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Creating Unstoppable Love

When Cat Met Matt

By Cat Rhoden GoguenPublished 4 years ago 15 min read
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I am Cat. And before I attempt to tell you the stories of Matt, I think it’s important to tell you where our story begins. Not the individual story of Cat or Matt, but rather how Cat met Matt and the surprising way “our collective” story began.

Fate…do you believe in it? Is everything just happenstance? The events that led to my meeting Matt have made me question this in much detail. If it’s random luck then how did I get selected to receive the luckiest event that ever happened to me? We all have those days where all the traffic lights turn red just whenit’s our turn to go through and then alternately we feel lucky when we get the”not as frequent”green light on our entiremorning commute. These things happen and we might feel the universe has shown favor or wrath on us for a moment but it doesn’t usually change the course of our lives. And like manypeople, this was the type of random luck I had experienced.

Besides Cat, I have been called many things: Mom, Catherine, Cathy, Elaine, Ms. Rhoden and a host of other names probably not appropriate to repeat here. But in describing me,almost all who know me would agree on a few characteristics: I’m creative, persistent and a hopeless romantic.I have always beenthese things,especiallya hopeless romantic. I imagine somehow I came into the world with stars glistening while star crossed lovers kissed and cellos played in a field of a thousand red roses.

Sappy? Yes. I’m sappy.At times, my love of “being in love” hasled me to forget that often:the field of roses has thorns, that the twinkling stars aregetting ready to fall to earth because they havedied andthatany star crossed lovers kissing under dying stars aremorbid and doomed to fail. Despite learning this lesson and forgetting it over and over, part of me always believed there was that one person for me. The person commonly referred to as asoul mate.To believe in soul mates onehas to believe on some level that there is a person who waspre-determined just for you; the personwho was meant to complete youand help you through life.It seems a lot to suspenddisbelief and accept, but love is not always logical and somehow I had been ok with accepting this to be, “as likely as not.”

Ihad always been fascinated by stories of people who were strangers one minute and with just a random glance or hello, they instantly knew they had found their other half or partner for life. I wasn’t sold on destined to be and star alignment and such, butI wanted to be.Then it happened…It was the event that would forever change my life and shatter my belief in love or a kind creator waiting to design a special person for me.

A girl’s first love is often her father and that was certainly true for me. My Dad was 23 when I was born and clueless on how to take care of a spirited, strong-willed daughter;but looking back at the earliest photos of him holding me, all I see is pride and love. That continued to be the case for every photo of us together. I never had to question who would be there if something went wrong in my life. I never worried about if he would judge me or stop loving me. Daddy was my person.September 22, 2017, everything was taken from me with the untimely, gruesome and completely unexpected death of my father.There are no words, even now that can express the pain.Initially,it was a pain that I thought unbearable. I prayed for death. I didn’t think I could handle the pain that no pain medicine could stop.

Death did not come for me however and so my body protected me in the only way it knew how to respond to the shock, pain,and trauma. I don’t know how to describe what happened to me over the next year. I was completely disconnected from living. It’s as if I was an observer of things going on but from afar.All I can say is perhaps imagine your cell phone is inside of your head vibrating constantly. You can’t escape it and it won’t stop ringing. The pain, the anxiety… ever-present. Communication completely shut down.

People tried to reach out but the phone was stuck inside my head with no way for me to answer or to call out.Surely I would die. Surely the battery to the trapped cell phone would finally burnout. But like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and going….and I kept hurting and hurting and hurting.

I watched others who said they loved my dad return to their normal lives but not me. There was no more normal or life for me. It was just a matter of days or weeks I thought-at mostuntil I will die too.But days turned in to weeks and weeks into months and months into a year.After a year,I had to finally accept it. This was my life. I had no idea why I had been chosen to have this horrific event happen. Good one, God. And so I finally accepted it. This was my fate as longas my body continued breathing which I hoped wouldn’t be long. Iwasn’t alive and never would be again. Someone else could use the air that was being wasted on me. All hope was gone butsomehow the pain remained in a slightly different, defeated manner…the hollow skeleton.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t try to get life back. I had always been a very active participant in life. I hated wasting time. In my teaching career, Ialways had the next new project in mind before completing a current one. I just always was a carpe diem type person.The therapist whom I had seen almost weekly since my father’s passing kept reminding me that it would just take time….So I spent my days scrolling mindlessly through social media…waiting for that “time.”

On Halloween, 2018 I forewent the traditional dressing up and handing out candy to continue staring at more mindless postings of happy people.

