Ferrari (July 1992-September 14th 2015)

What can I begin to say about Mr. Meow? There is so much history, it was like having several cats over his considerable lifespan.

What we had been dreading for about two years happened: he died while we were off enjoying one of our vacations. We didn't stop taking vacations, or take any less (not that this wasn't considered), but the dread quotient kept ramping up each time we left home.

In hindsight, maybe it was better this way. I had always imagined I would be here, peacefully holding him when he passed. This was not to be, for a variety of reasons. One of the last times I held him on my lap, a warm flood of urine soaked the scrubs I was wearing at the time. So, unfortunately, I more or less quit holding him for any length of time. Our floors sustained a heavy artillery battery of feces and urine for nearly three years as he became increasingly unable/unwilling to use the litter boxes. So it was a paid sitter who professionally dealt with the last series of messes and his final days. Someone who did not become overwrought at the daily and nightly messes, or have a deep personal relationship with him to become strained; or investment in a home being held hostage by a toddler gate, homemade walls of cardboard boxes to the carpeted areas, specialized cleaning products, puppy pads and scrounged newspapers.

To remember all the good things about him, we have to go back more than two years. He had really been gone all this time, his body apparently didn't know it. His reactions to us consisted of blank, empty stares, nervous lip-licking when our faces or hands came in contact with his head, or aimlessly wandering off.

There was a time when he would DEMAND eye contact with you. If you didn't look at his face, he would pummel your elbow with his paw until you paid attention to him. He would angle his head to get the best line of sight with your eyes. The night in November 1992 I found out dad's colon cancer was terminal, I sat on the couch with my face down, crying. He used the same attention-getting tactics. But that particular time... very, very gently.

He used to be beside himself when I took a shower. He didn't like water, and apparently didn't want me in it, either. He'd sit on the toilet, carrying on and hollering the whole time I was in there. Then he'd 'groom' me after I got out, sitting on my lap or next to me, industriously licking the water off my hair.

He could tell time. He knew when it was time for me to get home from work in the morning. Tim tells me of many, many mornings when he would sit and holler by the door between the kitchen and the garage in our Lahring Road house in Linden, leaping at the doorknob when 7 am approached. When the clocks changed  due to daylight savings time, he'd be an hour off.

He was never far off wherever I was in the house. In his healthy years, he would pace me, remora-like, as I made my way from one end of the house to the other, doing whatever. He was my shadow.

He was smart enough to know when to push a door or hook it with his paw when he wanted it open. He gave love bites.

He had an obsession with bagels and baked goods the first year of his life. We had to put plastic bags of bagels on top of the refrigerator (where he still found them) to keep them out of his reach. We'd find the bag on the floor with sharp tooth punctures in each bagel. He once ate the sliced almonds off a whole pan of muffins I'd foolishly left cooling on a countertop, and vomited them on the living room carpet under a table.

He started the whole head butting ('bunting') thing. I guess I knew cats did that, I just didn't know the significance of it. I thought it was cute. And his head smelled so, so sweet. The first time I took him to the vet in a cardboard box to give him a check-up, he was sitting on my lap in the waiting room. He stretched up and butted my face. And again. And again. He did it for the next 20 or so years. Almost every time you would put your face up to his, a bunt ('meow kiss') was yours for the asking.

He fetched balls for the first four or five years of his life. We bought cat toys randomly, hoping something would be a hit (nothing was ever as good as plastic rings sealing the caps of milk jugs, cardboard boxes, or grasshoppers). Brightly colored (yellow seemed to be his favorite color) rubber balls, the same size and dimpled texture as golf balls became his obsession. He'd barrel after one thrown down the half staircase in our trilevel house, and bring it back, dropping at your feet. Over and over and over again. After a few hours of that, we started to wish he would stop. Then when he didn't do it any more, we wished he would.

We bought a cat toy at the Michigan Renaissance Festival in 1992 for him. It was a little cloth satchel of catnip with a bell on it. The bell fell off years later, and it became faded and full of sharp tooth punctures. It was blue fabric with gold crescent moons and stars on it. It became a favorite of his. He would carry it around in his mouth, meowing through a mouthful of saliva-moistened cloth and catnip.

While we were still in the Linden house, we had a waterbed. Every day in the mid to late morning, Ferrari would slowly walk up the stairs to the spare bedroom where it was. We grew to be amused at his 'old man' habitual ways. A short time later, you could look in the door and there would be a 'C' shaped lump under the covers. It was the best heated cat bed in the world.

He climbed our first Christmas tree. Unbeknownst to Tim, who stepped away from stringing it with lights, he had wriggled his way up the trunk. When Tim returned, there was this pair of yellow owl eyes staring from within the branches at his eye level.

