The Shared World

The Shared World

We meet her backside first, the veterinarian in bright green scrubs jogging down a dirt path. Somewhere lush and warm. There’s no narration, only an overlay of ambient music as a barefoot kid leads the way to a slack-eyed cat beneath a fern, four wide-eyed kittens fastened to her flanks.

This isn’t the video I meant to watch in May of 2025, of an officer-involved shooting a mile from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area. The warning of graphic content caused me to pause long enough to click instead on the video of a mother cat clinging to life while her kittens cling to her.

The vet finds a bit of level ground, gathers the kittens and resettles them at the edge of a towel, then retrieves the mother and centers her on the cloth. Her medical kit is a plastic case with terraced shelves, the kind that might hold sewing notions. After listening through her stethoscope, she turns the limp cat over and starts CPR. When there’s no response, she splays the cat’s forelegs and lifts them overhead, back and forth like a child might be allowed to do to the family cat if the cat loves the child.

There’s a calm and purposeful economy to the vet’s every move. She gathers her supplies close and loads a syringe with a clear liquid. She cradles the mother cat’s head and squirts in the fluid while herding kittens. One white kitten perches on her knee with its front paws as she pumps the mother cat’s heart with her thumbs. The cat is the color of an approaching sunset. Her fur has worn away where she once wore a collar 

It goes on like this until some connection resumes between life-fluid and life-rhythm. The mother cat’s tongue flickers. Her belly rises and falls. When the vet puts an oxygen mask over the cat’s face, her kittens are rapt. They seem to sense that what’s happening is better than what came before, to trust this green angel. Once the oxygen flows, she wipes away eye crust, checks ears and mouths, and transfers the kittens one by one into a pink backpack. She wraps the mother cat in the towel and lifts her into a second carrier.

Then we’re in a clinic—fluorescent tube light, steel exam table. The green angel shaves a foreleg and inserts an I.V. While she waits for the medicine to work she turns her attention back to the kittens, whom she bathes with wet wipes then lets wander, preventing them from dropping off the edge of the table with a precisely timed elbow. Eventually, the mother cat kicks. Her eyes revive. She tries to raise her head but can’t, so the green angel cradles it. She flicks dirt from the mother cat’s nose. She feeds a bit more from the syringe, massages the heart. Feed, massage, feed. Repeat.

At 19 minutes and 33 seconds in—boom!—the cat’s hind legs twitch. She raises her head, with eyes that see. The green angel draws up a milky fluid. At the first taste of the food-milk-medicine, the cat shakes her head, but she swallows.

At 23 minutes 2 seconds, she’s alert, sniffing her kittens in a fluffy bed. Cross-legged on the tile floor, the green angel resumes syringe feeding—first the mother, then each kitten. They eat in a thousand eager licks, all jerky limbs and sharp teeth. Eventually, when the mother cat consumes an entire foil tube of food, the green angel’s mission is complete.

Under her scrubs she wears a glittery blouse with three-quarter length sleeves, as if she has somewhere festive to be. We never find out who she is, where or when this occurred, what happened next. But what we do know, and why I’m telling you this, and why you’re listening, is that this is the shared world we want to live in.

Where help arrives without hesitation, conditions, or currency.

Where the choice between kindness and violence is available and easy to make.

Where attention is medicine, expanding the possibilities and rooting us to one another in tenderness.