“Cat lady” was a label I didn’t want after losing my husband. But Teddy changed everything.
When people share that they are a “dog person” or a “cat person,” throughout my life I have had to apologetically admit that I was neither. I grew up with dogs, and I even owned several as an adult, but I never got that warm fuzzy feeling toward them, that special bond that others so often describe. As for cats, I learned by osmosis from my family that they were feral animals who used our garden beds as their litter boxes. I thought of them as aloof and disloyal animals who got their paws all over countertops and sunk their nails into furniture. I certainly never expected to spend almost $3,000 on a pandemic rescue cat.
When Covid-19 first disrupted the world, my fast-paced, busy schedule came to a screeching halt. I was four years into a different type of grief. My husband had unexpectedly passed away, leaving me a single mother to a 13-month-old, 3-year-old, and a 6-year-old. All of the things I used to seek comfort in during the years that followed — overscheduling, running away on trips, and the built-in company of my social networks — completely dried up. School became exclusively online, and as a high school government teacher, I struggled to teach my classes virtually while juggling solo parenting at home. I felt stranded on a desolate island, and being stuck at home left me feeling more alone than ever. As my despair deepened, I watched other people scramble to adopt pets to fill their own pandemic voids. My daughter seized this opportunity to push harder for the orange tabby kitten of her dreams. I never thought I would agree, but as the uncertainty of the times slowly drained me, somehow I said yes.
But I was scared. I wasn’t an animal person, and I worried this would be another pet I would feel indifferent toward. It also felt unrealistic to take on more responsibility as an only parent. Not to mention the danger of the cat lady stigma: I already felt insecure about my relationship status, single-mother status, and almost-40 status. “Cat lady” was a label I did not want to add to this depressing resume. Yet there I was, filling out applications and chasing every possible lead during a competitive surge in pet adoptions, until finally, a friend of a friend knew someone who had a rescue with an orange tabby kitten. We named him Teddy.
Any doubts I had dissolved the moment we picked him up. Teddy was friendly and social, destroying every preconceived notion I had about cats. He let my children carry him around, kiss him, and take naps with him. My no-cat-on-the-bed rule immediately went out the window. He slept with me every night and cuddled against one of us at all times. I taught my classes online with Teddy nearby. He kept a daily rotation of sleeping, stepping on my keyboard, and walking in front of my camera with his tail in my face. His presence had a calming effect during those anxious weeks and months when we had no idea what we were doing or where we were going.
It confused me how much I loved Teddy. I’d spent my entire life thinking I hated cats. I would scoff at people who treated their pets like their children; I could never wrap my mind around that kind of love. Now I was posting pictures of my cat on social media and buying cat-themed dish towels. I wondered how I could have gone so many years not knowing.
One day, five months after we got Teddy, he began to throw up. I was still a nervous pet owner, but other people reassured me that it was probably nothing. I felt like a new parent, constantly checking to see if the baby was still breathing. When it continued for a few days, I knew it was serious. I worried about how much money an emergency visit would cost. I searched for an appointment, only to find that all the vets near us were booked out for days because of the pandemic pet explosion and safety precautions. It made for a perfect storm while Teddy became increasingly lethargic, no longer eating or drinking, and unable to even lift his head. The kids took turns checking on him, trying to coax him to take sips of water, and worrying that he was going to die.
We were finally able to get in at a vet across town with peeling advertisements, unkempt landscaping, and minimal Yelp reviews. It would not have been my first choice, but we were desperate. A vet tech took Teddy from us as we waited in the parking lot due to Covid-19 protocols.
It took two trips before a diagnosis: an obstruction in Teddy’s intestines. We were told it could be a hair tie or a rubber band that he may have swallowed. I thought about the number of things my children left out on a regular basis and I felt immediate guilt that I didn’t do a better job of picking them up. Teddy needed emergency surgery or he was going to die. The veterinarian told us that even with surgery, he still might not survive.
I initially paid $289 for X-rays and a barium test. Surgery and recovery would be another $2,446. Almost $3,000 and no guarantees for a rescue cat we had known for five months. I had to give the office an answer.
“You need to put that cat down,” my dad said on the phone when he called to get an update.
I grew up in a household where animals had to be low-cost and low-maintenance. My parents were frugal people who didn’t believe in sinking money into their animals. There were no exceptions. If an animal violated any one of those rules, it either got re-homed or put down. Pet insurance wasn’t a thing I knew about or took seriously.
I sat in my car in front of the veterinarian’s office crying as I tried to decide. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw my children’s faces. Their eyes brimmed with tears as they stared at me, searching for an answer in my expression.
