to me. He settled down and began purring. Cloud eventually joined him and they both sat on me, washed each other's faces, purred and fell asleep. In the morning, they woke up with me, making their little mew sounds, and I brought them to their food bowl. They began devouring their food, which made me happy.

They were more comfortable the second day and their personalities were more evident. They PLAYED! They got excited every time I came home and would cuddle with me for a moment before beginning to tackle each other. They follow us from room to room, even if they continue play-fighting, and often they climb on us. I am unabashedly posting nothing but kitten photos on all social media outlets.

Aang and Cloud do not know that the world is on fire. They don’t know we’ve had a rough time this past year or so. They don’t know what a huge emotional decision it was for me to go and see them. They just know that they’re happy! They like us. They have food and water and toys. They have so much energy and joy and affection exuding from them. It fills the house. It fills our hollow spaces. It’s been so good.

My heart will always ache for losing Jake and I will probably continue to cry a bit when I remember him for a good while. But I already love Aang and Cloud so much. And I didn’t know that was going to be possible. It’s a good thing to know. It’s a great thing to feel.

Aang and Cloud. And Jake, of course.