I Learnt About Death from my Cat

8 mn read

Why I Wrote a Book Called Kahuna – the Cat that Didn’t Die

Imagine standing in the hustle and bustle of Kings Cross station when all of a sudden you notice the air around one of the pillars shimmy and blur, and you can’t help yourself because you’ve seen all the Harry Potter films – you run towards a pillar very close to Platform 9 and find yourself rushing through into a different dimension of reality. Not to Hogwarts but to Catwarts! The Feline University of Life and Death.

Who would have expected to learn so much about death and beyond from a cat? Then again, who would you learn from?

It started way back when I lived on a small boat on the Thames in the heart of London with my first cat. I had always been a dog person until one day the opportunity arose to be the proud ‘parent’ to an adorable black and white, half Persian, fluff ball kitten. She gave me one of those long cat stares and I was smitten! When she came to live with me on the boat, which rocked sometimes gently and sometimes quite violently, I wondered if I had made the best decision. She was so tiny and fragile-looking but I was unable to let her go. She filled a void in my life and I was selfish. After a few months, I was getting more confident in her ability to leap from boat to boat successfully. After all, she had nine lives didn’t she? Maybe she used eight of them up when I wasn’t looking, because one very early morning, with the sun glinting off the incoming tide, she drowned. I was lying awake in my bunk wondering where she was, lulled a little by the lap of the water against the hull, when I felt a whoosh of vital energy rush through my body. Its impact was that of a strong draught of champagne; heady and uplifting. I knew in that instant she had either returned home safe and sound or she had died. I realised if death felt like that it wasn’t so bad and I was in no doubt that I had felt her soul leave her body and kiss me goodbye.

Over twenty years and three cats later, this experience of death and beyond began again, this time with my ginger moggy, Kahuna. He’d arrived in my life as a Christmas gift with his gargantuan purr, his wide rib cage and his long long tail which hung over his back like a question mark. I’d never had the magical closeness, I’d had with my first feline but he was still my ‘boy’. As he approached his sixteenth year, we ended up together far away from London in the wild and enchanted landscape of Powys in Wales and everyone thought he’d experience a whole new lease of life having always lived in suburbia. But it didn’t quite work out that way.

Having had a fairly uneventful life, he came to this extraordinary place of beauty and experienced a number of firsts – his first hill, his first pond, his first stream, his first waterfall, his first rabbit, and then his first (and only) attack by a bulldog. He escaped but damaged one back leg so badly enough he had to have surgery and then was cage bound for weeks. During this time, he became diabetic. However if he hadn’t had to have this rest and seclusion, and nursing by me, then we would never have travelled on such a profound journey together.

I had just turned 61 and on top of Kahuna’s health crisis, my life was chaotic. I had lost my only client and along with that my only income. Without savings and an alternative revenue stream, my landlord gave me notice. However, I am a firm believer in the magic of life and that when there appears to be a breakdown, it’s usually followed by a breakthrough. Which is just what occurred. An unexpected business idea dropped into my imagination fully- formed – although maybe it’s less of a business and more of a vision, mission, and legacy. And a new home was offered to me for a few months as a breathing space where Kahuna would also be very welcome.

So my few possessions were stuffed into the car and we embarked on our next adventure together. I discovered a protocol called ‘tight regulation’ that helped cats to come out of diabetes. It is a very challenging protocol and you have to be fully committed to the well-being of your cat before you start this procedure. I had to learn to let Kahuna’s body be the expert and tell me what he needed and when. After four weeks of testing his blood glucose levels every few hours day and night, feeding him and dosing him with insulin accordingly, he became non-diabetic. It was a moment of triumph but by no means the end of his health challenges. But you don’t go through this kind of intense experience without deepening your relationship substantially.

I was sure Kahuna knew I was doing my very best for him even while I had to stick pins along the edge of his delicate ears to tease out those essential pearls of blood.

We moved again to what I hoped would be our long term home on a beautiful Welsh hillside but his health continued to be a problem and we faced numerous journeys to the vets to sort out a chronic constipation problem. I knew there was only so much that beautiful tiger-striped body could tolerate and I watched him lose his vigour and his eyes told me that he was on that final furlong.

With hindsight, I had this strange thought that we had made an agreement for me to be his student. I thought back to the death of my first cat and how she died because of the selfishness of my decision to keep her with me on the boat. I was worried that my selfishness at this time would result in me keeping Kahuna alive no matter what and against his own wishes. My trust in my ability to understand his thoughts was minimal even though I had been on an animal communication course years before and felt so close to him. I was too caught up emotionally with him so I sought for someone to speak on his behalf.

