He spent a lifetime dodging disasters with grit and grace, until a bit of calico made sure he didn’t take one last wrong step. Listen to your animals; they’re often loving with a built-in alarm. When people look at her family album, they see a wiry Polish immigrant with a mischievous smile and a lap full of cats. They can’t see the near-misses that trailed him through life or the night a small calico saved him.
She called him “Branka,” a toddler’s twist on Grandpa that stuck. He’d arrived in North America at three and a half, clutching a single toy ball that slipped over a ship’s rail and disappeared into the ocean. Maybe that’s why he never cared much for things; he cared for people and animals instead. His childhood was challenging, with an abusive father and a gentle mother who died when he was ten. His last words to her were, “It was an honor to have you as a mother.” He ran from that house at fifteen to join the army, survived two close brushes with death overseas, once skipping a ride in an armored vehicle that struck a landmine. Back home, he built a business from nothing, married, raised two children, and broke the cycle he was born into. Kindness became his rebellion.
Old age didn’t soften the drama. In his 90s, he bounced back from double pneumonia, healed with startling speed after a car sent him off his scooter, and continued with a grin. At ninety-four, he still lived in his bungalow with two cats and a walker, avoiding the basement stairs and the bathroom nightlight his daughter kept trying to leave on. Sciatica flared for one week, and he found walking backward hurt less. In the dark, he shuffled backward down the hall, reached what he thought was the bathroom door, and turned backward toward open space.
That’s when Emma, the gentlest of his cats, sank her teeth into his ankle. She never bit. He paused, puzzled, stepped again. She bit the other ankle, harder. Annoyance turned to awareness. He glanced around and saw the yawning stairwell to the basement right behind him. One more step and he would have tumbled backward down the flight. Emma had invented the only language he would listen to at 4 a.m., teeth, and refused to stop until he did.
After that, he accepted the nightlight, and the basement door was locked. Grateful phone calls went around the family; a tiny cat had done a huge thing. Soon after, he agreed to move to supportive living. The pandemic made it brutal. His beloved cats were rehomed, and his children said goodbye at the entrance while an aide wheeled him inside. For a few months, he did as well as a very old man can. Then the calls came: say goodbye. His daughter sat with him for almost two hours. He couldn’t speak, but at the end, he opened his eyes and found her face. A few days later, on January 9, 2021, with his favorite nurse nearby, he slipped away.
She couldn’t attend the funeral because of restrictions, so she wrote to him instead: a thank-you for crossing an ocean as a small boy, for choosing gentleness after violence, for building work and family out of thin air, for the jokes, the generosity, the stubborn optimism. She looked at photos of him meeting her little girl, the only great-grandparent who did, and promised to keep his spirit moving through their house like sunlight. His life was a quiet argument for resilience: that you can lose early and still give freely, be hurt and still be kind, face danger, and laugh.
He taught them to hold people closer than possessions, to let go of what doesn’t matter, and to trust the instincts of the creatures who love us. And they’ll never forget the lesson Emma left with her tiny teeth: sometimes the warning you need doesn’t sound like words, but you listen anyway.
