How to cope after a beloved pet crosses the rainbow bridge | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on September 8, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: Losing a pet can be devastating. Animals become part of our lives, and part of our families. And that treasured time together often feels far too short. How do we make sense of those feelings and cope when we lose our furry loved ones? Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic best known for his sharp political analysis, shares the story of his personal journey with Carla, his beloved cat who recently passed.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson. Today is Sunday, September 8th, 2024.

Losing a pet can be devastating. Animals become part of our lives and part of our families, and that treasure time together often feels far too short. How do we make sense of those feelings and cope when we lose our furry loved ones? Tom Nichols, a staff writer at the Atlantic, examined some of his own emotions in the wake of his cat Carla's passing and joins me now to discuss.

Tom, thanks for being on The Excerpt today.

Tom Nichols:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Tom, we should just tell our listeners and viewers that pets is not your regular beat. You normally write about politics. So just start out, if you would, Tom, by telling us about your experience with pets. Did you grow up with them and who was your first pet?

Tom Nichols:

I did. I grew up with cats. I wanted a dog when I was a little boy, but my family thought that was high maintenance, and it turns out I wasn't a very attentive little boy. So dogs were more than I was able to take care of. And then when I was in first grade, we got a little gray kitten. And because I grew up with the Dick and Jane Spot and Puff readers that all children in the early 1960s read, I imaginatively named my cat Puff after the cat in the book. So my very first cat was a wonderful gray cat named Puff, and we had him right until I was almost through high school.

Taylor Wilson:

Wow. And so I mentioned Carla in the intro. Who was Carla? Tell us about her and how you found her.

Tom Nichols:

Carla was actually in the window of the veterinarian that was right downstairs from me when I was living in downtown Newport, Rhode Island. I was 50-ish, my late 40s, early 50s. I was recently divorced. I was just a mess. I was depressed. I was drinking too much. And I would take walks because Downtown Newport's a nice place to take a walk. And I would go past this window where the veterinarian had adoptable animals. And there was this beautiful regal-looking black cat with big gold green eyes. And I would just stare at her and she would stare back at me. And then I would say, "No, I'm too much of a mess right now to take care of anything. I can barely take care of myself." So I would walk on, and then the next day I would take a walk and I would stare at the cat and the cat would stare back at me like, "Okay, it's you again. Hello."

And finally, I was walking with my good friend who was also my next door neighbor, and he said, "Look, you obviously love this cat. You stare at her every day. Why don't you just go in and get her?" And so I went in and it turned out she had somehow ended up astray, but had clearly grown up with a family. She'd been spayed. She was in good health and had a wonderful temperament. And that's how I met her. And I named her Carla because I love the TV show Cheers, which I watched in my 20s. And she was black and furry. And so I named her after the frizzy haired black haired waitress in Cheers, and she became Carla Tortelli Nichols.

Taylor Wilson:

You said Carla had this strange, hard to describe presence about her. What did you mean by that?

Tom Nichols:

Some animals, especially dogs and cats, but I think other people have seen it in other animals. I know some people have had rabbits will say the same thing. Some animals just have an emotional intelligence about them, not in the sense that you can train them to do tricks or fetch or whatever, but they just seem to connect to people. And I've had probably in my life, three or four cats. Some of them do, some of them don't. But Carla really had this way of just this presence where, like I said, when I would walk by the vet and she would just look back at me instead of slumbering or looking at machine, I would stare at her and she'd look at me as if to say, "Okay, what?"

And that really turned out to be true. She was very personable, could really sense when you were upset or happy, loved children. If she heard children anywhere in the house, she would come running down and just be around them in this very present way. She wouldn't necessarily play with them. She would be like dogs are with children. She would shepherd them and go in circles around them. She just was very much a cat that if she came into the room, you knew she was there. And some dogs and cats are a little more laid back. They don't do that. They may attach to an owner, but Carla was, especially if we had a social event, Carla was practically like a hostess. I mean, she would just come downstairs, sit right in the middle of a group of people and look around, again, as if to say, "So, what are we talking about?" And that was really an amazing thing about her because it made her very easy to connect with and to be attached to because she reciprocated that.