Facebook,I saw all the happy families and their perfect vacations and their lovely meals and all the happiness that everyone else was experiencing. Not me. I was stuck…Twitter….was much the same only,happy people there expressed happiness in 140 characters. Brevity had never been my strong suit but it didn’t matter to me what I was readingor what social media platform it was on. Everything was just a giant blur to divert my pain long enough to survive another day.Little did I know that the moment I clicked on the Quorawebsite would be the domino that would set so many changes in motion.

It started innocently enough with just a few clicks on Quora and thetypical mindless scrolling began. I couldn’t even tell you what I read until the oddest thing happened... I read a post twice.This was the first time I had re-read something since daddy’s passing and the oddity of it felt strange.

Thepostthat had caught my attention twice was about a young person who was asking if his or herlife was over. At first,I re-read it because it made me angry. How could someone in their mid-twenties think their life was over because they didn’t make as much money as their friends?HELLO!?I lost my dadin the cruelestway a person could die. MY LIFE IS OVER…not yours.My reaction of angersurprised me. I had always loved young people and had found that my students always remarked I was compassionate. That was the old Cat… The Cat-before-daddy’s-death.Cat 2.0couldn’tcare. She only felt anger and pain and anguish.But a comment left by someone named “Matt” fascinated me.

Matt had commented onthe things he had overcome including dropping out of high school, to land a job designing particle accelerators at Cornell University.There was an instant connection to me and his comment.I think it spoke tothe teacher side of me who had seen so many of mystudents drop out of high schooland for themost part, they had never gone on to findsuccess. What was his secret?

As I read the comment a second time, I was moved by the compassion he was showing to a stranger. I wasn’t sure why I was feeling so emotional about compassion. It was the first emotion other than grief and anger I had felt since daddy died.

The feeling, the response by Matt evoked reminded me of something my therapist had said. He had told me that he thought writing would be therapeutic for meand that I wouldknow when the time was right for me to do it.

You see, before daddy’s death,I used to write plays and I had been quite successful at writing them. I had had three plays published and they were performed all over the US and Canada and other countries as well. I had won awards in contests for playwriting, been recognizedbythe Kentucky House of Representatives with their adjourning in my honor and had written and co-written countless other plays for various showcases. Ihad beenchosen by the Kentucky Playwright’s Workshop to give the playwright lecture for the state in 2019 and needed to write a play to have presented on the night of my lecture. That seemed so far removed from reality for me. I had not given it a second thought as I sat there on Halloween night of 2018.I just had no interest in writing. No ideas were coming to me. It was a total disconnect and beyond writer’s block.

I’m not sure if what happened next was because I could relate to the struggles Matt described or maybe because I was simply not in my right mind butIhad a thought and all who know me know that once I have a thought, I act on it.“I’m going to contact this guyMattand I’m going to ask him to let me tell his story in a play.”…and so I did.

I didn’t expect he would respond since the article wasn’t recent, but I sent the email anyway.I must admit I was feelinga little anticipation and excitement when I considered the prospect of ifhe would respond at all.I had always loved surprise happenings and spontaneity but it had been so long since I had had any feelings thatperhaps it wasn’tgenuine excitement,butitsure felt pretty close.The next day, to my surprise,he had responded. I was almost too afraid to read his response. Could I handle the disappointment if he said no? What if he called me crazy or worse? Then it hit me. There was no“worse”. What I had already gone through with my Dad would be the worst thing I ever had to face. In a weird way that brought comfort to me and gave me enough courage to read his response.A big smile came over my face as I read that hewas agreeable to discussing it with me. And so the process began. It was uncharted territory for both of us butI prepared a list ofquestions and sent them to him and that is how we proceeded.

He answered them all in great detail and from that day on, we were in contact daily. The emails became texts and texts became phone calls and the raw honesty in which he shared so many details about his life fascinated me.Without realizing it consciously, each day I awoke looking forward to a response from Matt. What would he reveal to me today? What new emotions would I feel today? The cell phone trapped inside of me for so long had emerged and I was communicating again. I had a purpose again.I was in charge of the task to tell Matt’sstory but in doing so, I was inspired and amazed and connected to him.And our names rhymed!

The texts became more frequent, the phone calls longer and soon we were laughing and sharing details of our day, yet still working to tell his story.After two months, my excited and happy feelings changed to fear. The writing was on the wall and the play was coming to an end. Then I felt that all too familiar feeling…loss. I did not want to go back to the terrible depression and seclusion I had experienced after the death of my dad, but I feared it was inevitable. I wasn’t ready to be without Matt. What will happen when he goes away? He had become so much more to me than a writing subject. Hearing the sound of my phone when he texted had become as routine and automatic as breathing, and as necessary it seemed in my mind. I didn’t want that feeling to stop….ever. It was a surreal feeling and suddenly I felt alive again. And I felt only what I can describe as love for this “stranger” with the rhyming name.

