The message about a stray cat was on my machine when we came home from our daughter’s open-heart surgery. A thirty-something single mother, I was focused on the success of the surgery and didn’t think much of it. “Now everything will go much better for us” was the thought replaying in my head. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Getting my eleven-year-old’s heart fixed was the easy part.
Frances had always been a high-maintenance child with behavior problems, mood disorders, and learning disabilities in addition to the congenital heart defect. As I look back to this time in my life, I see a stream of experts helping me care for her. One of those “experts” was exceptional, though not certified, nor — with four legs and a tail — even “credible” to some.
When I had taken Frances to the cognitive and academic specialists for testing, I received a twelve-page report with a devastating seven lines devoted to her multiple diagnoses. The ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, made things hardest of all, because Frances would go into temper tantrums whether she wanted to or not. With enormous blue eyes and a body as skinny and willowy as Olive Oyl’s, Frances was as volatile and episodic as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. Annie Sullivan was the child whisperer for young Helen. Harry the Angel Cat played that role for Frances.
After her heart surgery, I prayed fervently for an answer other than hospitalization, when I suddenly remembered my girlfriend’s recent call about a cat who was about to be euthanized at a nearby animal shelter. His temperament was so lovely the secretary at the front desk had actually made a tearful scene objecting to euthanizing him.
I finished my prayer and called the shelter. Thank heavens it wasn’t too late.
Harry was a beautiful eighteen-pound male stray. He had fluffy, long gray hair, with a regal white breast. Gorgeous and docile, he quickly became Frances’s best friend. Mine, too. Harry was a miracle worker and could motivate Frances to do many a difficult thing.
I had tried time-outs on Frances and they didn’t work. Now when Frances acted out, Harry the cat — not Frances — would have to go into time-out. A quarantined cat was more than Frances could bear. She truly tried to behave better in order to get the cat back.
I had a daily rewards system set up for Frances regardless of her behavior. Once a day, we had a twenty-minute period where she got to do anything she wanted — within reason. Habitually, Frances wanted to go on twenty-minute car rides with Harry on her lap!
Harry also went for walks on a leash. He even allowed Frances to seat-belt him into the child carrier seat on the rear wheel of my bicycle. He could have easily escaped the restraints and fled the scene, but he did not. He just rode around the neighborhood with her — to the delight of neighborhood kids.
Frances had trouble making and keeping friends. Harry filled the void. He wore doll clothes and paper hats, slept in a doll rocker, and heroically chased big, scary dogs away from the yard. But most important, he faithfully slept with Frances every night. When Frances was assigned to draw a picture of God at church, she drew a picture of Harry sleeping. He was her image of unconditional love.
Harry attended Frances’s tutoring sessions because that’s where her behavior problems were often the worst. The tutor was teaching Frances how to work with fractions and decimals, a particularly tough task because of Frances’s arithmetic disability. With Harry sitting on top of the study table, Frances worked hard to learn how to calculate decimals — by balancing a checkbook register. When she mastered a problem, she repeated what she’d just learned to the cat. Whisking his tail, Harry patiently listened. Very smart cat.
The tutor and Frances also baked pizzas and cut them into fractions. They would shuffle pizza pieces to figure out a problem, and then eat them with Harry’s help. The cat loved hamburger on pizza!
Eleven years later, the same math tutor phoned Frances and me from Japan, not knowing Harry was seriously sick. While Harry panted and struggled to breathe, I held the phone up to his ear, and the tutor told her faithful assistant good-bye.
After hanging up the phone, I realized I must say good-bye, too. I whispered to him with the intensity of a prayer: “Thank you for all that you’ve done for Frances.” That moment, Harry let out a long, drawn-out exhale.
If he were human, he’d have been about ninety. He had been waiting for me to tell him his work was done and done well. When I had saved his life over a decade earlier, I hadn’t realized that he would reciprocate a hundredfold. And that he’d truly live up to his name.
Excerpted from the book, A Book of Miracles: Inspiring True Stories of Healing, Gratitude, and Love 
, ©2011 by Bernie Siegel. Reprinted with permission from New World Library.
Photo courtesy R. C. Stanley
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