BRAVO DOMENICO

You've gone

Gone and made a beautiful hole in my heart

 - My Very Best, by Elbow 

I was debating whether or not to write anything to eulogise the passing of my cat. On the one hand, writing, painting, reminiscing and speaking are all means by which grief can be processed through art. Grief is necessary because it gives a person the opportunity to transform abstract emotions into worked labour, through which a person going through loss can experience catharsis and exercise choice over the manner in which they articulate their emotions. This is art. Art is the volitional act of technical problem solving through which a person exercises choice in the resolution of a task that is best solved with art, rather than with mathematics or power tools, and in making decisions in a value-based system of consideration to solve a problem that person achieves a catharsis where their person's soul and lived experience become reified into more concrete things like pictures, music, and the written and spoken word. That's what Art is about, and this is the art that I have the chance to use to transform my feelings from a lived abstraction into a definite thing to which I can return and which other people can read. On the other hand, I am a private person. I keep to myself, am solitary, regular, and do not deviate from my routine. I do not advertise myself because I do not want to be known. I rarely show myself outside of professional capacities because I do not enjoy being seen. I find it difficult to talk with other people and it takes a great deal of effort to do so. In addition to this, I do not want to cheapen the death of my friend by adding his eulogy to the thronging songs of pain that fill the attentional milieu of other people, who more often than not have enough on their plate without the added worry spilling over from mine. Lastly, and more personally, I simply didn’t know what to write. 

I was thinking of keeping this to myself until something unexpected happened - my patients started asking for photos of Domenico with which to remember him. 

This is very strange to me, because I never imagined that Domenico would be so well-regarded and loved among the people whom I treat. Instead of grieving alone and with my family, I’ve received condolences from my community, locally, and even interstate from people whose relationship with me was primarily based on business, or so I thought. Instead, these same people have been human to me, comforting to me, and I have learned that in their own way they are grieving with me. I didn’t solicit these condolences - I simply told people that because he was unwell, I may need to cancel or shift appointments. Peoples’ empathy, kindness, and patience created spaces where I could tell them about what was happening, and once the inevitable did occur, they gave me their care in a moment when I didn’t know I needed it. 

So, it is for my friend Domenico, and for the many friends of his to whom he meant more than I realised that I will eulogise him here. He will always have a place in my heart, in my memory, and in my home, and now he will have a small part of the internet to himself too, nestled deeply within an increasingly labrinthian collection of other blog posts and articles. Maybe you didn’t know him. Maybe you knew him. Maybe you met him. Maybe you had a pet of your own that has passed, or you have a pet now at home, or you’ve never had a pet and never intend to get one. No matter who you are, maybe there’s something in this for you, because if there’s one thing I can say for certain, it’s that Domenico has taught me about myself, and maybe his life can hold a lesson for you, the reader. 

I’ve spoken enough about myself, so now I will tell you about Domenico the cat.

All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.

 - Watership Down, by Richard Adams 

Domenico passed on the morning of 2025-05-15, at 8:40AM, at his home. His last day was full of love, and his body was full of cancer. Domenico was a ginger-coloured domestic short-haired cat of unknown age. It was originally thought he was four years old, but it was more likely anywhere between eight to twelve. This came to be known because during the course of the medical care that characterised the closing time of his life, he needed to be shaved for the diagnostic ultrasound that found the cancers in his guts. Shaving his coat, that same marbled orange, brown, and cream that resembled the floorboards of my home, showed off deep scarred gouges in his skin from fights he'd been in, some lost, some won. As his fur slowly grew back, the depth of these cuts and old injuries only became more apparent as if deepening the ambiguity of his life story. I originally thought he was a semi-domesticated or abandoned cat. It's more likely that he was a feral tomcat that made good. It was originally thought he was healthy. It's more likely he had a bloodborne or other immunodeficient condition that fried his ability to fight illnesses after his scraps. He had apparently been unwell for a very long time, such that when the article Bello Domenico was written in December of 2024, he was most likely already on the decline, and probably past the point of any return or management. Death is an inevitability for cats, dogs, and people. No matter how healthy, how loved, how needed, or how storied a life might be, the inarguability of the end comes quickly, slowly, somewhere inbetween for us all. That these facts are known goes without saying. The pithiness of repeating them is obvious. The necessity of acknowledging them is absolute. We did not know Domenico’s history, but now we know he was lucky. The colloquialism says that cats live nine lives, and it’s clear that Domenico lived his first eight in no small measure of hardship. 

