Our Story
I never thought of myself as a cat person.
Growing up, I had two cats. One was named Gwendolyn — she disappeared one day and never came back. The other was Parakeet. He got sick, disappeared too, and we found him on the street sometime later. Maybe that's part of why, for most of my adult life, I kept cats at arm's length. Loving something that could just vanish on you didn't seem worth the risk.
My wife felt differently. She'd had a cat as a child, and she never stopped wanting another one. All through the time we were dating, she'd mention it — casually, patiently, the way you plant something and wait.
I reluctantly agreed. We made a deal: after a year of marriage, we'd get a cat.
We didn't even wait that long. One month into our marriage, Garfield came home with us.
What Garfield Started
I didn't know it yet, but that was the day everything changed.
For almost thirteen years, Garfield was the center of our home. He was the cat who finally taught me what my wife had already known — that loving something isn't a risk you avoid, it's a risk you take on purpose, over and over, for as long as you're given.
I've always been more of an observer than a participant in life. I think it comes from growing up on the outside of things — excluded a lot, bullied more than I'd like to admit. Watching from a distance became a habit, and eventually it became a skill. I write for a living — marketing campaigns, mostly, where the whole job is finding the story inside something ordinary. So somewhere along the way, I started doing the same thing at home. I'd watch our cats and see whole storylines. I'd been turning them into ideas in my head for years before I ever wrote one down.
Then we lost Orange.
That loss is what finally moved the lessons from my head onto the page. I started writing them down — not as an assignment, but because I needed somewhere to put what I was feeling. That grief became Life Lessons From My Cats. And it became something else, too: Nine Lives, which is, in every sense, a love letter to Garfield. It's my way of telling him I haven't forgotten him — and that I never will.
Why We're Doing This
If you're here, I'm guessing you've had a cat, a dog, or some animal who felt like more than a pet. Who taught you something you didn't ask to learn. Who left a Garfield-shaped hole in your life when they were gone.
That's who this is for.
I hope that somewhere in these stories, you see your own animal looking back at you. And if you do, I hope you'll stick around — subscribe to the newsletter, follow along with the cats who are still teaching us new lessons every day, and when Nine Lives is ready, I hope you'll let Garfield's story sit alongside your own.
He was never just a cat.
