Saying goodbye to a friend

I remember thinking two things the day I found out that we were going to have a cat.
1. Oh my God I can’t wait to get him home!
And
2. Kathy got talked into buying a cat?
It was the summer of 2006 and Kathy fell in love with an adorable little kitty in Mankato, as the local animal shelter was holding an adoption event at the local pet store. I immediately was overcome with giddiness. Shortly thereafter, I was emailed a picture (top right, click on it to make it bigger) and I saw The Cat About To Be Named Joe for the first time.
It didn’t take long after he first came home for him to stake out his favorite place to recline. For some reason my computer chair (middle right) became his most favorite spot. He allowed me to use it occasionally, but we all knew it was only because HE was okay with it, and he would get it back when he was ready…if that meant meowing, clawing or squeezing his arm behind my butt and grunting, he would let me know it was time to move.
His second favorite place? On me.
For the first six months he lived with us, I had a series of tiny scratches up and down my right leg. He was so tiny he couldn’t make the leap from floor to the top of Mount Mark in one bound, so as I would sit at the kitchen table with my right leg facing out from the table, he would ascend by digging in and pulling himself up one paw at a time. If I was otherwise occupied, like maybe eating, he would perch on my shoulder, but his preferred location was my vast, spongy chest. He could sit there for hours.
Overnight, it was either my chest or the small of Kathy’s back. He always had to be near us.
As he grew older, he grew a little more hesitant to show us much affection. He always liked being in the room with us whenever possible, but was never much of a lap cat. He still held on to that affinity for my chest however. Eventually, he would only spend any time there when Kathy was not in the room. If she would walk in and catch him, he would jump down immediately. “What?” he seemed to ask. “I wasn’t doing anything.” The six weeks I spent unemployed last year, he was my constant companion. If I didn’t offer my chest, he felt the need to park on my laptop keyboard. It’s hard to send out resumes with what had become a massive 16.5-pound kitty blocking out my screen.
I did eventually get a job again, and he had to do without me during the day. When I came home, however, he always came out to greet me. To be fair, he wasn’t the only person who cared if I was home. Sometimes Lindsay would come out to the kitchen and ask, “What are you doing home so early?” A different kind of caring, but caring nonetheless.
Sometime after his second birthday, we started to notice his front foot pads were swollen and eventually started cracking and bleeding. After many attempts to give him some relief, including some topical potions and oral medication, it was decided he had an auto-immune disorder, and he could get some relief from taking steroids. It may or may not have been a sign of things to come.
Nearly every morning, Joe served as my alarm clock. Whether I wanted to get up or not, he meowed his insistence. I used to think it was just because he was hungry, and no doubt that was part of it, but he didn’t like me going back to bed after he had a snack. He would chow down on whatever I gave him, but before long he would be back meowing at me, poking my nose with his paw or sometimes just sitting inches from my head, staring at me. Many times I would open one eye and see a giant kitty face filling my view. On weekends, once I was up for the day and he was satisfied I was going to be hanging with him, he would catch a few winks himself, curling up on the floor next to me.
He was my buddy, but he was also my confidante. I could complain about my job, my wife, the Vikings…it didn’t matter. He got to hear about it…although he usually looked at me like, “I’m a cat, what do you want me to do about it?”
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know most of the rest of this story. A couple of months ago, we noticed that Joe appeared to be working a little too hard to breathe. Lots of trips to the vet and many x-rays and shots later, we still don’t know for sure what was attacking our kitty. We did know by looking at the x-rays that his lungs were about half the size they should have been, and probably shrinking. He made it clear to us, however, he did not like going to the vet.
