A Cat’s Departure

[With a cat — Dilly, I’m told, but to me the stripes
rather say, Nameless — sometime in 1993.]

Dilly first entered the life and home of The Missus-to-be sometime in the spring of 1993, shortly after I myself moved down here and some months before we moved in together.

As with her predecessor, Nameless, Dilly probably would have gone anonymous for a while — we’re notoriously indecisive about most things, singly and as a couple — except for one happy circumstance. She needed happy accidents at that point, too. She’d been in the animal shelter with her little brother; The Stepdaughter-to-be had gone there with a friend who was looking to adopt. The friend pointed the two little kittens out. (As I recall, the backstory to that point was that Dilly and her brother had been abandoned by the side of the road.) The Stepdaughter-to-be, on behalf of her mother, “adopted” Dilly. (To this day, she remains haunted by uncertainty about whether the little brother got adopted, too.)*

When she arrived at The Missus’s place, then, the kitten still had on one foreleg the ID bracelet from the shelter: D1L, it said, and voilà — with the substitution of a letter for a digit, she had a name.

(She acquired a couple nicknames over the years. Dillybutt, for one — a reference to the “elevator butt” that kicked in when you so much as approached with an about-to-pet-her hand, sometimes when you merely spoke her name. Later, there was Dilgoyle: the cat who’d be sitting on a windowsill, as if carved there, when we got home from work or a trip.)

Nameless — or Big Mama, as we sometimes referred to her — hated Dilly at first. After all, she’d always had The Missus to herself; why should she put up with this tiny gray interloper, this pathetic runt with the eyes that looked like they’d been kohled? That was before Dilly started “nursing” at Nameless, treading on her belly with little paws as she suckled at the dry nipples.

Nameless’s eyes flew open in shock the first time this happened. What the hell is THIS? she seemed to be wondering. You can’t nurse here, move along — I’ve been spayed, you little idiot!

Undeterred, Dilly just kept on treading.

The lines softened around Nameless’s eyes.

And soon, Nameless was bathing the new ‘un. They never had a problem after that. (Or more precisely, Nameless never had a problem thereafter; it had always been cool with Dilly.)

A few years later — The Missus and I were living together then, though I was still The Mister-to-be — another cat was invited indoors, a cat eventually named Katie. She wasn’t terrified of Nameless, exactly, but she didn’t want to push her too far. Katie always acted — continues to act — like she’s walking on eggshells, ready to jump out of her skin at the approach of even a familiar footfall. And Nameless was, well, Nameless: rumbling tyrant queen of the household.

Which left Dilly to develop on her own. No one ever paid attention to Dilly, unless she wanted them to. She could’ve gotten away with murder.

Except… she didn’t.

Unlike most cats — unlike any others I can remember — Dilly had no sneaky side. We never caught her breaking into things, never caught her up on a table snuffling around the remains of a meal. If we were in the other room and heard a crash, when we ran in Nameless and Katie would be sitting on opposite sides of the room, perhaps staring out a window, turning their heads in our direction and blinking slowly, or perhaps washing themselves, their entire Who, me? demeanors oozing guilt. Dilly would run to greet us, not only guilt- but guileless.

Now, we’re not hopelessly naive. We know that because we never caught her doing those things, she didn’t necessarily not do them. But damn, that was one sweet cat.

Nameless died a couple years ago, leaving Dilly in the unfamiliar role of Alpha Cat. The crown of command never rested easy on her head, though. She’d always been adamant about getting dinner on time — “adamant,” in her case, meaning she pled with us in a piteous mewling sort of Weeeeeeh… wehhhhhhh..! until the dish hit the floor. Now, with Nameless out of the picture, she got a little more insistent. But not by much.

One thing did change in the post-Nameless world: how much laptime she could get with The Humans, particularly The Missus. Unfortunately, by this point The Missus had developed a huge allergy to cat hair and dander, so Dilly started to get a little more dependent for attention on me. Not that I minded — Lord knows she was a satisfying cat to pet, walking in place, stretching ecstatically, never letting you think for a moment that she might be bored. She was satisfying even to talk to, for that matter: indeed, any attention at all, and she’d start to purr. Loudly. (Vets had a hard time using a stethoscope on Dilly — once they had to sedate her, because the purring which erupted when they handled her was too loud for them to hear anything else.)

