‘Kedi’ and a Eulogy for My Cat, Tiger.
Three years ago, I published a piece about Ceyda Torun’s Kedi and about my cat Tiger. When I finished that piece, I was proud of myself and convinced that I had reached enlightenment. I had tricked myself into believing that I made peace with mortality and was prepared for the inevitable and overwhelming grief that comes with losing a pet. I thought that I was going to be (at least a little bit) prepared for this moment. Tiger passed away this week, and I discovered how immeasurably and exceptionally wrong I was. Thinking about death and actually facing it are entirely different things (Duh).
I was around ten years old when Tiger came into my life. I wish I could say that we had adopted him, but in reality, he adopted my family by consistently showing up in our backyard, demanding food and shelter. In less than three months, he had gone from the adorable stray that showed up in our backyard occasionally to the most important member of the El-Sadany family. It was all part of his master plan — fifteen years of systematically converting my family from “no pets” people into devoted servants. Tiger famously refused to meow. But Tiger also famously received everything he wanted, and he made sure we knew exactly what he wanted. We spent fifteen years developing a shared language that transcended English, Arabic (although my mother is convinced that he was fluent), and meows. If he rested his paw on the leather couch, that meant it was time to take him on a walk outside, or else he would begin to scratch the leather couch up. If he woke you up at 2 AM with a tongue to the face, that meant “Wake up and entertain me.” If he slammed his paws against your laptop keyboard, that meant “Your day job is a foolish endeavor, and you should be focused on me instead.” If he went outside and came back with a gopher that he found in the backyard, that meant “I have provided for you, and now you must be grateful and show me affection.”
Ceyda Torun’s Turkish cat documentary, Kedi, has become inseparable from my relationship with Tiger. I’ve always been someone who likes to have tangible things to represent my feelings, and I feel so lucky to have found this movie as a vessel to contain so many of my memories with Tiger. The film follows seven cats as they move through the city of Istanbul and control the spaces of the world they occupy. The first time I watched Kedi, I recognized Tiger in every single frame. I saw his fascist tendencies in Sarman, the golden neighborhood mob boss who presided over his turf with Pacino-like authority. I saw his charisma in Bengü, the social cat who charmed every human in his path. I saw his chaos in Gamsiz, the bakery’s local troublemaker. Every single one of these cats has a piece of Tiger.
In the same way that my family completely shifted our daily routines to accommodate Tiger, the humans of Kedi have completely transformed their lives because of their feline friends. Duman (the cat with manners) lives near a deli and has become its most important customer. A few fishermen are shown with a morning routine built entirely around the regal cat, Aslan Parçası. The humans in Kedi are constantly taking part in an ongoing negotiation with cats over space, food, affection, and respect. Torun’s documentary finds poetry in an urban ecosystem where wildness and civilization are in perpetual symbiosis.
When we lose our cats, we also lose a way of being in the world that they taught us. The cats of Istanbul may live on in the culture of their respective neighborhoods, and Tiger also lives on in the same way. But with Tiger’s death, there’s also a part of me that died. As I reflect on his passing, I can’t stop thinking about how much of how I move through the world is a direct result of him.
Love embeds itself in routine, and caring for something changes the fundamental motions of your day-to-day. Tiger lived in our home, but he also rewrote the rules of how our house worked. Now those rules will continue to exist without him as a ghost protocol. The cats of Kedi occupy a permanent place in how their humans understand home and routine. Tiger’s real legacy lives on in how I move through the world. He’s immortalized in muscle memory and reflexes, in a version of myself that knows how to care for someone demanding and irreplaceable.
And Tiger taught me so much more than just how to be his human! That first viewing of Kedi (recognizing his negotiation tactics in Duman’s window pawing and his territorial confidence in Sarman) was, I think, the first real moment I learned to love a movie. It crystallized everything in my mind and taught me to see film as a way to understand my own lived experience. I was able to turn a movie into a temple to my relationship, and through that, he taught me to use film to understand my world and my life.
He’s the reason FilmSlop exists. Every review we post, drawing a connection between the screen and life, traces back to how Kedi helped me understand my own love more clearly. Tiger is the reason that I understand that movies are at their most powerful when they embody the human experience in ways that excavate meaning from the ordinary moments that make up a life.
So every piece I publish here is, in some way, a tribute to him. Every time I find myself in a film and connect a story to my life, it is in part due to Tiger. He showed me how special stories can be and how to make sense of loss and love and the weight of time passing.
I miss Tiger so much already, and I don’t know how I’ll cope, but he lives on in who I am and how I experience and love the world.
