Who is your best friend?

That question has always been unclear in my mind, a thought-provoker. I didn’t, and still don’t, fully know what qualifies as a best friend. We know in our hearts that best friends always present themselves differently in everyone’s lives, but having notions rather than guarantees can be frustrating — a hero’s journey without an outline. Growing up, I had a few friends and I’d always mentally go through a list, naming everyone close to me but failing to find someone I was the most connected to.

It was only recently that I realized my best friend was never a person.

My best friend was someone with whom I shared mutual understanding without needing words, someone who taught me patience and care. My best friend was someone whom I had an unusual connection with, but one that taught me how to truly listen to others.

My best friend was a cat named Lady Grey. And she taught me how to live.

Growing up with a cat altered the path of development I would have taken in life. My parents adopted our 8-month-old cat on Sept. 5, 2007, when I was about 6 months old. She was around my size, with beautiful, silky blue-grey fur. My mom’s friend had been fostering some cats from a family that moved to Uganda with Lady Grey, originally named Fefwina, being one of those cats.

My parents say my love for Lady Grey began when I first saw her, spouting my first word – “kitty.” But that love wouldn’t be reciprocated for quite some time. Lady Grey was generally not a kind cat, only showing affection to a few people and just tolerating everyone else. The fact that I didn’t understand her, and didn’t know when she was telling me “no,” didn’t help her view of me for years. Over time, though, I came to understand her on a deeper level.

But what made our relationship special was the fact that it combined human and animal interaction. Lady Grey communicated with her eyes, her body language and her movement, exposing me to a different way of learning than the one I had with the people in my life. They taught me through pictures, songs and words, while my cat taught me through observation and careful emotional scrutiny.

I admired Lady Grey more than anyone else in my life as a kid. I found her both adorable and fascinating, and over time I learned how to listen to her, picking up on what she did and didn’t like about my actions. One of the most important lessons I learned from her was how to read her body language to tell how she was feeling. This ability has allowed me to understand the people in my life. She taught me how to learn without words.

My time with Lady Grey gave me a different kind of love in life — a love I couldn’t share with a human. It was a bond that existed only between us. We comforted each other when no one else did, and we had an emotional sense of how the other was feeling. Lady Grey had anxiety with people, so whenever people came over to our house, we’d take her to my parents’ room to de-stress. I would quietly sit with her, sometimes for as long as half an hour, petting and comforting her, until she fell asleep. And when I’d cry in my room, she would come in and sit with me, licking my tear-stained face and making me giggle through my sadness with her odd, sandpaper-textured tongue.

One of the hardest things I have ever had to go through in life was losing Lady Grey. When she was around 13 years old, we found out that she had pancreatitis, an inflammation of her pancreas due to the lack of filtration in the water she was drinking. She stopped eating regularly and became increasingly sick, resulting in countless vet visits and rounds of medication.

Finally, after over a year of treatment, my mom sat down on our off-white and worn-down living room couch, the one we had been talking about replacing. The light behind her was almost blinding, but even I could see the heaviness in her eyes as she told us that Lady Grey’s medicine wasn’t working anymore.

Time and space held my breath. My heart felt like it was sinking into my ocean lungs, drowning any words I could think of to say. Sea water filled my throat and eyes as a million thoughts rushed to my head – “No, this can’t be happening. I can’t lose my best friend, the one who would comfort me when I was crying and who would greet me when I came home from school. I don’t know how I’m going to live without her.”

My worst fear of losing my cat, my best friend, was coming true.

Lady Grey was dying.

But, of course, we had expected this. We knew we had been living on borrowed time with her. We knew that her clock was running slow.

This altered my relationship with my cat. It made me realize she wasn’t going to be around forever. Throughout my childhood, I took the time I had with her for granted. I unconsciously expected her to always be by my side, and as I saw my mom carry her into the car to go to the vet one last time, that expectation and her life were ripped from me.

I don’t remember when I started to pray for eternal time with Lady Grey. I grew up in a Christian household, and I convinced myself that by praying every night to God to not take my sweet baby away from me, she would live as long as I did. As I grew up, I learned that no matter how many times I whispered prayers under my breath, nothing would stop the inevitable ticking of time’s heartbeat.

My cat and I both had heartbeats, timers running on different physical properties according to our species. The moment I was hit with this realization was when I came to terms with the fact that all life eventually dies, that the ribbons tying our lives together were coming undone and would eventually separate.

Living with an emotional bond with Lady Grey shaped the person I am today. She taught me valuable life lessons about patience, how to listen to others and how to let go. She taught me that death is but a physical separation, that one doesn’t truly die so long as we preserve the memories and experiences with our loved ones.

I will never forget how my cat healed me in times of need, how she would climb into bed with me on Saturday mornings when I was drawing and how she would sit with me when I was upset. I will never forget how her purring made me feel almost instantly better after a rough day, her gentle body lying next to mine on the floor of my living room.

Lady Grey wasn’t just my best friend. She was my baby, my guardian angel and my teacher. And I will never forget how she taught me how to live.