“It’s a lot of money,” I tried to explain, my stomach in knots. I knew the clock was ticking. One of the worst things about becoming an only parent is being responsible for everything. There was no other parent to bounce an idea off, and no one to share the blame for making the wrong decisions that might ruin everyone’s lives.
“Do we not have the money?” my daughter asked.
“You can use all of my money,” my older son said.
My 5-year-old offered to make the surgery count toward all of their Christmas presents for the year. His siblings agreed, and even added their birthday presents too.
The thing is, Teddy was so much more than a cat to me. He was even more than family. I never expected to love an animal the way I loved him. He gave me the gift of hope — a realization that my life still had so many happy discoveries to unearth, more joy to experience, and likely a lot more heartache too. It was all worth it. I think my mind was set before I even saw the price, back when I handed Teddy off and it felt like a piece of my heart was being given away. Subconsciously, I must have known that I was too far in love to consider any other option. If there was one thing losing my husband had taught me, it was that time is precious and fleeting and priceless. We don’t get to control a lot of things in life, but out of the choices we do get to make, we should choose the heck out of them. That is a gift I never want to take for granted.
The surgery went well. The veterinarian produced the culprit of the obstruction. He gave it to me in a clear zip bag: knotted, bloody green string from the new cat scratching post I bought earlier in the week. I felt more guilt, but Teddy eventually recovered with no complications. Sometimes we get our best-case scenarios.
My husband had been severely allergic to cats. It is not lost on me that we would have never gotten a cat if he were still alive or if this pandemic had never happened. Of course I would rather take a world where my husband was here and there was no Covid-19, but in lieu of those options, I get to live in this silver lining — a place where our household today has expanded to three cats, officially making me a full-blown cat lady.
Death can have a way of hardening us. We can feel angry and punished for our circumstances; the loss and grief can be consuming. In the throes of raw grief, I did not think I would ever be happy again. I struggled to conceptualize a future with joyful new beginnings. I didn’t think I even wanted it. But loss can also have a way of softening us, opening our hearts to what is possible if we choose to let it.
Teresa Shimogawa is a civics teacher and writer trying to do good things in the world.
Journalists struggled to accurately convey scientific uncertainty on Covid-19.
The media has come under harsh scrutiny for how it has covered Covid-19, for good and sometimes for unfair reasons. It is absolutely true that covering a fast-moving pandemic in an age when science is being done at a record cadence and under an unrelenting spotlight is a truly difficult job. But mistakes under duress are mistakes nonetheless, and the only way we get better at this job is to learn from them.
One recurring theme in the media missteps over the pandemic is a failure to think through and convey uncertainty to readers. And one glaring example of how many journalists and outlets failed the public is in its coverage of the so-called lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins.
This became freshly relevant again recently when Vanity Fair published a fairly stunning piece of reporting by Katherine Eban on the long and ugly fight among scientists and officials over the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
It’s worth remembering how initial reports of the lab leak theory were met by the press when it first started trickling out in the earliest months of the pandemic. At the time, it was widely agreed that China was likely concealing information about the origins of the pandemic, just as it had originally downplayed the virus itself.
At the same time, there was plenty of nonsense floating around, like claims that Covid-19 was closely related to HIV (it’s not) or that it was engineered by Bill Gates (also a no). When Republican Sen. Tom Cotton speculated that Covid could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab, many scientists condemned that as the same conspiratorial nonsense, and many journalists echoed them.
That includes me — I published an article on February 6, 2020, warning that the coronavirus might turn out to be a big deal. I’m proud of it overall, but less so about the part where I referenced the “conspiracy theory” that the virus was from a Wuhan lab.
But lab origins weren’t a conspiracy theory — they were a credible scientific hypothesis, at a moment when we knew very little, for how Covid-19 could have originated. The WIV was conducting research on SARS-like coronaviruses, and we later learned that shortly before the pandemic began they took offline a massive database of viruses they’d studied.
As was well known at the time, China’s government had a history of lying and covering up disease outbreaks, including the original SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003, which was always going to make it very difficult to get to the bottom of a situation like this one.
Privately, Eban found, a few scientists were writing to each other that there may have been a lab origin for Covid-19. But publicly, they said something different, shutting the door on the lab origins theory.
It’s not that they were covering up clear-cut evidence of a lab origin. Instead, there seemed to be a push to prematurely resolve the conversation — perhaps out of a sense that the public couldn’t be trusted to handle uncertainty.
Why we need to get better at living with uncertainty
This isn’t just a question of media or science criticism — it’s a big problem for our faltering efforts to prepare for the next pandemic.
