Moses and Noah Kahan: Loss, Change, & The Life That Remains

There’s a new cat in the neighborhood. He belongs to the family from Vermont who moved in two doors down. My wife named him Noah Kahan. He’s big and gray. It’s only been a few weeks, but he’s already carved out his territory — patrolling our block a couple times a day sniffing, spraying, hunting, listening, and watching for friend or foe.

Our cat is in the basement: gaunt, frail, and vulnerable. Moses turns 15 next month, if he makes it. When Moses was Noah Kahan’s age, this neighborhood was his. Cats and dogs came and went, but Moses remained. In his prime, he was enormous. Jet-black with golden eyes, he prowled the streets with the portending elegance of a panther. But, Moses also has a soft side. When our kids were little, he would always follow them down to their friend’s house, a quiet shadow of protection at their heels. He’d take up his post in the yard to wait as they played, sometimes for hours. When they finally came home, Moses would rise from his vigil and escort them back to safety.

But, two months ago, Moses stopped eating. We think it’s the cancer. His eyes are just as sharp, but his grand old body is now all ribs and resilience. He doesn’t go outside alone anymore. Only if we are on the deck or in the backyard does he venture out, moving gingerly, as if our presence is the only thing that makes the outer world safe enough to enter.

Two cats: one coming, one going. One in the prime of his spry little life, the other dying daily. Between the two, you can almost feel the universal cycle of arrival and departure, beginnings and endings, new life and necessary death. I can’t remember a time when Moses was not in our lives, but one day soon he will be gone. Another memory, another reminder that nothing stays the same for long.

I shouldn’t be surprised, yet sudden change always catches me off guard. I wake up each morning, take the same shower, drink the same coffee, eat the same breakfast, drive the same route to the same old job, and return home whence I came. I bet you do something similar. These repetitive patterns are habitual enough to fool us into thinking that everything stays the same. But if we are honest, the whole wide world is in constant fluidity. Just look around you. Something in your life is dying right now, and something else is being born. The cells in your body are changing as you read this. You and I are no longer who we were yesterday, and we’ve yet to become who we will be tomorrow. Nothing is ever finally settled. Everything is always in motion, always passing through. Everything that arises, eventually falls. What feels solid is always quietly moving, even if we don’t notice it. I guess old King Solomon was right when he wrote, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

My Buddhist friends call this natural state of change impermanence, or the belief that everything is in a sort of in-between state all of the time. Pema Chödrön writes about this in When Things Fall Apart, where she describes impermanence not as something abstract or distant, but as the very texture of our lived experience.

“Impermanence is the essence of everything. It is babies becoming children, then teenagers, then adults, then old people, and somewhere along the way dropping dead. Impermanence is meeting and parting. It is falling in love and falling out of love. Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don’t struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.”

For Chodron, the ground we think we are standing on is already giving way. Instead of treating that as a problem to solve or a pain to escape from, she invites us to see it as the foundational truth of life. Things fall apart—not occasionally, but continually. How lovely to be told the truth.

What makes Chodron’s teaching so powerful is her refusal to turn away from the discomfort of it all. Impermanence means we cannot hold onto what we love, and we cannot prevent what we fear. Rather than hardening against this reality, she suggests we can learn to stay present with it—to remain open in the middle of change instead of bracing against it. In her view, the point is not to escape instability, but to become more intimate with it. Or, as philosopher Alan Wilson Watts writes, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

Only recently have I begun to see change not as an interruption to life, but as life itself. The sooner you make peace with that, the lighter everything becomes. In times of plenty, I remember there will also be seasons of want. When things are bad, I know this shit won’t last forever. When you pause long enough, it all makes sense. “There is a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.”

Seen this way, impermanence is not merely about things ending, but about life endlessly remaking itself through every ending. Even death, which seems so final, cannot stop the current of life. Seasons turn. New people arrive. Grief softens into memory. The world keeps becoming. Maybe that is the point of it all: life just goes on. Not as it was, and rarely as we hoped it would be, but onward all the same.

Soon, Moses will die. His body will disappear from this world in the way all living things eventually do. But the life he created will continue unfolding long after he’s gone — in our memories, in the stories we tell about him, in the habits and routines he quietly kept, and in the corners of our house and hearts where his shadow still remains.

Last night, I finally met Noah Kahan. He slipped onto the front porch as I sat reading. He was skittish at first, but soon settled down at my feet as if to say, “This is my porch now.” I understood. In the quiet between us, I told him about Moses, about his life and lore, and how we were in a season of succession. I think he understood. After a few silent minutes, new Noah Kahan stood, stretched, and wandered back into the night, leaving me with the sense that life was already moving on.

Gary Alan Taylor