Cats Against Trump

By Sue Bergeron

August 8: Last year, on a blazing hot day in the Texas sun, I knelt at the gravesite of my beloved sister Laurie and gently placed my pink pussy hat next to her urn. I had sought out her husband and asked his permission to send it down with her. She loved the little pink hats, a symbol of the resistance. 

We despised Trump, a con artist and a thief. For us it was personal. Trump had not only ripped off the American people but he'd ripped off a member of our very own family for a large amount of money. So, though she was a very sick woman, we were both warriors for Joe Biden, whom we loved and had turned to as a beacon of hope.

Laurie had seen many photos of me in my handmade pussy hats, bullhorn aloft, at various rallies protesting Trump. The hats had bloomed like a field of pink tulips rising out of the snow across America and the world, starting on January 21, 2017 at the Woman's Day March. Millions rose up against the tyrrany of Trump from the very day after his inauguration. It made my heart glad, climbing the hill to the RI State House that day, to see the massive crowd of protesters! The people were not going to accept this liar, this monster, as leader of the free world. 

Laurie wrote to me and asked if I could make her a pussy hat and send it to her because, of course they were non-existent in rural redneck Texas (her words) where she lived. I mailed her a hat and she told me she could only wear it indoors. She would sit in her easy chair, wearing the pink hat while watching TV. Whenever The Orange Beast came on the screen she got her frustrations out by tossing cat toys and balled up newspaper at the screen. Her last message to me was a text while I was attending Joe Biden's kick-off rally in Philly. It said simply "You Go Girl. Power to the Puss..." The message trailed off. I think she was too weak to finish it. She didn't answer my messages after that. She passed away exactly one month later. 

I found great solice in the writings of Joe Biden's memoir "Promise Me, Dad," a treatise in dealing with grief. As most people know, Joe is no stranger to grief and deep sorrow, having lost his first wife and a child in a deadly auto accident, and then his son Beau to cancer. There is no one-size-fits-all cure for grief. But what Joe tells us is the single thing that helped him the most in dealing with grief was finding a purpose in life to hold onto. If you do that, you'll find that over time you can go for longer periods without having the weight of the sorrow crush you. Finally, there will be more days when you can smile at the memory of the good times than you cry about the loss.

As I left the grounds of Joe's kick-off rally on May 18, 2019 I passed a vendor's cart selling Biden buttons. One button in particular caught my eye. "Cats Against Trump." I absolutely had to have it. When I returned home to Rhode Island I showed my treasure to my beloved cat Peepers. Of course she approved whole-heartedly when I attached the button to the mattress on her bed. Ron and I always joke that Peepers despises Trump as much as her cat parents do. When we adopted her two years ago she began to sit in front of the TV and watched CNN and MSNBC with us with great interest. I'd kept in touch with her original owners, writing them often. One day I wrote and teased out their political bent by letting them know I'd gone to work as a volunteer for Joe Biden. Well, what do you know! They were a couple of liberals, Democrats who verified that Peepers, indeed, was used to watching CNN. They were thrilled that Peepers was safely in the hands of true blue Democrats.

On August 3rd I received my long-awaited Rhode Island delegate's ballot to vote for Joseph R. Biden, Jr. for candidate of the Democratic party for President of the United States. I stared at it for a long time. I drank in the importance of the moment and reflected on how proud my deeply Democratic parents would have been. I hurried down to my basement office to use my computer to cast my secure vote. I was filled with joy, but at the same time a kind of emptiness set in, because my duty as a delegate was finally fulfilled. And Laurie was not there to share it with me. Even though the job of campaigning is not done, and though I knew there was much more work to do from this point forward, it felt like all the air had flown out of my balloon. 

I smelled cooking going on in the upstairs kitchen as Ron prepared the evening meal. MSNBC buzzed in the background. Bounding up the stairs with exuberance I proclaimed, "It's done! I just voted for Joe Biden for candidate for President!" Ron turned and beamed at me, spatula in hand, "Good job!" 

And it was then that I found that my beautiful Peepers, my sweet furry love, had curled up in her bed in the living room and gone to sleep forever. I would like to think she waits for me, where we shall someday meet again, in happier times at The Rainbow Bridge. And I cling for dear life, in these terribly sad times, to the lessons that our dear friend Joe Biden has tried to share with us about grief. Once again, my heart is broken. But there is much work to do.