He became more and more inactive in the ensuing weeks and his breathing was more and more labored. Each day he became less interested in eating and drinking. On both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings of this week, my morning buddy came and sat near me in the early morning, but didn’t make a sound. He spent all his energy breathing and apparently meowing was just too much work. Wednesday morning he waited patiently for me to rise, but for the first time ever, he didn’t lead me into the kitchen. It was too hard for a kitty to do when he couldn’t breathe. After about five minutes in the kitchen, he finally came out to see me, but wasn’t interested in the usual routine—weaving back and forth to garner a few pets and some scratches behind the ears. He didn’t want his morning treat—a piece of deli turkey. I left for work with a sick feeling deep in my gut. By noon he would do nothing but lie on his side and gasp for breath. He would lift his head momentarily to look at Kathy, but couldn’t find the energy to move. When I saw Kathy’s I.D. come up on my cell phone shortly after noon, my stomach did a flip-flop. It wasn’t going to be good news. It would be the news I had been dreading for weeks. Kathy’s wavering voice confirmed my fears.
The decision was made that we couldn’t continue to see him suffer. I took the rest of the afternoon off from work and made a blurry drive home. I walked in the house and headed for the bedroom to see my sick friend. When he saw it was me, he stood and jumped off the bed, but that would be it. The action sapped him, and he had to lay back on his side on the floor, mouth open and his sides sucking in with each breath. He couldn’t, as he had done nearly every day of his life, come and let me know he was happy to have me home. He didn’t have to…I knew. For the next two hours, while we waited together for the call from the vet, he was able to lay in one his favorite spots—that little patch of afternoon sun on our bedroom floor. He even got to sleep for awhile and was able to forget that he struggled to breathe.
The call from Mona at the vet’s office finally came and Kathy and I gathered him up to take him to that place he hated so much. If I had to do it all again, it would have been a house call. I made a bad call, and assumed he was too far out of it to care. I was wrong, and will beat myself up for a long time that he spent the last five minutes of his life very frightened. He didn’t seem to care that as I held him, I continued to apologize to him in his right ear.
His struggle is over now, and right now it is hard to see the good in what we did. For over four years, he was my constant buddy—morning, noon and night—and not seeming to care that I was a middle-aged, overweight, somewhat messy, opinionated liberal underachiever. He seldom left my side.
I showed him my appreciation by signing a piece of paper Wednesday afternoon, saying it was OK to take his life.
Yeah, I know, it was the humane thing to do, and I will comprehend that eventually. But not right now.
This morning could only be described as weird. I awoke at Joe’s usual meow time, about 5:30. Out of habit—honed over the past four years—I peeked around my pillow. I could almost feel him there in the room with me, but no luck, it wasn’t just a bad dream.
The turkey was still there in the fridge meat drawer, but I didn’t have a large, chubby kitty butt plant itself between the drawer and the door when I opened it, waiting for a treat. When I spent a little too much time in the bathroom, I didn’t hear any impatient meows coming from outside the door. Nobody jumped up and spun around as if he wasn’t really waiting for me when I finally emerged.
For four years I would complain to people that the reason I was tired because “my cat got me up at 5:30.” I mistakenly thought I was perpetually annoyed by this. I found out this morning, however, I was mistaken.
I spent most of Joe’s life complaining that he liked hanging with me so much he couldn’t wait for me to get up in the morning; whining that he was always under foot when I got home from work because he was excited that his friend was home; expressing my dismay that he would plant himself in front of me, right on my laptop, because he liked being near me. Apparently I just like to complain…although he never seemed to mind that either.
It would be comparable to Britney Spears complaining that people are always telling her she is beautiful. Deep down I loved his attention.
Of course, now I realize I would trade just about anything to have all those burdens back in my life.
Many people tell me that for this very reason—they don’t want to lose them—that they don’t have a pet. Yeah, right now it feels like I don’t need this in my life. But this will eventually fade, and I will remember what a great companion I had, even if the time was too short.
Am I making too big of a deal out of the death of a silly pet? Yeah, probably. There are a lot worse things that go on in this world. I just can’t stop myself.
We miss you Joe, and I’m sorry for a lot, but I’m not sorry we took you into our home.
Thanks for being our good friend.