Harvey, the cat who helped me through grief and illness

Harvey arrived during a year of loss in 2004, after my grandmother died and our family cat Skeet passed away. The house felt shockingly quiet and my mother was grieving; I was only 11 and wanted to bring back some chaos and joy. We found him at the local cattery on the Isle of Man, pressed at the back of his pen with enormous, owl-like eyes.

My mother smiled for the first time in months and we knew he was the cat for us. He settled in quickly and showed a very human kind of intelligence: he used door handles, devised ways to steal catnip from the kitchen cupboard, and meowed in a broken “mah-ow” that sounded like “hallo.” Mostly, though, he was valued for how he loved us back.

When someone was upset he would sit close and purr, his calm weight seeming to anchor us. In my later teens I became ill after starting sixth form, with daily nausea, vomiting before school and an inability to eat. Doctors ran an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, a barium meal X-ray and several scans without finding a cause, and I was put on a feeding tube.

Isle of Man

harvey, cat, grief, feeding tube, endoscopy, colonoscopy, barium meal, nausea, vomiting, sixth form