Pep's Law

Content warning: pet loss.

Some teaching evaluations really stick in your craw. One I’ll never forget was from the last time that I ever taught my Humanities Programming class at HILT with Ethan Reed. A critique of my teaching slide deck, it went something like: “We’re not children. We don’t need so many cat photos.”

I never forgot it because it felt like a fundamental critique of a very intentional part of my teaching. I try to bring my whole self into the classroom. It’s a function of my privilege as a cis white man to be able to do so, but I’ve also never known any other way. I would readily explain the reasons for having cat photos in my slide deck in all sorts of highfalutin ways—the animal photos are there to make the students more at ease! DH learning is about mitigating anxiety and frustration!—but the truth is I’ve always included pet photos in my teaching materials because they make me smile. They are who I am. I am an animal person. I grew up with five dogs.¹ At any party, I zero in on any resident animal in the mix straightaway because I want cuddles. Our Scholars’ Lab slack has a dedicated channel for dog photos because one of our coworkers kindly pointed out that we were flooding the main channel with them. The animal photos are there as much for putting myself at ease as they are for the students.

That final year at HILT was significant because it also marked a turning point for this impulse of mine to share pet photos. Right before I left for the conference, my wife, Eliza, and I adopted Pepper, our first pet as an adult couple. I remember being excited, scared, and effusive about the little cat to anyone who would listen. He was my news, my new cuddle bug, my new teaching device.

This past week, five and a half years later, I got the worst birthday present ever as Pepper took a sudden turn for the worse and passed away. As we have struggled to process the abrupt and unexpected loss of our little guy, I’ve been thinking a lot about Quinn Dombrowski’s beautiful tribute to Alla. I thought about what I might write about Pepper and whether such a thing would be worthwhile. I finally gave up on the idea audibly, and I did so in earshot of Eliza. I asked, “Would anyone really care?” Her response stunned me:

Are you kidding? People in the DH community know Pepper so well. He’s shown up on camera in so many of your presentations. He sat in your lap during so many talks even if they couldn’t see. He’s been in every one of your slide decks.

And she’s right. I’m positive I showed photos of our new family member to everyone who would listen during HILT 2019. And he began to feature in every single slide deck I made for the next five and a half years. He appeared in the decks I used just this past month with my own students for all manner of topics: writing pedagogy, fellowship information sessions, orientations, and more. I would develop whole narratives around him to serve as threads through particular talks. Pepper was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the page which boxed him in! He would write his way out.

But as with my HILT decks, he’s always meant so more to us than the purpose he served in any talk. He was ours, and we loved him. So here is a little more context about the cat who always wanted to be in the room. The little guy who strutted around like he owned the place. Because he did.

---

On New Years Eve 2018, we were visiting Eliza’s parents in Philadelphia. Her best friend, Hanna, was house sitting for a family friend who was traveling, so we went over to hang out with her for a low-key evening in. Just three or four people. We had to enter the house quickly when we arrived because the cats wanted to be let out.

Two things you should know about me to give context to this moment. First, I hate staying up late with every fiber of my being. A holiday built around being tired? No thanks. I had historically loathed New Years Eve parties, as you can imagine, and I am sure I made Eliza promise to let me turn into a pumpkin at a pre-approved time that night.

Second, I hated cats.

I grew up with a boatload of dogs in the house. Cats had never made sense to me: what do you mean conditional love? What do you mean they won’t cuddle when asked? What do you mean they scratch and bite? I had friends with cats when I was growing up, and they never connected with me. I would always go home to our family dogs and breathe a sigh of relief as our pups ran to greet me.

So on New Years Eve 2018, I went to the couch and flopped down to rest while Eliza played with the house cats. In the midst of all that, as I dozed on the sofa, Eliza heard a meowing through an adjoining door. “Oh,” Hanna told us, “that one has to be separated from the other cats, but he wants to say hi.” So Hanna opened the door and out lumbered an enormous tabby cat—over 25 pounds. This little guy said hello to the other people and then beelined towards me on the couch. He jumped right on my lap, assumed his new role as gravity blanket, and we both fell asleep for three hours. We missed the ball drop. It was the best New Years ever, and I posted about it an hour in on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brandon Walsh (@hshtgbrandon)

From the beginning, we found each other.

