I want to tell you about the night Eros arrived.
My husband and I had just come back from dinner. It was 2021, and we were living in Italy — we had moved there when the pandemic locked everything down, including our work, and we were finding our way through a strange, suspended kind of time. We came home that evening and heard it before we saw it: a small, thin, desperate sound coming from beside our door.
He was maybe three months old. Impossibly small. His eyes were infected, his tail was matted, his ribs were visible through his fur. Someone had left him there — just set him down beside our door and walked away. He was crying the way only a very sick, very frightened animal cries: with everything he had left.
We took him to the vet that same night.
The vet kept him for three days. Antibiotics, injections, more medicine than seemed possible for something so small. On the third day, when it was time to give him a name, the vet looked at me and asked what I wanted to call him. I hadn't thought about it. I didn't have a name. We went back and forth for a moment, and then the vet said: What about Eros? It means God is with you. Good fortune.
I said yes. And I meant it as a prayer.
Eros came home. He was saved.
The Complicated Business of Healing
At home, I already had Stellina and Tommy — siblings, six months old, full of the confidence that comes from having always been safe and loved. They did not want Eros. Not at first. They hissed. They retreated. They made it very clear that this new creature was not welcome in their world.
We kept them separated for weeks — Eros in one room, Stellina and Tommy in the rest of the house — until he was healthy enough, strong enough, stable enough to be introduced properly. It was slow. It required patience. There were setbacks. There were days when it seemed like the three of them would never find their way to each other.
I think about that separation period now and I see it differently than I did at the time. At the time it felt like a problem to be solved. Now it feels like a lesson about healing: that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is hold space, keep things separate, let the healing happen at its own pace, and trust that the reunion will come.
It did come. Slowly, then all at once.
Eros, Four Years Later
Eros is four years old now. He is the boss of the house. He is the boss of Stellina and Tommy, who were there first and are technically older, and who have accepted this arrangement with the grace of cats who know when they have been outmaneuvered.
The three of them are inseparable. They sleep in a pile. They groom each other. They move through the house like a small, coordinated kingdom. Whatever the early tension was — whatever the fear and the hissing and the weeks of separation were — it is completely gone. What remains is something that looks, unmistakably, like family.
And Eros — my Eros, the one who arrived sick and crying at my door — has a particular habit that undoes me every single time. No matter what he is doing, no matter how deeply he is sleeping or how absorbed he is in whatever cats are absorbed in, the moment he hears my voice, he comes running. Not walking. Running. Like a dog. Every time.
I do not know how to explain what that does to something in my chest. I only know that it does something.
What Science Says About Cats and Healing
The research, it turns out, supports what cat people have always known. A cat's purr vibrates at a frequency between 25 and 150 Hz — a range that has been shown to promote bone density, reduce inflammation, lower blood pressure, and support the healing of soft tissue. This is not folklore. The vibration frequency of a cat's purr falls within the range that physical therapists use in therapeutic ultrasound treatments.
Beyond purring, the simple presence of a cat has measurable effects on the human stress response. Studies have found that interacting with cats reduces cortisol — the primary stress hormone — and increases oxytocin, the bonding hormone associated with feelings of safety, connection, and calm. The act of stroking a cat activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for rest and recovery, and pulls the body out of the fight-or-flight state that many of us spend far too much time in.
There is also the matter of non-judgmental presence. Cats do not evaluate you. They do not have opinions about your productivity, your choices, your appearance, or your emotional state. They simply are — and in their being, they invite you to simply be as well. For people who carry a great deal of internal criticism or external pressure, that quality of presence is genuinely therapeutic.
What Stellina Taught Me About Stillness
Stellina has a particular quality of stillness that I have tried, with limited success, to learn from. When she sits near me, she is fully there — not distracted, not half-present, not thinking about what comes next. She is simply in the room with me, attending to the moment with her whole self.
I noticed, over time, that her presence changed something in me. When I was anxious or scattered or caught in the loop of overthinking, sitting with Stellina — not doing anything, just being near her — would gradually slow the mental noise. Not because she was doing anything. Because her quality of presence was contagious.
This is what I mean when I say cat therapy is real. It is not that cats perform healing. It is that their natural state — present, unhurried, undefended — creates a field that the human nervous system can entrain to.
What Tommy Taught Me About Playfulness
Tommy is the middle cat, and he is ridiculous in the best possible way. He has an enthusiasm for cardboard boxes, hair ties, and the garden that I find genuinely inspiring. He approaches everything with the same full-body commitment — whether it is a toy, a nap, or a sudden sprint across the apartment for no discernible reason. He acts like a king in the garden. He has earned it.
What Tommy taught me is that playfulness is not frivolous. It is necessary. The capacity to engage with something for the pure joy of it — without outcome, without purpose, without needing it to be productive — is one of the things that keeps the spirit alive. Adults lose this. Watching Tommy reminded me to make space for the things I do just because they delight me. That is enough. That has always been enough.
The Distance
Stellina, Tommy, and Eros are in Italy right now. I am in Canada. We had to come back, and they stayed with their nanny — a person who loves them and cares for them well, and who is not me.
I will not pretend this is easy. It is the specific ache of loving something you cannot be near. I go back and forth. I make it work. But the goal — the real goal underneath all the work I am doing, the music and the writing and the online income I am building — is to close that distance. To get back to them and stay. To not have to choose between my life here and my life there.
That is what I am working toward. Every article I write, every song I make, every thing I build — it is all, in some way, for them.
Eros ran to me the last time I was there. He heard my voice from the other room and he came running, the way he always does, and I held him for a long time and thought: this is what I am building toward. This exact moment. This is enough reason.
Why I Believe in Animal Companionship as Healing
I am an intuitive. I feel things — other people's pain, other people's grief, the emotional weight of rooms and situations and the spaces between words. The world is very loud when you feel it this way.
My cats are the opposite of loud. They are the quietest, most uncomplicated love I have ever received. They do not need me to explain myself. They do not need me to perform wellness or productivity or having it together. They need me to be present, to be warm, to be the person whose voice makes Eros run across the room.
That is it. That is the whole requirement.
In a world that asks a great deal more than that, there is something profoundly healing about being loved so simply.
They met me in 2021 when everything was locked down and uncertain and strange. They gave me the purest love I have ever known. And they are waiting for me to come back.
I am coming.
Emy J is a writer, musician, and proud cat mom based in Ottawa, Ontario. Stellina, Tommy, and Eros are currently in Italy, being magnificent. Everything she builds is, in some way, for them. Visit emyj888.com.