Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years.
We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so…
Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around 16, maybe 17 years. We can’t be sure because she came to us fully-formed, as a stray. This was when we lived at our previous place, the rented house on the west side of town: deep in the heart of college-student apartments, but on a very large block at whose center was an old, heavily treed forest which butted up against our back yard. Like other strays who visited us over the years there, she (and/or her mother) possibly had belonged to a student who left for a summer and just “released” her into the wild.
In any case, one day I came home from work one day to find The Not-Yet Missus eager to tell me of the epic animal-kingdom moment I’d missed: this mottled tortoisheshell cat had appeared from nowhere and simply leapt, in a single fluid movement, to the top of the wooden fence surrounding the artificial pond in the back yard. Striking enough, just that much. But what elevated it to the level of a National Geographic feature was this: the four-foot-long blacksnake trapped, writhing and whipping about, caught in the cat’s jaws.
Snake Cat, The Not-Yet Missus at first called the new visitor for lack of a real name, and that was exactly how she called to the cat when she started putting food out on the patio for it. (“It,” yes. We had no idea of its gender for a while.) Because the orphan took to watching us through the glass, pathetically, sitting out on the bricks under the big live oak as rain splashed all around, The Not-Yet Missus set up a little “house” for it under the eaves: a plastic US Mail bin turned on its side, lined with dry blankets and hand towels and with a single towel draped across the cave entrance. When the patio door slid open, no matter the weather, a small freckled-brown-and-black face would appear through a gap in the covering towel, to see what of interest was about to happen.
“What’s interesting outside my window?” became Katie’s default mode, once she moved indoors as Cat #3. She never played very much, unless it involved some form of human-initiated hunting. (She was a ground hunter, chasing things dragged along the floor. Dilly, Cat #2, was an “air hunter,” grabbing for objects dangled overhead. As for #1, Nameless — she disdained any play, unless you actually brought the bait to her and placed it on her body.) No: Katie sat in a window. Watching the outdoors — birds, squirrels, and, well, who knows? snakes — and escaping once or twice but never going far or for long.
And probably as a result of her early outdoor life, she never really trusted people other than The Missus and me. An excellent hider, she was, so that visitors never guessed that we even had a cat. Especially when The Pooch arrived on the scene: more or less from that day forward, by her own choice Katie stayed upstairs in our offices, which we kept off-limits to those of a doggish persuasion.
Lately, Katie had been in decline for months, throwing up a meal on the average of once or twice a week. Over the summer, we took her to the vet — we explained that she hadn’t seemed in pain, had just been losing weight and getting a little, well, weird. He said he couldn’t tell without further expensive testing exactly what might or might not be the matter, except her age itself; as long as she wasn’t obviously uncomfortable, he said, we could postpone making any decisions.
Another few ounces lost, here and there; a little more agora- and xenophobic weirdness — adopting new hiding and napping places; her meowing weakening; the simple passage of days and weeks. It was time, finally. On Friday, she made her last trip to the vet.
Even when you don’t interact much with a pet, their departure leaves a little pet-sized shadow in the corner of your consciousness:
You catch yourself about to greet her by calling up the stairs when you get home.
The morning and evening routines slacken just a bit, minus the extra five minutes for scooping the food onto the plate, the thirty seconds to refill the water bowl.
There’s less fur and dander in the air.
And the upstairs window you’ve left open a few inches for years, for all but violent storms? It finally gets tugged down and sealed shut, the watcher gone for good.
cynth says
For as much as I complain and rant about the one feline in residence, I know that I too will be missing the empty window and the presence just around the corner. I’m sorry for your loss, John and Missus.
John says
Yes — when something goes wrong which was obviously the cat’s fault, you’ll start to blurt out a rebuke… and then catch yourself.
Growing up, I was such a self-absorbed little thing. I don’t think I ever thought anything about the sudden absence of pets — and it’s almost certain that I never worried about its impact on Mom (if not Dad). Considering how many times we changed dogs and cats, that’s a pretty remarkable record of willful ignorance!
Nance says
A favorite word learned in my psych grad student days is cathect. It’s supposed to mean something like the investment of emotional energy into an idea, an object, or a living thing, but I always pictured it differently.
I saw an outline drawing of a human figure. When some new being entered the energy field, the outline would break and create a door (a bit like a pet door), letting the new thing in, and then the door in the person-shape would close and life would go on, enriched. From time to time, something had to be de-cathected; the pet door had to open to let something out again. De-cathection left the door standing open for an uncomfortably longer period of time than cathection had done. We cathect much more easily and comfortably than we de-cathect. De-cathection just sucks.
John says
Useful (and completely new to me) word, cathection. (I see, per Wikipedia, that Freud regarded it as “an investment of libido.” What a surprise!)
And I love the idea of creature-shaped doorways, which captures precisely my own sense of what it’s like to lose someone whose arrival we experienced. You ought to do something with that idea, Nance. (Yeah — in your spare time. :))
Tessa says
John, what a lovely obit. I became a cat person relatively late in life, but I can’t imagine my home without one now. As for those who “release” (as you so delicately put it) cats into the wild, hanging is too good for them.
