The Trumpet and The Cat

How beauty guides us through loss

Our cat Earnestine died this week. This tiny feline who pried open my heart months after my beloved Kali died in 2014, who helped me learn to love something new after I said I wasn’t sure I’d ever want another cat again. Too painful. Her time with us feels circular and fleeting—an E-stein colored time warp. Ten and a half years. Little did I know how her gentle presence and beauty—her silly bowlegged walk, chirping meow and powerful purr—would teach me so much about the rhythm of life.

After we learned of her fast-spreading cancer a few weeks ago, memories of other losses came forward. This time, I found myself thinking about miscarrying over the skies of New Orleans.

Some may say, of course you are thinking about the miscarriage, wasn't the cat, all of your pets, somehow surrogates for those children you never had? And I'd say, yes and no. Earnestine and all of my pets could never replace or pretend to be that of a child I birthed. And yet they represent something deeply meaningful—a part of me that opened itself fully to love for that relatively short life span, an animal I knew would likely precede me in death. In that loving, I embraced both the joy and knowledge of inevitable heartbreak, a different kind of courage than parenthood requires, but courage nonetheless.

I cried when I told my mother that Earnestine was sick, admitting I felt selfish for my grief over the loss of a cat, knowing full well that my mother has lost something so much more profound, her own son.

She held that admission and told me she understood and that this cat was love. No more, no less.

“And you give them those names, Earnestine, Gertrude. It’s not like you name them Princess or Powder Puff.”

I felt known in that reflection. She understood how deeply I’d given myself to these furry beings, even when experience says giving myself vulnerably will likely lead to pain. I’ve been holding that truth as I reach back to the memory of 2009.

Ben and I were traveling together to make a short film for the nonprofit where I was working. I was 35, still figuring out how to be a journalist and pay my bills, and I was around three months pregnant. I had just started getting excited about the idea of being a mom, something that I thought I was supposed to want, but had always felt slightly ambivalent or at least conflicted about. I’d been pregnant before, but it had been unwelcome. Months into the pregnancy I felt myself changing and at the airport, I allowed myself to buy a parenting magazine and open my heart to the prospect.

Mid-flight, I began bleeding and having cramps. I became hysterical and when we landed I was removed from the plane in a wheelchair and brought to the hospital, where they confirmed what I already knew—I'd lost the pregnancy. The hospital is a shocking white light of blur, and hours later, I was back in our hotel room with Ben to sleep a deep sleep of trauma. Yet, in the morning through the fog, we went on with our work, filming stories of resilience after catastrophic loss following Hurricane Katrina. The work centered around a praline shop owner, Loretta, who reopened after her store was ruined in the floods. In the aftermath she linked arms with her community and found the fortitude and chutzpah to reopen and rebuild despite the tremendous loss. Each bite of sugar, cream and pecans in her pralines represented the spirit of New Orleans and the heart of resilience.

We filmed Loretta’s reopening party, filled with music, food and neighbors, everyone gathering to celebrate the store rising from the flood like Lakshmi from the ocean. I listened with wonder as she spoke to the crowd of the darkness she held in the storm’s aftermath and her determination to rebuild despite the heartbreak.

I couldn't help but see parallels to my own experience—a different flood, a different loss, but the same human need to recover.

Toward the end of that evening, I sat near the entrance of the store while a New Orleans brass band played its last notes of the event caddy corner from my seat. The procession was led by a large man playing a small trumpet. The booming notes coming from his instrument felt as if they were landing at my feet, lobbed one-by-one like gifts of flowers thrown on a stage. I locked eyes with the player as he made his way across the room, full band following his steps. With each note, I heard him wordlessly say he knew my pain and in that knowing he wanted me to know I would be alright. The music will go on.

I began to tear up, entranced by his eyes, by the sound, by the sense a mystical golden thread was being knit, cradling us—me, Ben, the loss of that great city, and that of the world beyond—until we could move once again. And in a moment, the band marched past me and into the street, off to their next joyous funeral march, the sounds of the trumpet echoing against the simple white building with its iconic black wrought iron balconies.

There's something about beauty that heals in ways nothing else can. The brass band's music and their insistence on joy amid loss. Earnestine's physical beauty—her lush coat with its tufts of gray and auburn fur, the perfect symmetry of the black lines across her face, her alert yellow-green eyes that seemed to hold the wisdom of owls—wasn't just aesthetic pleasure. It was a reminder that the world contains perfection even in its smallest creatures. In both, I found myself held by a beauty that didn't deny pain but somehow transformed it, making it bearable, even meaningful. Beauty became not an escape but a pathway through grief.

I still carry that band and their song with me all these years later. When I think of everything life has brought—including my lovely Earnestine—I can almost hear that trumpet again and see the light of the player's heart shining through his eyes, shooting upward through the crown of his head like a geyser of love, offering a way forward. As I said goodbye to Earnestine this week, I found myself listening for that same song—not with my ears, but with my heart—trusting I will find another note to carry me along life's procession of heartbreak and healing, and hopefully, more joy.