According to Eliza, I started talking on the drive home about stealing that cat away for ourselves. I had never had any interest in cats my whole life, but we kept talking about him for months. Encouraged by the many photos Hanna sent of Pepper playing or sleeping, we spoke about how friendly he was. How all he wanted was to be near other people. And how sad we were that he had to spend so much time alone in an adjoining garage because he was a food bully.

Over time, the Scholars’ Lab staff heard us talking about this cat and began a concerted effort to get us to adopt him. They ambushed me with renditions of “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables. And, just as he would later be immortalized in my own slide decks, my coworkers assembled a PowerPoint presentation to try to convince me to adopt him. They were persistent.

He was a part of the Scholars’ Lab community before we even took him in. When we finally relented and decided to adopt him, I distinctly remember the moments of panic that we felt as though the Scholars’ Lab had talked us into something we weren’t ready for. But we were. And this past week as we have grieved we keep saying how grateful we were for their efforts.

Hanna was our mutual connection, and she put out feelers on our behalf to see if his current owners would be open to us adopting him. Astoundingly, they were. A few weeks later, we got a very sweet letter from his former owners introducing us to our new roommate. Almost every other line in the note was about how much he loved people, laps, and cuddles. Hanna took the little man on a multi-state road trip to his new home with us. That was that.

---

He had many names. He came to us as Pepe, Mr. Peeps, or Peepsie. In honor of his new life with us, we wanted to rechristen him, but in a way that would still be recognizable to him. We called him Pepper, but we also had an endless series of riffs of our own: Pepperoni, Pep, Peppy, Chili Pepper,² Banana Pepper,³ Pepperon Pepperon Way Too Cool for Seventh Grade, Pepperdine Industries, Dr. Pepper,⁴ Mr. Chomps,⁵ Sweet P, Grumpelstiltskin. No matter what we called him, he was ours. And we were his.

Pepper settled in right away. He was sometimes afraid of the ceiling fan,⁶ but he was never afraid of us. From the start, he was the easiest cat to take care of. We put him in a room of his own for the night to get used to the space, and he cried all night because he wanted to be held. From then on, we three were inseparable. Pepper was happiest being held and used as a blanket for hours. A true Velcro cat, he wanted to be wherever we were. If we tried to close a door and enforce any boundaries, he would Kool-Aid Man his way through the wall and demand our attention. We refused to let him sleep with us for the first few months because Eliza had a childhood cat allergy, but we abandoned this plan after the vet diagnosed him with separation anxiety. We tried out having him sleep in the bed, and we never went back. We always looked forward to the cuddles, so freely given during the day, but especially warm at night. At the end of each day, no matter the stressors or pains, you had a huge cat that wanted hugs to look forward to.

And those snuggles were something. You could measure them out in units of how badly you needed to use the bathroom while trapped under Pep: he wanted to be held for hours at a time. He became increasingly like a rag doll as the hours ticked by.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brandon Walsh (@hshtgbrandon)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brandon Walsh (@hshtgbrandon)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brandon Walsh (@hshtgbrandon)

We often joked that Pepper thought of us as unruly furniture, sofas that wouldn’t sit still. Or as vending machines that didn’t get what was going on. (“A bite means I want food, darn it!”) But really we knew that he just wanted companionship.

Pepper’s previous owner was a horticulturalist, so he expected breakfast at ungodly hours. 4:00 AM give or take. After months of resisting, I gave up on trying to retrain him and started feeding him when he woke me up in the dead of night. Pepper knew the rules though: in exchange for food, he would pay a cuddle tax and spend the morning on my lap as the two of us went back to sleep on the sofa downstairs. Some of my favorite times were the hours I spent being his furniture as we rested in the morning. I eventually discovered an automatic wet food feeder that included ice packs so we wouldn’t have wet food sitting out overnight. The best impulse purchase I ever made in one sense: it let me sleep through the night and saved my sanity. In another sense, it was a tragedy as it brought to an end our early morning snuggle sessions.

