Wednesday July 21, 2004
Relating to others
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Thompson is gone.
Thompson was our daughter Sharon\’s cat. Her second cat, actually. She named her first cat Fraser, after the river, sort of, so naturally when she got a second cat, she called him Thompson. Except that he turned out to be she.
Thompson was coal black, utterly invisible in the dark, except for her luminous emerald-green eyes. At the age of 15, her kidneys gave up.
Sharon spent two days in tears.
So what, you might say. Thompson was just a cat. There are lots more.
But she was more than a cat. She was a relationship.
The quality of being human
\”Times New Roman\”> I had similar feelings, last December, when our little Lucky wandered off in the middle of the coldest snap of the winter. She went out one morning, and didn\’t come back.
For two days, we searched the district. We contacted neighbors. We posted notices. I covered our half-acre of garden on my hands and knees in the snow, peering into and under every bush and shrub where she might have taken refuge.
And when Joan found her two days later, and brought her home cuddled inside her parka, we rejoiced far more than eight pounds of fluff with a brain about the size of my thumb might seem to warrant.
More and more, as I grow older (and hopefully, wiser), I think that we humans are not individuals as much as we are relationships.
It\’s not our height, or weight, or wealth, that defines us as human beings. It\’s the range and depth and quality of our relationships.
A sense of loss
\”Times New Roman\”> I don\’t pretend to understand how the numbers and the depth work together. I\’m sure that having a few close and lasting relationships is better than having countless superficial acquaintances. But being dependent on too few close relationships can leave one impoverished, almost amputated, less than whole, when a life partner or a dear friend dies.
Even our DNA – that coil of genetic information that supposedly defines every individual – was the result of a relationship.
My concept may come as a disappointment to those who believe that in life, the one with the most toys wins. Not so. Only that person\’s estate wins – and it will trash most of those toys, because no one else has the same attachment to them.
Old age becomes painful not just because of increasing disability, but because both the number and the quality of relationships necessarily declines. Your contemporaries die; you don\’t have the energy to keep up with younger associates. There can be few things lonelier than a hundred-year-old parent who has outlived friends, siblings, colleagues, students, even children, and is left clinging to one last son or daughter.
So I am more than a collection of limbs and organs. I am the sum of my relationships. In general, I feel extraordinarily gifted by those relationships, old and new.
But I also feel poorer whenever one of those relationships – even if it\’s just with a cat – comes to an end.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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