The fact is that we don’t have enough evidence, one way or another, to prove definitively whether Covid-19 originated in a lab or in the wild. And that’s okay. We should be comfortable with communicating that uncertainty.
Covid origins are far from the only story during the pandemic where there were efforts to put forward a “‘united front”’ or an appearance of scientists all agreeing, when in fact the science was uncertain and the scientists did disagree.
The attitudes that are lacking here — tolerance of uncertainty, a willingness to withhold reassuring but incomplete answers, and courage to admit past mistakes — are attitudes that we’ll need to adopt to do better in the next pandemic.
But the uncertainty challenge goes the other way, too. All too often, communicators seemed a bit too timid to put forward provisional conclusions based on the available evidence, sometimes waiting for the definitive word from a very conservative and sclerotic CDC before hitting “publish.”
In February 2021, people wanted to know whether vaccines reduced the odds you’d pass on Covid to another person. There was some preliminary evidence that they did. But since the evidence wasn’t certain, and since they didn’t want vaccinated people to abandon all caution, a lot of public health communicators were reluctant to say anything about the topic.
I wrote an article on the growing evidence that vaccines reduced transmission, a theory that turned out to be accurate, though it was months before the CDC came to the same conclusion.
Efforts to create a “united front” are meant to reduce misinformation and confusion, but sometimes they end up causing it, as everyone waits to see what everyone else is saying. I’ve come to believe it’s better to directly and publicly explain what you believe and why, while acknowledging disagreement where relevant.
Reviving trust in the media
From the start of the pandemic, health officials made questionable pronouncements at times, often amplified by the media. First, some officials told us to worry more about the flu. Then we were told not to buy masks. The reversals on those and other questions may have contributed to declining trust in our public health establishment and the media.
Instead of trying to present a united front, scientists should say that there is disagreement, and explain what specifically the disagreement is about. And instead of trying to present readers with “the answer” on big questions like the origins of Covid, journalists should get comfortable saying that we do not know for sure, sharing what evidence we have, and being okay with not knowing.
Experts should also get more comfortable disagreeing with other experts publicly when they disagree privately. One painful lesson has been that our public health officials are only human, and a recurring theme in Eban’s piece is that they often had large disparities between what they believed privately and what they said publicly.
Based on the discourse about the lab leak theory, it’s not clear we’ve learned the lessons above. We need to adapt — quickly — if we want to do better in the next pandemic.
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
The ICC may offer a path to hold Russia accountable, but it has plenty of limitations.
The bombing of a train station in Ukraine where many were gathered to evacuate. The murder of countless civilians in Bucha and other areas. As evidence of Russian atrocities against Ukraine builds, so do calls to bring the perpetrators to justice — including from US President Joe Biden, who recently said Vladimir Putin should be tried for war crimes.
“You saw what happened in Bucha,” Biden told reporters on Monday. “We have to gather the information. And we have to get all the detail so this can be an actual, have a war crimes trial,” Biden said, calling Putin “a war criminal.”
While it’s possible to try war crimes in national courts, investigators from the International Criminal Court (ICC) are already working in Ukraine to gather and vet evidence, and a number of nations have already referred the case to the global court, signaling a strong push to to bring such crimes to trial.
But it’s not as simple as filing a case at a courthouse; there are practical and political limits to what the ICC can do in any of the crimes it investigates and prosecutes. Among those challenges, in this case, is the fact that neither Russia nor Ukraine is party to the ICC, although Ukraine recognizes the court’s jurisdiction, so the court can prosecute those responsible for atrocity crimes committed in Ukraine.
The ICC itself is based in The Hague, the Netherlands, but it has 123 member nations all over the world. The court’s remit is to try grievous crimes like war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity — collectively known as atrocity crimes — and aggression, but it’s not intended to replace national courts, explained Kelebogile Zvobgo, assistant professor of government at the College of William & Mary. “It’s a court of last resort,” she told Vox. “The court only has jurisdiction in places unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute their own cases.” Given the fact that the Russian government denies waging war in Ukraine in the first place, much less committing atrocities there, the ICC could be an appropriate mechanism for holding Kremlin officials accountable. But the ICC is not the only avenue to pursue justice for atrocity crimes, and it’s far from guaranteed that Putin or any of his high- level associates would ever stand trial.
A permanent international court is still relatively new
Although the idea for a permanent international criminal court dates back to 1870, the ICC wasn’t established until 1998. The Rome Statute — the product of the UN’s Rome Conference, where 160 different governments convened to consider an international criminal court — enshrined the ICC as the first permanent international court; it came into force in 2002, after 60 countries had ratified the Rome Statute. The ICC has a permanent, professional, and impartial staff, and operates in coordination with the United Nations, although it’s an independent body.