Pepper was Eliza’s companion most of all. She works from home full-time, and she was overjoyed to have him as a constant office buddy. He sat in the window next to her, sleeping in the sun, for many hours each day. He always wanted us to know that he owned the place, so he would climb behind her in her office chair and insert a single claw into her back to get her to move to a nearby folding chair before falling asleep, triumphant. Eventually, we bought him an office chair of his own so that she didn’t have to compete with him, and he began joining her for meetings with clients, his ears regularly popping into frame in the corner of her Zoom screen.

When he wasn’t with Eliza, he was with me. A part of my working life from the beginning, Pepper was there under my arm for many, many projects, emails, and calls. If you’ve worked with me in the last five years, you almost certainly have seen Pepper. If not, you were in his orbit as he was just out of frame. He was rarely happier than when he was purring next to a warm laptop. But even if you tried to exclude him for a little professional privacy, he wouldn’t allow it. I had forgotten until he passed, but Amanda Visconti recalled how Pepper once pooped in his litter box in the background of one of our 1:1 zoom meetings. He always demanded attention.

Codependent? Sure. But we wouldn’t have it any other way. Perhaps my favorite thing about Pepper was how he always waited in the window for us to get home. You could always count on him to be on the back of a chair, watching for our car to pull into the driveway, and he would start meowing once he recognized us before bounding off to meet us at the door. And each night, you could count on eventually hearing his little paws pad into the room, followed by a leap onto the bed for nightly cuddles.

Pepper saw us through so many firsts. Our first year of marriage. He stayed up with Eliza until 4:00 AM each night as she worked full-time and also finished her PhD. He celebrated with her as she graduated during the global pandemic from our sofa. He lived his best life during that time, when we were stuck inside with nothing to do but spend time with him. He comforted us through the trials of IVF, wanting to be fully present in a logistically complicated way as I gave Eliza injections for that difficult year. And then he was there when we finally brought home our newborn son, a new roommate that he took to with his usual patient grumpiness: “Why does the hairless one get food when he cries once? I’ve been crying for years!” He and Ben eventually worked out a dark alliance, wherein the infant would fling food to the ground for Pepper to pick up.

The new addition to the family meant a lot of changes to our daily rhythms that we worry sidelined Pepper. Did we still give our cat a good life as we focused on the baby? Did we forget about him? But the truth is that Pepper was always a part of things. When we became worried that Pepper wouldn’t be able to sleep in the same room as the basinet, I actually started sleeping on the floor of the baby’s room so that Pepper could stay in the bedroom with Eliza. I did this for six months so that both the little ones had the personal attention they needed. A lot? Yes. But both were worth it. Pep was amazingly patient and interested in the new guy. We always called Pepper an older brother to the little Ben, and the pediatrician agreed. She asked if Ben had an older sibling because he crawled so early. Ben always wanted to be where Pepper was. Pepper was not sufficiently afraid of an infant who didn’t have motor control, and he always patiently allowed full tufts of his fur to be grabbed.

Pepper came to us at nine years old—a senior by the time of his second or third vet appointment. And he was on a diet the whole time we had him. 30 pounds at his heaviest, he was down to 15 towards the end. We excused any grumpiness by saying, “Wouldn’t you be angry if someone made you lose half your bodyweight?” Even as he collected health problems over time—arthritis, chronic kidney disease, asthma, reflux—we dutifully adjusted medications and care strategies. I often joked that he felt immortal: even as the medical conditions accumulated, his underlying health seemed to get better and better with every vet visit. So even though we knew he was older and slowing down slightly, it seemed as though his departure was far into the future.

Even a week before his passing, he seemed normal and healthy. The day after Thanksgiving, Pepper had a vet appointment that went perfectly well. “Keep doing what you’re doing” they said. “He seems better than ever.” The only sign something was off was his temperament: normally, he was an angel at the vet and they loved him, but this time Pepper fought and bit back at them a bit. Everything else about him seemed fine, though, so we moved on.

In retrospect, I think he was already in pain.