Taylor Wilson:

That's beautiful, Tom. You wrote about this moment where Carla accepted Lynn, your partner. What was it like bringing these two important parts of your life together? I know this can be a tricky balancing act. I've done this before with past partners and animals. How did this go?

Tom Nichols:

Well, I can compare it. I've been married twice. So the first time I was married, I came into the marriage with a cat named Daisy who was a very loving, adorable cat, but Daisy very much felt like I was her person. And when I got married, she never got used to it. She didn't really spend a lot of time around my wife. If my wife got out of bed in the morning, Daisy would jump up to where my wife was and then curl up next to me. She was almost jealous.

Carla was different. Carla regarded when I started dating Lynn, after my first marriage, she would come and let Lynn pet her and sort of hang around, but didn't really show a lot of affection to her. And then I think over time, she said, "Okay, she's okay." And one morning, and I put a picture of it in the piece that I wrote for the Atlantic, I woke up and there was Carla curled up around Lynn's head on the bed, purring. And I think that was Carla saying, "All right, I have vetted this person. I will let her stay. She's cool." And when Lynn and I got married, and we're still married, Carla became Lynn's buddy. I mean, they would spend their day. I'm a night owl. Lynn would get up in the morning. Carla would spend the day with her, then come up, hang with me, come back downstairs. So Carla went from checking Lynn out to saying, "This is my gal pal. We spend the days together."

Taylor Wilson:

There was a really powerful part of this piece that struck me as a surprise. I did not expect this turn, Tom, when Carla saved your and Lynn's lives. What happened here?

Tom Nichols:

It was the day after Christmas, more than six years ago. And again, I'm a night owl. I stay up. I have a fire in the fireplace. Carla hangs with me. I went to bed, got up. I was sleeping in, and Carla came upstairs very early and woke up both me and Lynn, walking on our heads, meowing, and that was unusual for her. And Lynn thought, "Okay, she just wants breakfast. Cats do that. Feed me, feed me." Lynn went downstairs and Carla actually stayed with me. She was just prowling around. And Lynn came back upstairs and said, "I smell smoke." And I went downstairs and it turns out that the fireplace had been poorly constructed and there was now fire burning underneath the floor and smoke coming into my basement. And when I came down there, I realized we were in real trouble.

We called 911 and then all the smoke alarms went off. So Carla bought us about 15 or 20 minutes ahead of time because she smelled the smoke. And the fire marshal told me later that if the cat hadn't woke us up and gotten us moving, that that fire would've broken through the floor. Very dangerous kind of fire where they get trapped between the floor and the ceiling of the downstairs. Also unusual was that Carla just waited. Lynn went back upstairs, grabbed Carla, and I said, "Go sit in the car." It was winter. It was during a terrible cold snap in December, and they went and sat in the car together.

But the other thing the fire marshal told me is that cats are very often the most likely casualty, pet casualty of a fire because their instinct is to go and hide, especially when the alarms go off and there's all kinds of chaos. And Carla didn't. She came upstairs, she woke us up, she waited, she said go. Again with that presence that this cat seemed to have. And then we spent a month in a hotel while our house was being rebuilt. And as I say in the piece, I think Carla thinks that was very much the best time of her life, two rooms, big picture, window, litter, food, her people and a big bed all within sight of each other. And I think Carla said that was just the best place I've ever lived.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. What more could you ask for as a cat? Unfortunately, these animals don't live forever, Tom, if much shorter lives than any of us would prefer. Tell us about the end of Carla's life and some of her health issues and how you navigated that.

Tom Nichols:

She started to have just general problems, and she started to look mangy, which for her was very unusual because she had just beautiful cat, always took good care of herself. And what we found was she was starting to have thyroid trouble, so we had to start giving her thyroid medication. That helped for a while, but she started losing weight over the course of a year, year and a half. She was just getting old. But toward the end, I think she knew. The night before I took her, she was sitting downstairs with me, Lynn was asleep, and she got on my chest and she head bumped me and purred, and then she just walked over and sat down on the couch and tucked up. I think that was her way of saying, "Okay, I get it." So I took her, I held her while they gave her the first shot, and that made her drowsy and put her to sleep. And then Lynn and I both put our arms around her while they gave her the second shot, and then she was gone.