I finished the play, “Unstoppable By Design,” and it was different than any play I had written before in many ways. I had never written a play about a real person and it also was the only play I had written where the main character didn’t die. We had spent many conversations joking about his demise and had designed some pretty unique ways to kill him off. But the fact remained that I felt I would die if something happened to Matt; though that was a secret best kept to myself to tease him and use it to get my way. “I see a boulder falling on you as you walk by that mountain….but if you call me tonight I will make sure that boulder misses you by a mile.”

We joked a lot. It was the most I had laughed in my life and I discovered that I loved to laugh. Matt was so funny.Not fake funny. He didn’t have to try. He just got me and I got him.

When we were trying to title the play, we were batting around mediocre-at-best,options and even silly ones like, “Taco Dip.”It was so fun to me how we seemed to be on the same wavelength. But somehow through all thejoking andcraziness, we worked very well together and when he said, “I kind of likeUnstoppable By Design”, I could only text, “OMG!!! That’s IT! That’s the title!!!“

I remember writing the final draft of the play.I made a special flash-forward inthe copy only meant for Matt in which in his future he would marry the playwright. We both laughed and laughedandeven more,laughter came later when Matt mistakenly sent that special copy to someone to read and that person had called to find out if Matt had forgotten to tell him he was engaged.

Every moment of the whole process had been enjoyable to me and Matt had beenso complimentary of the work I had done. He made me feel appreciated. He made me feel like I mattered and still had a purpose in life. Iwas sohonored to have told his story andthe overall idea that I was writing a play with a message that could help others made me feel this play was so important and needed to be written.

What I didn’t realize while writing it was the message of the play was as much for me as for anyone else. I was the audience my play was speaking to.That alone made me again wonder if this was all meant to be. It seemed like an awful stretch to think it was just random coincidence.

I viewed Matt through eyes that saw him as larger than life and heroic and talented…eyes that he would often remind me had blinders to his faults. That was the only time I didn’t agree with him throughout thewholetwo-month writingprocess. I never saw him less than perfect. I knew there were “flaws” but they were perfect imperfections to me and in my mind, if there was such a thing asa soul mate, Matt was mine.But he was also only a person I was writing a play about and that task was now completed.

Not a day has gone by since that first email that we have not talked.We have seen the play we wrote together have a reading and seen it performed at an evening of one-acts.We both felt pride when we heard the positive feedback at the reading which the play was a part of. And no stranger than anything else about our meeting, the date of the reading was set on March 17th,St. Patrick’s Day. We had not had any input into the selection of the performance date and that date just happened to be the exact date Matt had had surgery to remove the brain tumor 11 years before and also it was his mother’s birthday. From meeting on Halloween to a reading on St. Patrick’s Day, again I questioned if it was fate that we should meet.

After the reading we were both wondering where the next steps would take us and after a visit to a high school in southeastern Kentucky called Lynn Camp High School, we knew. Arthur Canada had setup the datefor Matt andmeto meet with some interested students and a teacher and my former drama student, Corri Taylor. We had a chance to give our pitch and see if there was aninterestinthis age group to perform the play.So far we had only had feedback from older readers and we weren’t sure how teenagers would react to the play. So we nervously visited the students and gave our pitch. In the middle of it, some students were being called away to go on a pre-scheduled field trip. I think Matt and I had our answer when those students asked if they could stay and finish hearing the pitch rather than go on a field trip.

Lynn Camp High School premiered the play on May 10, 2019. Two other high schools gave performances of other plays I had written. At the conclusion, a student from another cast came to me and was expressing how much the play Unstoppable By Design had impacted him. He was teary eyed and I immediately introduced him to Matt and they continued to talk. It was a moment that to me, solidified all the work we had done.

Over time, how we had met has become as much of the story as the story I was trying to tell. And that brings us to what you are reading. You probably are wondering as you read this if it really happened and if it was fate or coincidence.While I can’t answer the second part with anything but my opinion,I can assure you that as strangeas it all sounds, it really did happen just this way.

Ever wondered how one minute someone is a total stranger to you and the next, someone you can't live without? Cat was one of those who wondered until the day she logged in to Quora and read a post by Matt. She lived in Kentucky and he seemingly lived in NY and worked at Cornell...The rest is a story straight from soulmate digests everywhere. See their story inthe video.

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