Matit Deserved to Exist
Attachment is the source of all suffering. Anything you grow attached to and become accustomed to experiencing as a necessary feature in your life has to potential to hurt you if it is ever removed, especially if the removal is sudden. And it is impossible to be more attached to something than that which perfectly accommodates your needs and expectations for how your experience of life should go.
It’s rare, as humans, to experience something we consider perfect. Not perfect in an absolute and objective sense, but in a personal and subjective way. Something that is an optimal match between some need we feel and the sensory experience that fulfills it completely. In those rare and perfect circumstances, we stop even considering how things could ever be better. That is the closest to heaven on earth we can get to: To find a sustainable source of experience that nullifies our desire to try to improve upon it or seek something better. It is our only way to live completely in the present, such that we stop lamenting how things could have happened differently in the past or planning how they ought to go in the future. Matit was one such “perfect” experience for me, the perfect experience of what a cat should be.
I awoke early on the morning of October 1, 2022, to the sound of my dog Popoke barking loudly from my balcony, just outside my front door. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, but she sounded more frantic than usual, so I hurried outside in a dozy state to see if something was wrong with her. I came out the door just in time to see not Popoke in trouble but that a large brown and white dog that lived down the road and a few houses over on my property, holding my blind cat Matit in his mouth by her back. She was still alive and making angry vocalizations at the moment I saw her. The dog then shook his head vigorously, apparently breaking Matit’s back. She went silent and limp in his mouth, and he began to ran off away from my house, still carrying her body.
I hesitated for only a moment as my mind struggled to comprehend what I was witnessing. Then I bolted barefoot out the door down my rocky driveway in the direction of the dog. I got close enough to him just as he was turning the corner toward the house where he lived, and he dropped Matit’s body to the ground. He then retreated to watch me from a distance. I picked her up and held her limp in my arms like I had a thousand times before while she was alive. I could do nothing in that moment but sit with her and try to process what had just happened. And though I don’t believe I’ve cried since I was a child, a single tear that I was barely even cognizant of came out of me.
I’ve known hundreds of cats in my life. I’ve kept dozens of them as pets for a short or long time. But I never found one’s life and the task of caretaking and protecting it so worthwhile as it was with Matit. Her name means “pencil” in Armenian. It was a name that proved to lend itself well to a variety of convenient nicknames, such as Matty, Fatty Matty or Fatit when she was pregnant, and Sweet Petite Matit. More often than not, I simply called her “baby.”
I chose the name Matit because she was a lightly colored dilute calico who came to me with a black-and-white brother that I called Gritch – “pen” in Armenian. They had been abandoned in the street as part of a litter of four. The other two had already been hit by cars and killed, but by chance, an animal rescue activist saved the surviving brother and sister pair and arranged to deliver them to me in Kalavan the evening of June 30, 2019. Both had terrible eye infections and were permanently blind, even after receiving medicine that cleared up the infection.
Shy little Matit seemed the weaker and more introverted of the two. I remember thinking at the time that if either of these kittens had a chance at surviving with any meaningful quality of life, it would certainly be the bigger, stronger, and more outgoing boy instead of her. In any case, it was good that they at least had each other, I thought.
A couple weeks later, Gritch was attacked by a feral cat in the village who entered my home while I was occupied in the next room. My house was still in the early stages of refurbishment at this time, so I didn’t yet have a proper door to prevent intrusion from wild animals. Seeing how badly injured Gritch was and how much he was suffering, all the while knowing that the nearest vet was nearly three hours away, I made the kindest choice I perceived to be available: To euthanize him myself. I said my goodbyes to this unfortunate, blind creature and ended his life quickly to save him from a painful, drawn-out death.
