Cats

Cats in Cheryl Strayed / Sugar’s life are more than affectionate companions: caring for them gives her a lived example of nurturing another being, while the demands and limits of that care help her describe what she values in a child-free life. They also appear in a correspondent’s account of family violence, where a cat is thrown against a wall during an attack on the correspondent’s parents.

Companions and Family Life

When Cheryl Strayed / Sugar describes her first husband, she places their two cats within the ordinary intimacies of their shared life. He was her best friend and lover, a partner in music, politics, and road trips, and the cats’ daddy. The detail locates the animals inside a domestic world the couple built together: they belonged to the life she loved, even as she felt an inward pull to leave the marriage. Her account does not make the cats a reason for the marriage or its ending; instead, their presence adds a small, concrete measure of the affection and shared routines that made leaving difficult.

The cats also recur in her account of becoming an adult while carrying student debt. She describes adopting cats who immediately needed thousands of dollars in veterinary care, one of several costly choices she continued to make despite owing money on her education. The example turns financial strain into a question of what debt does and does not determine. Her loans have lasted through roughly half her life, but they have not prevented her from caring for animals or pursuing other pleasures and commitments. The cats enter this reflection not as a symbol of financial prudence, but as dependents whose needs became part of the life she chose to lead.

Care as a Practice

In considering whether to become a father, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar recalls two cats she had from age twenty-two until she buried them in the backyard almost two years before writing. They had been born prematurely to a mother too sick to care for them. She bottle-fed them, woke during the night to wipe their bottoms, and stayed with them through their growth from kittens into adult cats. Her description emphasizes the repeated, physical work of their care, as well as its duration: she loved them throughout their lives and raised them to be trusting and loving.

This care had been intentional. At the time, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar thought that raising the cats might be good preparation for having a child, if parenthood proved right for her. She identifies herself as their father and says that she loved the role. Their story therefore offers a substantial, personal instance of her capacity to nurture—not a prediction that she must become a parent, but evidence she can consider while asking what kind of life she wants.

Yet the same experience also showed her the difference between loving and raising dependents and being continuously bound by their needs. She remembers that she could put an extra bowl of food and water on the floor and leave town for a three-day weekend. That freedom matters in her deliberation: she values quiet, uncommitted time, and spontaneous travel, and fears losing parts of her existing life if she has a child. The cats make the contrast specific. Caring for them brought deep satisfaction, while their needs still allowed a degree of independence she recognizes would not be the same with a child.

Loss, Vulnerability, and Meaning

The cats’ deaths are present in the memory of their care: after years together, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar buried them in the backyard. The account does not elaborate on the circumstances of their deaths, but the burial gives the recollection a clear endpoint. It frames their relationship as a whole span of responsibility, from the urgent care required by their premature birth to the final act of laying them to rest. In her reflection on fatherhood, this remembered life lets her consider attachment and loss without turning either into an easy answer about whether to have children.

A different cat appears in a correspondent’s description of her brother’s escalating behavior toward their parents. When their mother refused to give him more money, he threw a wine bottle at her, spat in her face, broke plates, rampaged through the house, threw the family cat against a wall, and damaged furniture. The cat is included among the immediate victims of the violence, not as a decorative detail: the attack makes the destruction reach beyond the adults in conflict and into the home’s vulnerable dependents. The correspondent says that her brother left after their mother called the police, stopping to steal beers from the refrigerator on his way out.

Together, these appearances resist a single symbolic use for Cats. They are cherished companions in a marriage, costly dependents within a financially constrained life, and beings Cheryl Strayed / Sugar deliberately raised with tenderness. In another household, a cat’s vulnerability exposes the reach of a brother’s violence. The contrast matters: the cats’ place in the narrative depends on the particular relationships and actions surrounding them, while their care makes questions of love, obligation, freedom, and protection concrete.