‘Did Kahuna attract your attention just then?’ This was the query from Lucy Jordan, an animal communicator based in Greece.

‘Yes he did,’ I responded with great surprise. Kahuna was sitting regally in his favourite corner between two windows behind my back. I’d just heard a sound I couldn’t place from that corner and had literally just looked round to see him watching me.

‘I asked him to do that so I could check I was talking to the right cat’, said Lucy.

‘Have you a message for me from him?’ My heart was beating rapidly in my chest as I asked this question.

‘He says he is getting tired but he’s not ready to go yet. He will let you know when he needs help from the vets by knocking something off the table. He also said that he thinks about death differently to you. For him, it is simply leaving his cat-suit behind and popping through a membrane to a different dimension.’

This was the start of many dialogues with Kahuna through Lucy and step by step we walked together towards that final frontier where he would let me know he was ready to leave his cat suit and pop through that membrane. I like to think we navigated this route well together.  As he got weaker and was less inclined to go out for a walk I asked him to let me know every day if he was happy to stay in his cat suit. If he wanted to stay he was to ask to go outside. There was no cat flap in the door so he would stand patiently until I noticed.

One day it was very clear, we were oh-so-close-to-that-moment. He hesitated near the door and then walked on by. His back legs were almost too weak to hold him up and his quality of life had leeched away in the previous 24 hours. I asked Lucy to check in with him after noticing a puddle of water on the table where somehow my water glass must have been nudged. Had this been his sign to me? ‘Yes’ came the clear answer.

I went with him every step of the way. The vet came to our home and Kahuna received the injection as he lay in my arms. Effortlessly, he unzipped that beautiful cat suit and popped through that membrane. And I was lost in my grief.

‘You’re getting lost in your grief Francesca!’ said friend Jeanette Kishori McKenzie as I responded to her call a few days after Kahuna’s departure. ‘Every time you feel his loss, choose to feel his presence,’ she counselled. I always took notice of Jeanette as she has the most extraordinary understanding of life and death.

‘Okay!’ I said, excited by the thought even though my rational mind told me it was never going to work. I remembered back to when Kahuna was diabetic and on Jeanette’s counsel, I had learned to tap into him to feel a bolt of life force flow through me. But he had been alive then.

Moments later I felt his loss, and the descent into grief arriving. But I caught myself and chose to dive deep, beyond that sense of loss until I felt his presence. It was a deep dive, it took all my will power not to lose focus and weep, and then all of a sudden there it was… a kind of tickling deep inside and a whoosh of energy ran right up through my body, out of the top of my head and a huge smile spread across my face. Kahuna!

I have no idea how many times I did this – but I was determined I would keep going. Every time I sensed his loss I would choose to dive in and sense his presence. My sadness would evaporate and be instantly replaced by joy.

One night, I spoke out loud to Kahuna and asked him to give me proof that he was not gone. I woke in the middle of the night hearing a scratching sound. There is nothing around my home that makes that sound except when Kahuna was with me. Whenever he needed my full attention, he stood up on his back legs and scratched whatever was in front of him. It was his signature sound I could recognise anywhere. I lay there with the most extraordinary feeling of warmth spreading through my heart and slipped back to sleep.

I connect with him regularly now as he has not gone anywhere – in fact, he is within me, in my heart, an intrinsic aspect of me. He helped me write my book Kahuna – the Cat Who Didn’t Die. He helped me write this article and he shares with me profound wisdom. One of my favourite examples is when I realised we were not going to hit the book launch date I’d planned to coincide with Kahuna’s passing. I was so sure that a launch on 6th January, a year on from him popping through the membrane as well as being epiphany was a perfect date. But it was not going to happen. I asked him what that was about and his response had me laughing. He said basically ‘Dates are completely man-made things and have no real meaning other than what we assign them.’ He went on to say that every day can be as profound and meaningful as we want, so not to be concerned. What a beautiful reminder that we are not bound by anything other than our imagination!

Asking what he’d love me to share with you, he reminds me of something he shared in the book – that cats are often considered aloof, but this is not the truth. Cats expand to feel everything and be part of everything. They understand we are all One. So aloofness is not as we perceive it, it is their state of being one with everything. He suggests we slow down, enjoy our environment, and expand our awareness out until we are all at one. His advice for all of us is this – be more cat- lke.

Kahuna is certainly a cat that didn’t die.

If you would love to read more about this journey with Kahuna to death and beyond please follow the link: https://francescacassini.com/books/kahuna/ Kahuna – The Cat Who Didn’t Die is for sale there.

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One thought on

I Learnt About Death from my Cat

  • Sally Ibbotson

    Thank you so much. This is such a valuable gift that you and he have given to us other cat owners.

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