Pepper’s appetite, always voracious, started to go, and he crashed rapidly in the next couple days, a symptom of kidney failure. Emergency trips to the vet revealed he had an undiagnosed heart condition as well as the advanced kidney disease we had kept carefully under control for years. Both systems were finally failing, and you couldn’t treat both together. There was nothing we could do, so we brought Pepper home for as many cuddles as we could manage in the time we had. I held him in my arms as we said goodbye to him at home, both Eliza and I rubbing his nose gently in just the way he liked as he slept in a sunbeam one last time.

Eliza wanted Pepper to leave us the same way he found us - in my lap, purring himself to sleep.

In Quinn’s post on Alla, Quinn says that compartmentalizing is their superpower, that their own approach to feelings is akin to Tupperware that you stuff things in so you do the hard work of getting on. I’ve never felt very capable of that kind of self-organization. Personal spills over into the professional, and the compartments are porous. Triumphs and troubles in one affect the other. This characteristic has always felt like a strength of mine—it helps my teaching feel alive—but it’s also an approach that brings lots of pain and challenges. There are lots of holes, for better or for worse. It’s hard to turn off.⁷ That’s part of why I’m writing this post at all: I wanted to write about Pepper as a way to remember him, to grieve him, but also to think about what pieces of him I might carry with me. At the risk of over-intellectualizing something that just hurts right now, I’ve been trying to honor Pepper’s memory by thinking about what he tried to teach us.

And I have long thought that he did have something to share.

I have a real problem slowing down, and Pepper knew it. Even when given rest time, I’ll try to find something to do. Something to clean. Something to organize. Even when relaxing, I’m thinking about how I need to finish this show before the next. I’ll feel guilty when I’ve spent too long playing video games and not enough time “productively” relaxing. Pepper could tell, and he had a solution for every situation. Brandon having a panic attack? Hop on him for a cuddle. Eliza crying? Hop on for a cuddle. Trying to nurse the newborn? He could squeeze in for a snuggle anyway. If I sat down for even a single minute, he would hop on my lap. A common refrain around the house was, “Well, I was going to go practice trumpet, but then Pepper hopped on me.” Or “I was going to work, but Pepper said no.” We called it cat law. But I think it was Pepper’s Law more specifically.

As we’ve been grieving, we’ve had a lot of guilt about the changing orbit of our lives in the past year. Did we work too hard and not spend enough time with him? He was always nearby while we held the newborn. Did we take him for granted?

My best friend Brendan, a doctor, says that Pepper’s particular collection of advanced conditions would have been challenging to manage together even in humans. Pepper was almost certainly on borrowed time for ages, and it’s helped us this past week to know that we helped Pepper steal those years. Each time Pepper purred on top of us, he seemed to know. He seemed to say, “Slow down and enjoy this while you can. It’s enough.” So we did. And it was.

I think Pepper would have a clear solution to all our sadness. He would lie on us, purring, for hours, until it felt like all that mattered was this moment right here. The body, weighted down, vibrating with comfort and rest. Even as we try not to rush the grieving process, I’ve started repeatedly invoking a thing I’m calling Pepper’s Law. Pep’s Law states:

What would a 15-pound cat on your chest say about this problem? Slow down. Take a rest. Be here, now, in your body, with the ones you love. Make time for this.

The night after he passed, as Eliza and I wept ourselves to sleep, we looked for signs Pepper might still be with us. In years past, we often mistook the sound of the HVAC for the sound of Pepper purring. But now, just maybe, it could be him. If we woke up feeling a weight between our knees, just maybe it was a piece of his spirit coming in to rest. When we finally woke up and came downstairs in the morning, we found that our son’s heart-shaped balloon, originally in another part of the house, had been pushed through our home by the air currents and come to rest over the exact spot where we said goodbye to Pepper. I’m not religious at all, but I’m learning to be just a bit spiritual. It hurts too much not to be.

Pep will stay around for years to come, in our home and in our hearts. We were lucky to have him as long as we did. And now, when he shows up in my slide decks, there’s a new dimension to the images. The Pepper photos are there as a reminder of what matters. They’re there to remind me to invoke Pep’s Law, to slow down and appreciate wherever I am and who I’m with. They’re there for me. For us.