Big Love and Big Hope

News on my missing cat, some musings and a poem reading

I’d made a decision. It was time to, wooden plank by wooden plank, remove the climbing frame we’d built for him. It’s all across one wall of our living room and it’s a strange edition to our home. A series of felt covered shelves, leading to one, long high beam. It blocks out the whole wall. Some might even call it ugly. But when he was on it, it was magnificent. 

Watching him hop his way up, totter along the beam, to a cosy spot where he’d sit, occasionally pawing at our heads when we walked past. Without him here it wasn’t just ugly. It was lonely. A constant reminder of life without him. Yet removing it felt like sending a message: all hope lost. 

Then, around 11am, a Facebook message flashed up on my phone. “Call me. I have your cat, Big Love.” He’d been missing for five weeks. After that call, he was back home in twenty minutes. 

I’ve been thinking about hope a lot recently. How hard it is to muster - particularly if you’ve faced or are facing bereavement. Also whether there’s such a thing as too much hope, if it’s a way of kidding yourself, building a ladder for your own disappointing fall. 

Throughout the pandemic I was endlessly hopeful. I remember, around March 2020, someone on the news saying that it would be with us for years. I shut my ears off to that. I recorded long, rambling voice notes to friends, discussing all of our summer plans that would definitely not be cancelled. I was wrong, of course. 

But I was also right.

As I can also remember sobbing in my window seat, a decision tearing at me. Should I try to get up to Scotland, be with my dad, before the threatened, rumoured lockdown kicked in? But that would mean leaving my husband in London, perhaps for months. I cried, “if I don’t go now, I won’t see my dad again.” I was so sure she was going to die. A few months later I was with her, in a tiny Scottish village, together again. There were tall poppies in the garden, I watched as she smiled at them. At the sky. Full of life. I’m very lucky for this, I know. 

Which is the right way to be? Someone who doesn’t plan and therefore doesn’t get disappointed? Or someone who overtly sees the bright side, only for life to snatch that away from them? The damage deeper as it was unexpected? Or, perhaps all of this is a fallacy, and the majority of us are like me: carrying our glasses half-full, while also being convinced, any minute, someone will knock it out of our hands.

I don’t have an answer. What I do have, is a story. As that man who called me about Big Love had been hard at work since 7am that morning. A woman had spotted Big Love, cowering in a cubby hole, underneath the tracks at a train station. She’d posted the picture in a local Facebook group and users, strangers had begun to contact animal rescue charities, including Wallington Animal Rescue. Everyone wanted him out safely. He was on a busy mainline station, trains sped by every fifteen minutes. But the rail company wouldn’t shut off the power - there was no risk to human life. 

But then, all of these people - again, I emphasise, strangers who do not know me, Ian or Big Love, kept going. Pestering. Calling. Tweeting. Saying they’d crawl down into the tracks and get him themselves.

The rail company succumbed. They also had team members saying it could be done. They shut the power off. A man, an ex paramedic, a volunteer at Wallington Animal Rescue went down, coaxed this skinny, yelping tabby out. My Facebook posts and his chip helped them locate Big Love home. He was dropped him off to me, later that morning, as my neighbour and I held each other, crying on the street. 

He’s sleeping beside me now. He’s not very well. Two kg in weight down, with a bladder infection and sores across his skin from his matted fur. I keep checking he’s breathing. I used to lie on my mum’s chest, feel it rise and fall, knowing - with her diagnosis - any day she could stop. That she would stop. 

So, hope? Perhaps it’s more about where we place it. As no amount of hope can stop bad things from happening. They do. They just do. But what we can hope for is something else. Something, I believe, has good odds of being realised.

That when we find ourselves lost, stuck in a dark, frightening hole there will be someone there, a stranger or a loved one, waiting with a safety net, to help us out into the light again. 

What do you think? Can you remember a time you found hope again? Or a stranger helped you? Let me know in the comments. And huge thanks again to Wallington Animal Rescue, a volunteer led charity, who gave us back our hope, just in time for Christmas. You can read all about their work here, and listen to me above reading a poem I wrote about hope - way back in 2020.