It was only chance that Gritch was the one who was attacked and killed that day and not Matit (or both of them). 50/50. There was a 50% chance that it could have been her brother who would have gone on to keep living with me instead of her. And now that she had lost the benefit of her brother to support her, and now that I knew I could not keep her safe even inside my own home,
I pondered there and then if the responsible thing to do would be to pre-emptively euthanize Matit as well. There would be no guarantee that I would be there to ensure a good death in the event that she, too, ever got attacked, lost, or injured. But I found that no matter how much I tried to convince myself it would be the responsible thing to do, I could not end Matit’s life. I liked her too much. I admired her too much. I just wanted her to stick around. For some reason, I felt that she deserved a chance to exist, even at the risk of it all turning out very badly for her.
I was never entirely sure exactly how sightless Matit actually was. From a distance, it was easy to forget she couldn’t see until you got close enough to see her blank and pale eyes where vertical pupils and colorful irises should be. I thought that she must be able to see at least a little to get around so well, even if it was only splotches of light and shadow or physical objects at extremely close distances. It’s why I never wanted to get her eyes removed, even though the left one occasionally oozed, and it seemed her infection could return. I didn’t want to risk taking away whatever little sight she might still have. And, of course, I didn’t want to lose my ability to look her in the eye when I spoke to her, which was often.
Still, at other times, it was clear that she was operating entirely from her kitty memory. If I moved a piece of furniture that she had grown accustomed to being in the same place for a long time, she might attempt to jump on it and be surprised when she found herself falling to the ground instead. And there were always times when she got spooked and ran into walls, so it was obvious she didn’t always know her way around perfectly. And no matter how good she was at figuring out how to get down from the high places she climbed to, she knew that if I was near, she could call to me and expect to taxi her on my shoulders or my head back down.
Matit had her own unique mannerisms as a result of her bad eyes that I just got used to, but that probably looked unusual to someone who didn’t know her. Her movements were almost always very deliberate, like in the way she placed her front paws on the edge of something to feel it before jumping up to it. Or the way she walked with each foot firmly on the ground and pressing the side of her body against a wall as she moved around the edge of it to find a way past. I remember training her to do these things as a kitten, testing her ability to navigate an unknown space by putting her on one end of a room full of obstacles and calling out to her so she’d come find me, or placing her on a windowsill to see if she’d locate the plank of wood positioned as a ramp on the edge that she could safely walk down.
In a way, I already experienced Matit’s death once, about two years ago. Unlike some of the other cats, she was never outside for more than a day, so I noticed right away when she hadn’t come home one morning at the tail end of the first winter here. For six days, I waited and searched the most obvious places around my house where she might have disappeared to. Perhaps she’d gotten stuck in someone’s barn. Perhaps she’d been injured and couldn’t make her way back. If it were any other cat, I would have just accepted this is a normal part of their nature – to disappear without warning and come back when they happen to feel like it. But not Matit. She was blind. She was vulnerable. She was not the kind of cat to stay away for long. So, after a few days, I accepted what was almost certainly the reality of the situation: That the cat I had raised from a blind, helpless kitten would be part of my life no longer. Even then, despite her having only been in my life for about a year at the time, I knew I would remember her. I knew she had had a special effect on me.
And then she wandered back home on her sixth day of being gone, skinny, dirty, and very hungry. I will never know why she left, where she went, or why it took her six days to find her way back home. But my baby was back. She was alive and well. And I was so relieved to have her as part of my reality again.
I didn’t feel bad for Matit when she died, even as I held her inactive body in my arms. I saw it happen. I knew she died quickly. It was the best she could have hoped for in a terrible situation. It was the opposite of the painful, drawn-out death I had always been worried I wouldn’t be around to spare her from if it ever came to that. A broken back is about the fastest way a small animal can go. Indeed, her body seemed remarkably unharmed from the outside. No gashes, punctures, or blood to disfigure it. I sat there with her for about an hour, just stroking every part of her small body, realizing that this would be the last time I would get to look into her blank eyes, feel her tiny paws, and experience everything else about her physical form while it still took on the feel and appearance of being alive, before rigor mortis and the stiffening signs of death took over.