At one of Mom's Christmas parties, possibly in the late 90's or early 2000's, I somehow got talking to a guest about cats. I don't remember this woman's name, or how she knew Mom. She was about the age I am now. On a side note,  I do remember Mom almost desperately trying to butt into our conversation, trying to insert something about herself. But she just couldn't. Because we were talking about pets, cats specifically.  Eventually she gave up and wandered back toward the dining room/kitchen. This woman said something that has stuck with me. In describing a beloved cat, she said she had never since and probably never would have a relationship with anyone, human or animal, like that again. There was no hyperbole or drama, just a simple truth. A truth I understood then, and now completely understand.

The blast of grief was intense, but the level of pain was fortunately short-lived. Yeah, someone told me it was a blessing. Then why did it feel like someone had hollowed out my chest cavity with a grapefruit spoon for two days?

What I didn't anticipate was the second-guessing of major life decisions it caused. If this cat had been our child, it would be a 23 year-old young man. But he was a cat. And he was gone. And we had nothing. Because we had chosen not to have kids. Imagine, a 23 year-old... The echoed voice of a past abuser, maybe? Yes, I could totally imagine her musing something to that effect, disguising it as sympathy in her back-handed style. Ironically, this person was the one who kept him and fed him for two weeks before I claimed him.

Other essential questions were dredged up from the depths, too. Can you continue to love someone even if their essential personality is gone? Can you do it when caregiving is a challenge day and night? For weeks, months, even years? Is it wrong to wish someone would just slip away when they're in that state? Will I be up to the challenge of doing this for a spouse or parent if it becomes necessary? Will there be someone to be patient with me and clean me up over and over again when I'm pooping and peeing myself?

At the end of the day, the earth has shifted, and a season of our lives is over. We buried him with that favorite toy under a spruce tree in the back yard, next to Mocha Java's barely settled grave. The two of them never really got along, but there they are, together now. Mocha Java bullied Ferrari, and Ferrari was perpetually annoyed with Mocha Java. The time we brought Mocha Java back home from being neutered, you could literally see a black smoke cloud over Ferrari's head. He turned and walked away from me, all the lovy-doviness of the last two days vanished. And we still remember the evening a neigbor's cat (Ta-Da) was prowling on our deck, and the two of them were sitting together at the doorwall, angrily yowling at him. Mocha Java let out one last howl, and Ferrari swung a paw and thunked him on top of the head with the sound of a ripe melon. For all the times Mocha Java beat on him, that was the one time he got in a solid shot.

It was dark by the time we got done with the grave. I had started it in the afternoon, but just couldn't make progress because of the dry ground. And it's hard to dig and cry at the same time. Tim was tamping down the last of the loose dirt when I heard a sound I have only heard once or twice in the 17 years we've lived here: the descending, quavering cry of a screech owl. It continued from the woods behind the house.

The next evening  I was slogging away on the elliptical. I watched not one, but two catbirds using the birdbath at the same time. They managed to share it for a few minutes before one annoyed the other, and it flew off in a huff.

A few nights later, I was pulling into the parking lot at work, and was especially missing him. Just then a line from Seether's 'Save Today' came on the truck radio: 'Awake, I'll see you on the other side.'

I work with a someone who has been a one-woman cat rescue for decades, and has had probably hundreds of cats pass through her life. But she's had many of  her own personal pets, and completely unprompted, said to me that there would be little signs after they passed if I kept my eyes open.

I have always held the belief that people are the only beings with souls. Animals don't have them, they don't need redemption, etc. But now that I've had several pets, I don't know. I wish I knew for certain there was a way they latch onto our souls, and we could take them with us to heaven. I do believe we get skewed, blurry glimpses of what heaven is going to be like, and feel little prods from the Almighty, and energy surges and oddball 'moments' if we just pay attention. And there have been many times before when a song on the radio delivered the exact line that answered something I was wondering or struggling with. There, I almost said it: Jesus talks to me through the radio.

The radio was playing this song a lot when I brought Ferrari home in the fall of 1992, and even though it has absolutely nothing to do with cats or pets, it has always reminded me of him.

Elton John's 'The One'

As for Mocha Java, he never really had a song. Although Tim has said it should be the Imperial March from Star Wars. It seemed appropriate when he entered a room, bent on destruction or bullying or getting attention in his younger, healthier years.

Since I heard it so many times this summer ( I love the pencil drawings in the closing credits, so I listened all the way to the end) during many viewings of  'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies' on HBO, this song seems sadly appropriate for 2015. For all the goodbyes this year. My own, or anyone's.

Billy Boyd's 'The Last Goodbye'