Prior to the court’s establishment, there were mechanisms for trying crimes of international concern, most notably the Tokyo and Nuremberg tribunals after World War II. These were conducted before the Geneva Conventions were passed and were the first known international trials for crimes conducted during conflict. But those trials weren’t immune to criticism, including about their expedience as well as concerns over a sense of partiality, or “victors’ justice,” as Zvobgo said.
Later tribunals, like the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia prosecuting the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo under former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which prosecuted those responsible for that nation’s brutal civil war, and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which prosecuted the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, operated in conjunction with or under the auspices of the UN.
Individual countries can also try individuals for crimes that fall under universal jurisdiction, like atrocity crimes. Most recently, German courts were able to secure convictions for two Syrian military leaders for crimes committed against Syrians in Syria — crimes which technically didn’t involve Germany at all, but because they were so egregious and such an affront to the international order, they fall under universal jurisdiction.
Unlike other international courts, like the European Court of Human Rights, the ICC can only try individuals, not nation-states. That theoretically includes sitting heads of state, although that’s never happened in the court’s 20-year history, and is unlikely to happen in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The court has no enforcement mechanism, so while it can issue arrest warrants, it relies on national authorities to execute those warrants. “There are many ICC fugitives,” Zvobgo said, including former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, who even evaded capture in South Africa, a signatory to the Rome Statute, in 2015. All told, defendants in 11 ICC cases remain at large.
The court has, however, seen 30 cases, with 10 convictions and four acquittals. That might not seem like much, but considering how difficult it is to build the kinds of cases the ICC prosecutes, and the capacity that many defendants have to evade capture and trial, it’s significant.
It’s also a sign that countries are following up on their responsibilities, per the Rome Statute, and holding their own investigations and prosecutions for atrocity crimes, Zvobgo told Vox, citing an instance in Colombia in which the ICC closed down a preliminary investigation into grave crimes of international concern — including thousands of alleged extrajudicial killings that occurred over five decades of armed conflict — after determining that the Colombian government could conduct its own investigation and trials.
Prosecuting Putin could be impossible
The ICC doesn’t try defendants in absentia, or if they’re not present at the court. And because the court doesn’t have a mechanism like a police force to enforce its arrest warrants, Putin could evade capture as long as he stays in Russia or other friendly nations — and in power.
“I don’t really see the mechanism for holding Putin criminally accountable,” Zvobgo told Vox. “The US and allies, I don’t think it’s possible that they will seize Putin,” she said, noting that it could set a disastrous precedent and could enable Russia or any other country to use international justice to retaliate against their adversaries.
Plus, there is little precedent for trying sitting heads of state. The only time that’s happened is when Milošević stood trial and was indicted for atrocity crimes in Kosovo in 1999 in a special tribunal convened by the UN. The ICC and other international tribunals have indicted former heads of state, like former President of Liberia Charles Taylor and former President of Chad Hissène Habré, however.
Another complicating factor is that one of the most vocal nations suggesting Putin to be tried at the Hague — the United States — isn’t itself a party to the ICC. The US government voted against the ICC during the Rome Conference in 1998; former President Bill Clinton signed on to the Rome Statute in 2000, but never submitted it to Congress for ratification. Former President George W. Bush in 2002 notified then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the US would not ratify the Rome Statute and didn’t have to abide by any of its provisions.
“It really shows a lot of hypocrisy,” and encourages the perception of “justice for thee, not for me,” Zvobgo noted. In 2020, the US was under investigation by the ICC for war crimes in Afghanistan, which prompted former President Donald Trump to pursue sanctions against then-ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of The Gambia and senior prosecution official Phakiso Mochochoko, a diplomat from Lesotho.
Even if it were possible to bring Putin to the Hague, the ICC couldn’t try him for one of the most critical crimes — aggression — for which he’s clearly responsible. That’s because the ICC can only try aggression crimes, defined as “the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which . . . constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations,” per the Rome Statute, if the countries in question are signatories. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is. Linking Putin to other reported war crimes in Ukraine, like the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants, targeting civilian facilities like train stations and hospitals, and sexual violence, is a massive undertaking and requires documentary evidence — like specific orders or testimony from insider witnesses, which are closely guarded — linking the actions of soldiers on the ground to officials in the Kremlin. “This stuff just takes a long time,” Zvobgo told Vox, “and it doesn’t necessarily end in a guilty verdict.”