I walked slowly back up the same long rocky driveway I had run down in pursuit of the creature I loved, now with her in my arms. My bare feet now hurt as I made the slow trip back to the house. I had not noticed the pain when I ran down just shortly before because my mind was focused on only one imperative: Saving her if it was at all possible. Now my mind was free to feel it with each step.
I realized almost immediately how strangely grateful I was that I was witness to the entire ordeal and that I could know with certainty what happened to her – and even that I was just in time to recover her body. In those first moments that I held her, my thoughts went to a place of urging myself that I was now living in a new world that I would have to adjust to – one where Matit existed only as a memory for me instead of an active presence. There was no way I could deny what was real because I had seen it happen, and I held the tangible proof in my arms. I knew exactly what happened, how it happened, and who did it.
And I knew that if Popoke had not woken me up with her barking at that exact moment or if I had been even several seconds later to come outside my house, I would have certainly missed the crucial moment of death. I would not even have had a body to confirm that she had died. The dog that attacked her would have carried her away from me, just as he attempted to when I was forced to chase after him. I would have gone about my day as normal, expecting her to show up at any moment. And the next days would have passed just as they did two years ago when I believed she had gotten lost and died somewhere. I knew right away, as gruesome as it was and as traumatic as those unexpected moments of seeing what happened to her were for me, that certainty was better. Knowing brought more peace than not knowing.
I find a strange kind of solace in the knowledge that I never once took Matit for granted. There was never a day out of the 1,000 or so that passed since I first realized I valued her too much to euthanize her that I didn’t think she was the greatest cat in the world and everything I could ever want from the experience of knowing a cat. It’s how I imagine a marriage should go. A husband and wife should be profoundly grateful every day that somehow, out of the infinite chance and chaos that make up social interaction, they managed to find one another, build a sustainable bond together, and experience the optimal arrangement of being together. No matter what momentary problems arise, they should never stop appreciating the fact that they won the romantic lottery and somehow beat probability by having each other in their lives. Their pairing should be seen as a miracle worth celebrating every day that it endures.
In that regard, Matit added a type of emotional permanence to my life that I can’t recall having experienced since perhaps I was a teenager in love for the first time. She was an indistinguishable feature of my home because I knew how I would always feel with her around, and she enabled me to envision a long-term future of looking forward to that feeling. If I was away from home too long, I knew that I’d rather be back there because I knew what sustainable, enjoyable experience awaited me: Her.
Matit should not have existed. The fact that she survived being abandoned on the road, small, sick, and blind, was a miracle. That she survived when her similarly disadvantaged brother did not was another small miracle. That she came back from six days alone and unprotected in the snowy forest was a miracle. That she made it three years, birthed three litters of kittens, and was already a grandmother by the time she died was also a miracle. That she just happened to end up in the care of a human so perfectly suited to need the influence she provided and appreciate who she was was another miracle. And the sheer bad luck of her being in the wrong place at the wrong time to be taken out of existence in a moment by a random dog with an irresponsible owner, a threat that I had not even known I needed to protect her from, was just chance catching up to her for all the times she had beaten it. I knew she was a living impossibility. I knew her whole existence represented borrowed time, and that’s part of why I appreciated her so much. She should not have existed – and yet, she did. Because of that, she deserved to exist.
Despite her handicap and vulnerability, she was a fearless explorer who I could not have completely contained and protected even if I wanted to. She was as much a prolific hunter and provider for her children as any cat I’ve ever known. It seemed to me that every mouse or mole she caught was its own little miracle. Every time she somehow figured out the optimal way to climb a tree, or any of the other ordinary feats that cats accomplish every day, was special because she was the one doing it. I’ll never understand how she managed to navigate as well as she did or live a normal, catty life. But she did.
There were two things I always wondered about Matit. I wondered how much of her personality was shaped by being blind. How different would she have turned out if she had never had to learn to overcome her specific challenges and navigate the world the way she did? Would she have been just as clever and outgoing? And I wondered what her eyes looked like before they lost their healthy appearance. I may one day finally receive an answer to these questions if technology progresses to the point in my lifetime that I’m able to create a genetic clone of her and see how she develops under more ideal circumstances. These are the places my mind goes to when I am desperate to have something that has been taken from me. This is what a Gregory who has lost control of a situation that matters to him resorts to: A hope that science and technology might one day make fanciful impossibilities real and, to some extent, undo the errors of the past.