John says
Over the weekend, The Missus and I were tallying up the number of strays we adopted when we lived over in that part of town. It totaled something like 10 or 12 (not all at one time, thank the gods). They hadn’t all been released; we know for sure that many of them descended from the same mother and father cat (both of whom were among the adoptees). But the basic principle still stands — since Mom & Dad themselves had probably been involuntarily “re-introduced to the wild” at some point… un-neutered, at that. (We spent a small fortune on the trap-neuter-release cycle.)
So we’re with you. Death penalty opponents, to be sure… but with cruelty (unthinking or otherwise) to animals close to the top of capital crimes we’d have to stop and think about before we voted against them.
DarcKnyt says
Love the new look. I don’t know how I missed it, but it’s very nice. Sorry to be late on that.
I’m also sorry about the loss of your friend. I lost one seven years ago this coming March, and I’ve never really gotten over it. I think they’ll always have a special place for us.
John says
Thanks so much, Darc. Amazing, isn’t it? how creatures with whom we can’t truly talk can become such intimates.
Jayne says
:( Despite the nine lives we’re told they have, their lives seem–are–all too short. We lost our sweet 14 year old tabby, Moses, when the kids were in grade school and it was traumatic. I’d picked him up from a veterinarian neighbor (who’d been asked by his owner to get rid of him and the lot from where he came–she didn’t have the heart) when he was barely a month old. In the end, he had developed, I think, some kind of feline leukemia, and we had to finally have him put down. We drove home from Boston, Mosie on my lap, and buried him in the back yard, a stone to mark the spot. The kids still go out there to say Hello every once in a while–to Mosie and his new neighbor, a beta fish we couldn’t flush.
John says
One of these days I may tell the story here of “the Heathens,” as we called them — a clutch of strays we adopted, all from the same litter (or close to it). We moved them across town with us in 2001 (together with the three indoor cats). Our neighborhood now is not conducive to long lives for feral cats, even semi-“tame” ones: predatory birds, we think, and also foxes, occasional reports of coyotes, and snakes. One by one, the Heathens just stopped coming around. The last one had gone missing for something like six months or a year when he suddenly showed up again: battered and torn up. And, as we learned when we took him to the vet for repairs, infected with feline AIDS. Leaving him at the vet was really psychologically difficult on a whole other level; like Moses, he got an honorary — and monument-marked — burial in the back yard.
But I have to admit, “a beta fish we couldn’t flush” made me laugh. :)
Helen says
I am sorry to hear this. I haven’t had to take an animal to the vet to put down in my life as yet but it is something I have kept at the back of my mind since I was little. A hard thing to carry out indeed.
I am also sorry that I was updating so joyously about HP on a day such as today. Your comments were more generous than I knew.
Best wishes
John says
Thank you, Helen! And not to worry about HotPot’s news — anyone who’s ever owned a cat (or dog, for that matter) and wishes they could travel anywhere with their pet would be happy for her!
One of the twists to Katie’s passing was that we just don’t know, 100%, that it was the right time. She could have lived another month. She might have lived less or more than that. We just had to take our best guess. Nameless and Dilly had both gotten really, really sick at the end. Katie was just tapering off. Heck of a thing.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
I know that hole – every time we drop something on the floor we call for our long departed pooch, the living Hoover vacuum. How can something Not There be so There?
It’s a mystery.
a/b
John says
We’ll be adding Katie’s ashes-in-a-box to the bookshelf currently occupied by Nameless and Dilly; that does seem to help some. (And sometimes you’ve just gotta put aside all sense of rationality for the sake of the “people” who filled holes in your life.)
One of The Pooch’s best friends at the pet-care facility she goes to some days is a basset hound named Hoover. Never occurred to me he might have that name for a real, like, reason. :)
John says
Thanks for your thoughts, all.
marta says
Sorry, John.
Loss is hard. I remember the moment as if I had a picture of it in my hands–our cat that was hit by a car. I was about 10. I hid behind a floor-length curtain for a while. Or when I was even younger and my parents gave our dog away. Decades later and I still get tears in my eyes.
We have a dog who will be 16 in January. We know his health isn’t great. But I can’t bear to think about it.
Sorry for the gap in your home now.
John says
Thank you, Marta.
Every now and then I catch myself looking at The Pooch “that way” and freaking myself out, usually if she’s had a round of play and is lying on her side by me on the floor, her sides heaving and eyelids drooping. One of the curses of trying to become a professional imaginer, maybe.
deniz says
Oh dear, I’m so sorry to hear that. Got a little teary on that last line.
I worry about ours, who are still only 7 and 8, but how will I ever face that day when it comes?
John says
Thanks so much for your thoughts, deniz.
Nothing really prepares you to face that day, I think. I mean, we’d been sort of building to this ever since we lost the previous one, and certainly building to it since the summer — when the vet told us it was decision time. But damn, it’s hard.
We know people who’ve NOT made a decision, even long after the pet has ceased to have much of a life at all. We think of this syndrome as “keeping the pet alive for human reasons.” We were determined not to do that. At the same time, we didn’t want to let Katie go before she was ready — because she’d simply become inconvenient or difficult to care for, while seeming more or less “fine”: to let her go for human reasons. Ultimately, you never really know I think. You just take your best guess, close your eyes, brace yourself, and do it.
deniz says
You’re right. My friend had an aging and infirm dog that she kept alive for a few extra months, for ‘human reasons’ – but I wonder, would I do any differently? When you’ve loved someone for so long… It’s a very individual choice/matter, I suppose.
whaddayamean says
oh no. i’m so sorry.
i love this elegy.