Doppelganger Cat

Last February, I got a call at work from Lee-Anne. It was about our cat Finn. This one:

He had urinated blood into the litter box. We managed to book an emergency apppointment at our vet and I took the rest of the day off. I feared the worst. At the time, a few cats in my network had recently experienced misfortune. 

My mother and brother's Cassidy had passed away from cancer, originally thought to be a respiratory infection. This was only three years after I'd helped them adopt her. Another person that I'd supported in a similar way lost her cat from a stroke unexpectedly. Both were adopted within a week of each other, and had passed within a month. It seemed like the bad luck for felines had caught up to our household.

The vet's diagnosis was unexpected. We were told that he had managed to urinate successfully with assistance, although he had been on the verge of requiring surgery. He had gotten to this state from anxiety. That seems like such a human disorder.

Apparenty they usually experience an influx of cats with similar symptoms around the same time every year, due to stress from get-togethers and new furniture arriving during the Christmas season. Cats tend to hide their symptoms and therefor have a delayed reaction from when they are impacted, explaining how he'd only got this way a couple months later.

We hadn't thrown any parties at our place. We did receive a few new large items through gifts. We figured it could have been because we had been gone on several trips.

The  vet complimented him on being a very good cat. An early sign is normally to start peeing in areas outside the litter box after they begin to associate it with pain. But Finn never did this. He also hadn't shown any resistance in the office, despite his usually pink nose being a deep red, indicating a racing heart.

We got him on a couple of medications, which caused his whole body to loosen up. Unfortunately this meant that he leaked everywhere. The mess was the secondary grievance. The first was that he was helpless to maintain the cleanliness he had taken so seriously even while in pain. It was distressing to see him cleaning himself so rigorously and futilely.

But he did get better. Flash forward a little bit, and him and his brother Kieran were sitting in our kitchen window. I suddenly heard a growl and rushed to check what was happening. It isn't unheard of for some backyard critter to show up and cause a commotion. Usually Finn runs away despite being the one with the "athletic build" while Kieran stands his ground.

This time was the reverse. Finn had his tail puffed and his face locked to the window screen. Cautious, and despite being worried that his hunter instincts would kick in, I slowly closed the glass door between him and whatever intruder lurked outside. He bounced to the kitchen floor but continued to stare intently.

As I looked into the night, trying in vain to see what had caused the disruption, I saw something very strange. Finn approached from the other side of the window. I did a double take, glancing behind me to find our beloved cowcat was also safely, abeit frenzied, inside our kitchen.

I can't guarantee that the patterns were exactly the same, but they were similar enough that it fooled me in the moment. I was telling this story to a coworker the next day, and she pointed out how this fit my description of a poltergeist.

I don't think there are any hard definitions of spectral beings, but I'd been reading something that described poltergeists as projections of energy from the living. As opposed to ghosts, which are the lingering presence of people who have passed. I clung to this definition, as I had experienced a very strange phenomenon over the course of three sets of roommates. In isolation, each had claimed to see me in places where I verifiably wasn't. At the time of each sightinh I had been experiencing a great amount of shame. It made sense to me that my disturbed energy was projecting this spectral lookalike. This is probably the weirdest story I have, and one I often hesitate to share.

Now, knowing that Finn had an anxiety disorder, it was easy to imagine that he had summoned this spectral cowcat from outside. Sensing himself as a disturbed energy being may have caused him to react more aggressively than he would to the average outdoor cat.

This explanation is strange enough, but let me posit one more. One time, when I was walking the Iron Horse Trail, I ran across one of those missing cat posters. This one featured seven cats that had all vacated their home during a house fire. All of them had the cowprint pattern, and one of their names was... Finn.

We don't have seven cats, and the two we had were accounted for the morning of my walk. Even if a fire had occured, there's no way a poster could have gone up at that part of the trail between the time I left and when I got there. Even though the story was so disconnected with my reality, I still felt the need to call Lee-Anne to make sure everything was alright at home. Everything was fine.

But it's such a weird coincidence. Finn isn't a particularly intuitive name for a cowprint kitty. It's not even a classic cat name. What were the odds that two lookalikes with the same name could exist in the same neighbourhood?

So now I must put forward the possibility of a very strange quirk of fate. There is a non-negligible chance that our Finn was approached by this cat that had escaped a housefire, who didn't just have the same pattern as him, but the same name.