Feral cats living without human support usually only live for two years. This is due to the abundance of things that may kill a cat - predator animals like raptorial birds, small dogs, other cats, humans who abuse animals, poisons left out for pests that a cat can ingest directly or by vector, and then from other factors like the weather, injury, and disease. In Australia, feral and outdoor cats routinely kill and consume native wildlife, threatening the ecosystemic balance of species that are often endangered. Sometimes cats kill for food. Other times they kill for sport. Councils and shires routinely euthanise, shoot, and poison feral cats, and some domesticated outdoor ones are caught in the crossfire. Life is hard for an animal without a home or a family. Life is hard for an animal in the world. This is true for those animals that walk on four legs or on two. That Domenico survived as long as he did and was lucky enough to be picked up by the system that fostered and helped him is a testament to his luck, and to the invisible, guiding hand of Providence. We do not know Domenico’s age, his story, or very much about him outside of the two years in which he lived in our home, but we know that we loved him very much in the last of his lives, and his absence is felt with a waxing and waning sharpness. Where is the little whiskered face poking through the ajar gap of the front door? Where are the nipping claws digging into my arm draped carelessly over the side of the bed, summoning me to give the morning meal? Where is the softness of the furred head that pressed against my work trousers, dusting them with orange strands of hair? Anyone who has lost anyone, and anyone who has lost anything has felt this too. It’s surreal to feel something because of its absence. The world feels incomplete. Where do I point my energies of care, consideration, patience and love?

Oh, all that I know

There's nothing here to run from

'Cause yeah, everybody here's

Got somebody to lean on

 - Don’t Panic, by Coldplay 

Despite the pain of his absence, there is comfort in memory. There is reassurance that in Domenico’s life, every pain was taken and every effort was made to ensure he was fed, watered, warm, and safe at home. I know this for a fact - every time I leave my home I record a video of myself shutting the door for my own reassurance, and every morning I said goodbye to my cat. Domenico was always safe and loved. Over time, the cat grew to enjoy the finer points of domesticity, napping under the heaters or on top of the record player. He enjoyed listening to Gil Evans, Johnny Horton, and Coldplay. Time of the Barracudas played on the radio when he was brought to the hospital. When he passed, the last music he heard was Don’t Panic. He was extensively, almost excessively, photographed. He was photographed at rest, at play, in grooming, when eating, in flight, midstretch, and especially during his yawns. We had Domenico for two years. There are over two thousand photos of him in messenger chats and text messages. I should know, I counted them. Domenico was the ambassador for my clinic, and the proof of substantiation for the second of my patients’ responsibilities - first that they need to tell me the truth, second that they need to pay me so I can feed my cat. I’d show a picture of him to back this up. Everyone loved Domenico, and Domenico seemed to love everyone he met. He was charming, social, and open with people, even if he wasn’t like that with other cats. At first we just thought he was standoffish, we’d joke that he didn’t have any ground game. Later we realised that he was likely fiercely territorial because of his past. We also realised that if we wanted to have another cat, Domenico would have more than likely torn them to shreds. This was just one of many assumptions about Domenico the cat that were proven to be false in the horrible twenty-five days that elapsed between his admission to hospital and the day he passed away.