Taylor Wilson:

I'm so sorry, Tom. It's absolutely brutal. You rescued Carla as you mentioned here at the beginning of the conversation, but you wrote in this piece that the cat really saved you. Powerful words there, Tom. How so? Why is that?

Tom Nichols:

I was really hitting bottom in my life in so many ways. I mean, financially, emotionally. It was classic divorced guy moment, right? I'm living next to a bar. I was just hanging on by my fingernails emotionally, and this cat comes into my life and it's like, "Look, I get it. You're bummed, but I still need food and I wouldn't mind if you'd pet me for a while." And so we got into this routine where I would just come home and I'd make a bowl of popcorn and she'd sit on the arm of my chair and we would watch TV.

As I said in the piece, I think Carla and I have seen every episode of Law and Order SVU ever made, because in those days, it was on heavy rotation and repeats. And I'd just sit there and we'd chat and I'd say, "I think the teacher did it," or, "I don't think it was the coach." It was just such a healing thing because she would just sit there. I mean, she didn't just come out and get fed and then go away and go to sleep somewhere. If I was home, she was with me. It reminded me that there are things that make you happy when you're very depressed. And at that point in my life, I decided to get some help from a good doctor, a good counselor, a good priest, and Carla was a big part of that. She really was.

Taylor Wilson:

Tom, you wrote this piece earlier this summer in May. What have the months been like since? How have you and Lynn been adjusting to life without Carla?

Tom Nichols:

For the first month or so, and I think this is common to everyone who's lost a pet, I kept looking and thinking I saw her, the old habits. I would wake up and I'd look over into my daughter's room where she would usually sleep. And it took a while to get used to dinnertime. Carla had a very keen sense of time. This cat, it's almost like the cat had a watch. Five o'clock, she'd come downstairs, she'd sit in the living room, look at us and say, "What are we having tonight?" And it took a while to get over that routine.

I couldn't think about getting another cat, but I think Lynn and I, we're getting close. I think this fall, we're ready to bring some cats back into our home because I know this sounds terrible, but I also know that my father said it when he lost the cat. I've heard other people say it. There are people I've lost that I didn't miss as much because I didn't spend every day with them. It's a weird thing to say, "Well, I miss my cat more than I miss my uncle Mike," but I didn't see Uncle Mike every day, and this really was losing an immediate member of the family. So it took a while to get past that. It was very hard.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. These are close, intimate relationships. Do you have any advice that you would give out to folks who are going through their own loss of a pet?

Tom Nichols:

Yeah, the first thing I would say is don't be ashamed to feel so intensely about an animal. I mean, anyone who walks up to you and says, "Well, it's just a dog," or, "It's just a cat," or whatever, these are people that just don't get it. Lynn and I, we're both in our 60s. We walked out of the vet's office and tears streaming down our face. And when her ashes arrived and we put them out in the garden, we cried again. I mean, it's okay to feel that way about your little companion. It's normal and it's good.

And I guess the second thing to say is it's okay to start thinking about getting another animal at some point. That's how I got Carla after I lost Daisy who I loved and had been with me since I was in my 30s. When I lost Daisy, I was heartbroken. But if I hadn't decided together another cat, I wouldn't have met Carla. So there's always another friend out there waiting to be found.

Taylor Wilson:

Beautifully put. Tom, thank you so much for being on he Excerpt and sharing your experiences here.

Tom Nichols:

Thank you. Thanks for having with me.

Taylor Wilson:

And a quick update for our listeners, since earlier this summer when we taped this interview with Tom, you'll be happy to know that he and his wife have adopted a five-month-old black and white tuxedo kitten whose name is Lilith, or Lily for short. Tom says she's a, "Very affectionate cat who already demands laps and bed space, and her middle name, of course, is Carla."

Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How to cope after a beloved pet crosses the rainbow bridge | The Excerpt