But I can’t depend on that farfetched future coming to pass. Instead, I am left only to reflect on how having her as a part of my life and as a constant presence in my village house since soon after I moved in has shaped my experience of life in Armenia. I have struggled every day since her death to try to understand how a cat, just an ordinary cat, could have such a profound influence on me. I know it is because she gave me an example of something I could not possibly have wanted more from. More than once, I proudly labeled Matit my “cat soulmate,” meaning she was everything I could have ever wanted in a cat. Almost any other cat I’ve ever had, I could have considered giving away to a new home under the right circumstances. But not Matit. She belonged with me, and I with her.
Most of us don’t get too many experiences of that in any domain of life. Some of us are so alienated that we hardly ever get them at all. And that’s what Matit was for me: One perfect thing in my life. One thing I knew I could come home to or just look over to at any moment of her existence and be so glad that she existed.
Everyone who loves a pet prefers to believe that theirs is special somehow and that the bond they have with them is real and meaningful, more real and meaningful than it could be with any other random fluffy creature. My life has brought me into close contact with more cats than I can remember around the world. I grew up in a house with several of them present at any given time. I’ve lost many of them, even recently, in the same home I still occupy. I am no stranger to death and saying goodbye. And because of this range and depth of experience, I know that Matit truly was a one-in-a-million cat, and so was the unique appropriateness of our relationship to each other.
Matit doesn’t know that she’s gone. Only I do. The other cats, including her children, may feel still her absence and expect her to return for some time, but they do not know that she is permanently deceased. They will not carry the memory of our time together the way I will. The neighbors who knew her and liked her still saw her only as a cat, a fungible and replaceable pet. It is a loss that I alone am capable of experiencing. Only I remain here to continue experiencing life without the effects of her presence in it. Only I will continue to look back on these three years that she was part of my life and remember them having a unique feeling because of her. Only I will have to compare that memory to the long life I envisioned for her, of seeing her grow up and change over the next 20 years or so that she could have existed and deserved to exist.
I’ve kept Matit’s body in my freezer since that morning. I open it up about once a day to look upon it, not because I think it's still “her” in some metaphysical sense, but to give myself a visceral reminder of this new reality I am living in, the one where she is no longer an experience but only a memory. When I am done adapting my unconscious to process the fact that she is gone and that I should not expect her to be around with the other cats, doing any of the normal catty things I loved her so much for doing, I will bury her in a grave appropriately demarcated for me to continue remembering her, just as I will likely look back upon this written eulogy as a way to remember how I felt at the time I lost her and what she has meant to me.
That’s something I’ve never done before. I’ve never felt the imperative to remember someone or something so badly and had so few other means by which to do so. Matit never held a job, wrote a book, or contributed significantly in any physical or social way to the world. I don’t get the luxury of looking around me and seeing how things are different because of her or indulging in the experience of something she consciously created while she was alive that might give me a facsimile of the sensation of her being with me again. The effects of her existence are largely limited to the intangibilities within me, notwithstanding the kittens she birthed and the occasional paw print left in drying concrete. I will be different for the rest of my life because I knew Matit, and that’s more than I can say for almost everyone I’ve ever known.
It shouldn’t be possible that the loss of a mere cat can have this kind of lasting traumatic impact on me. Even the best cat in the world is still just a goddamn cat. Yet, Matit will always remain worth remembering to me.
To field the inquiries that came from this, I have posted two updates on the Kalavan.net blog, Primitive Culture Killed My Cat and What Became of the Dog that Killed Matit (and What It Means for Kalavan). They cover everything regarding the dog responsible for Matit’s killing, including communications with its owners and my attempts to improve the state of the culture here so that nothing like this ever happens again.