She never quite adapted to the fact of sharing a house with a dog, I think. I told The Missus that Dilly’s behavior around Sophie reminded me of the way we boys used to react to girls — or they, to us — around age 8 or 9. It was like you didn’t want so much as to be breathed on by the other gender, let alone touched by them, lest you get (as we said) their cooties.

Sophie would enter a room where Dilly lay, on the floor or even out of reach, and seem suddenly possessed by excitement, crouching down, near-barking, running in circles not even around Dilly but around the furniture — the room itself.

Meanwhile Dilly would glance in the Yorkie’s direction, disdain rolling off her in waves invisible to canine perception, and then look away. If (as often happened) Sophie tried the old doggy “Can I sniff your butt, O potential friend?” routine, Dilly would turn around and slap her, whap whap whapwhapwhap — her only sign of aggressiveness, ever — and then walk serenely away, out of reach, leaping over the gate which keeps Sophie from going upstairs.

A couple weeks ago, Dilly stopped coming downstairs at all. She stopped eating regularly; always lean and muscular, she turned skinny and frail, her vertebrae like knuckles down her back. The Dillybutt behavior disappeared. She lay at the top of the stairs, still mewled at us as we passed or stepped over or spoke to her, as we put food down by her head, but the neediness — the animation — seemed gone. Her voice changed, deepened, and although she still purred you had to put your head right down next to her to hear it.

On Friday morning, she was down once more on the living room floor… until Sophie showed up, whereupon she evacuated upstairs.

On Saturday morning, when I came out of the bedroom — like the living room, on the first floor — The Missus was lying on the living-room carpet next to Dilly (who was on her side on a big beach towel), petting her, talking softly.

We need to get her to the vet, The Missus told me. I’m afraid she’s dying.

Yeah, I agreed, I think she is.

The Missus went back to the bedroom to get dressed (and to keep Sophie corraled). By then I was reading the newspaper; out of the corner of my eye I saw Dilly stand and — shockingly, she was so graceful — stagger, and lie back down on her side. Then I took my turn on the floor next to Dilly, petting her, murmuring. I’m pretty sure I said the same kinds of things to her that The Missus had; Dilly lay there breathing deeeeeeeply. Blinking her eyes. Purring.

By the time The Missus came back out, dressed and ready to go, it was obvious even to me (through the warm salty water pooling up alongside my nose, behind the frames of my glasses) that Dilly wasn’t going to last much longer.

The Missus wrapped her in the beach towel, intending to hold her during the fifteen-minute ride, but we put a cat carrier in the back seat just in case she struggled or seemed uncomfortable. And as we got in the car, that’s what happened. I saw Dilly flail, weakly, and she looked up at The Missus, her eyes large, larger than usual even, in something that looked like panic.

I’m not going to be able to hold her without hurting her, The Missus said, and put Dilly into the carrier. I thought I heard a squeak from the back seat as we backed out of the garage, but I’m probably wrong about that. The Missus kept her eyes trained back over her shoulder, on the carrier; we had gone not even a mile when she told me to pull over at the first chance I had.

And, well, that was that.

We proceeded to the vet’s anyhow, to arrange for Dilly’s cremation. We didn’t want to carry her into the waiting room where she’d be around other pets and children, so I waited outside by the side door, carrier in my hand, while The Missus went inside and made the arrangements.

Noontime traffic flew by in slow-motion; through the side window of the clinic, I could see technicians going about their business, opening cabinets, working at counters.

In my hand, the carrier was heavier than it always had been when Dilly was inside, and that’s how I knew it wasn’t Dilly in there anymore (despite the faint resemblance to her). No, she’d taken her gravity-defying effortless lightfootedness somewhere else; was off watching birds through another window; singing for her supper; leaping at a catnip toy or feather at the end of a string; treading on Nameless’s belly; purring, always purring, butt in the air. The carrier grew heavier, ever heavier, and finally was handed off to The Missus and then to a much stronger vet tech.

We drove off to return to a house, a home, which was now skewed at an angle, hollowed out a bit, collapsed a little inwardly upon itself. To our dog, and our one remaining cat.

____________________________

* In the first version of this post, I got some of the details wrong in the story of Dilly’s adoption. I’ve corrected the story above, per The Missus’s own recollection.