That Domenico was going to be in my life for a long time had always seemed like an assured thing. Domenico was the cat who would live in the house I’d like to buy. Domenico was the cat who would be there when I welcome my children into the world. Domenico would be there to welcome me home, and of course he would pass away eventually, but he would do so at the end of a long, storied, warm life that was rich in love, food, comfort and good music. That it only took less than four weeks for those assumptions to be invalidated and destroyed speaks to the house of cards that is our lives and the brittleness of our assumptions about the world, large and small. We live our lives on knives’ edges, falling quickly from a moment’s misfortune, inattention, or the indifference of other people, or falling more slowly from the eroding effect of disease, fatigue, alienation, and time. Nothing lasts forever, and everyone’s having fun until they’re not. The supreme irony in this is that in the way that I practice physiotherapy and do my OHS consulting, it’s my job to remove the ambiguity and risk that arises from nested series of assumptions and the cumulative ambiguity that arises from overlapping and synergising unknowns. It almost feels like a sick, ironic joke that this should happen to someone who lives, acts, and moves as carefully and in such a paranoid manner as I do. I assumed everything that I didn’t cover was okay, but I didn’t think about this, I didn’t even know where to start or consider. Even up to his last day, I felt like I did everything right, everyone I spoke to told me I did everything right, everything I read told me that I did everything right, even when the decision was made to let him go, that was the right decision, but it was hard, and I do not think it is very fair that I did everything right up to that point and the reward I got for it all was that the next correct thing to do was euthanise my friend because there was no other option. That doesn’t make sense. It’s not right, it’s not fair, it is absurd. It is absurd that something as small and as powerless as a cat can be destroyed by something as monstrous and as indifferent as cancer. It is absurd that this happens to children, to infants, to people who want nothing more than to punch the clock and go home. It is absurd that the sun still rises and the light of day lands on a place that is absent one of my favourite little creatures. It is absurd that all the love a person can pour into something or someone can’t in some way defend against or mitigate the random vicissitudes of circumstance, but that’s how life works. Life is absurd. Life is inconsistent, illogical, and indifferent to the suffering of those living it. To live is to contend with that absurdity every single day, to suffer because of it, to make the decision to endure, to make the decision to try every single day, to know that every single day the distance between what may happen and what is going to happen draws more narrowly until they intersect at the moment of our deaths because that’s the most unambiguous thing about life. Life kills all of us in the end, as surely as it killed my cat Domenico. There is nothing ambiguous about that. All we can do is try and soften the edge when it hits.

If ever you're broken

No reason to do it alone

 - Baby, by The Bird and The Bee  

It is impossible to protect ourselves from everything. Life gets us in the end. Outside of healthcare, insurances, design and safety, there will always be vulnerability to unseen, unknown, or unimagined lethalities. If trust is how a safety system accounts for residual risk, then bravery is the only way to manage those uncontrollable risks and outcomes in life. To live every day is an act of bravery, to face the world and to try over and over. To live is to be brave in the face of uncertainty, every day and every minute, and to love is the bravest thing we can do. To love something or someone else is to open ourselves to the highest intensities of joy and of pain. Life isn’t the same without both. To love is to be brave and to try, every day, for people and things that are bigger, better, and purer than we are. My friends have asked me how I’m going. I say I’m good, but I feel brittle. I feel that all I can do is to pull on my boots and put one foot in front of the other and try and make the most of it, for love, and for trying. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is just try. I don’t know if the trying gets easier, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and be the best I can for other people because that’s what I owe them. Life doesn’t owe any of us anything and so all we’re going to get comes from the people around us, from their care, their regard, and their love. In everything we do, we try to put that little bit more good into the world and leave it behind for someone else to pick up. That’s life. That’s love. That’s art. That’s the only thing we get to do in the middle of it because all the other choices we get don’t stack up to that at all. Nobody gets out of this alive, and nobody gets anywhere without someone else to lean on, someone to be there. I was lucky to have Domenico, and I was lucky to be there for him when he needed me the most, because the only thing I needed to remember was that the decisions I made all came from love. That’s why they were easy. That’s why they hurt. That's why the art of living is to try each and every day to take the edge off the cutting cruelty of life.

I'll never have enough words, the right words, the timeliest words, or the best words to talk about this, so now I'm going to stop.

I am sad to be without my friend. For those of you who never knew him, I wish you had the chance. For those of you who knew but never met him, I wish you could have scratched his head, felt the softness of his fur, and let him mash his stupid head into your knuckles. For those of you who met him, I know you wish that he was here as much as I do now, because I loved him every day until the day I had to let him go, I will love him every day afterward, and all the love I have for him will live on even though he’s stopped, and that will be his memory.

That fact, like Domenico, is as real as the love I have for him, and I love him very much.

What a fellowship, what a joy divine

Leaning on the everlasting arms

What a blessedness, what a peace is mine

Leaning on the everlasting arms

Leaning, leaning

Safe and secure from all alarms

Leaning, leaning

Leaning on the everlasting arms

 - A. J. Showalter & E. Hoffman