#catgrief

Dear Butterscotch,

You arrived half-starved, a weightless stripe of cream-colored fur, protruding ribs and scrawny legs.

I didn’t know better, or maybe I did. I fed you, and you moved into our heads and hearts and house. Two days later I was in ER, gasping through my first asthma attack, the doctor giving me steroids and a lecture: Get rid of the cat.

But first you were spayed, an unwanted cat with a womb full of unwanted kittens. Barely healed, a stranger shot you with a nail gun, piercing the narrow gap between the bones in your front leg.

You moved into my office after that, a scrawny princess on a green pillow I picked to match your eyes.

Dear Butterscotch,

There were dogs; you loved them all.

There was Dave; you loved him best.

There was me: forced to keep you at a distance, we staked a fake-out, each one pretending the other was the enemy.

You almost had me fooled.

Dear Butterscotch,

You slept in a crate because that’s what the dogs did. Oversized, set high on a shelf, safe from scary monsters that roamed quiet streets after dark.

Daytime found you stalking pit bulls in their yard, mocking them from your perch on a fence, tail carried high. Our neighbor begged us to make you stop, swore you’d be dead if you ever fell.

Who can caution a cat?

Dear Butterscotch,

You came in the mail, with the mail, a special delivery we never regretted.

I opened the door to take a package, and you waltzed inside. Stood, purring loudly, in the living room, hardwoods gleaming from a splatter of sunlight, golden like your fur.

That’s why I fed you. Desperation masked by bravery, I must have felt our kinship.

Dear Butterscotch,

I’m sorry about your name.

I knew I was allergic to cats, knew I couldn’t, wouldn’t keep you. So I gave you the stupidest, silliest, non-cat name I could think of--blithely ignoring the fact that naming is the first step to wanting, the precursor to loving.

You bested me there, too, immediately responding to my tremulous call as if you were a dog.

I’m sorry about your name, but maybe you’re not.

You yearned to hear those three syllables, all the time, all those years. I’d found a quirky way to say it and no matter the depths of our antipathy, you’d slink into my presence, and onto my lap, just to hear me hum-croon Butterscotch, making three syllables sound like ten.

Dear Butterscotch,

I’m not going to lie: we had a great time in Italy.

The neighbors fed you. You had a safe place to sleep, pit bulls to pester, long afternoon naps under the laurel hedge.

Quit pretending our month-long absence wasn’t every bit as fun for you as it was for us.

Dear Butterscotch,

How the hell did you get behind that sliver of wallboard?

What were you thinking, going three days without food, water, or potty breaks?

Signed,

Not Sorry We Moved to Salem

PS: Deal with it.

Dear Butterscotch,

Playing Marco Polo with you in the new house is FUN.

PS: We’re in the living room. Hush yer yowlin’ and join us.

Dear Butterscotch,

We were right! You love the yard and having the downstairs bathroom all to your badass self.

Signed,

Still Not Sorry We Moved to Salem

Dear Butterscotch,

What the hell?

You were supposed to live four more years, then four more, and four more after that. Not four more weeks. Renal failure is not how we wanted this to end.

It’s incurable, but there are options. Always, options.

You will have none of it.

Feisty, independent. Surely you know where this is going.

You’re handling it with far more grace than we ever will.

Dear Butterscotch,

It’s been six weeks.

We don’t know the last time you ate. You’re like Houdini, caught in some magical, death-defying leap. There are days when we don’t think you are going to die, nights we cry because we know you will.

We take turns holding you, mostly because you have abandoned the last of your “touch me not” ways and have slipped, seamlessly, into the role of world’s most cuddliest cat.

That, and the Kitty Bucket List you apparently (finally) discovered. In the midst of your dying you are choosing life: climbing on counters, knocking objects over. But that’s the extent of your mischief. You never knew what you could have had, never took what wasn’t yours. Unlike the dogs, you never pulled dental floss out of the trash or caught a fish hook in your lip. You never filched a bagel or stole a plate of chicken.

Food still intrigues you--it drags you out of thick slumber and into the kitchen, the sound of a crinkling cheese wrapper as erotic as any fantasy.

But that’s all it is: a dream.

You’re holding us hostage. Because now that you can eat anything you want, you want nothing. There are no enticements to drag you off this balance beam, this precipice between life and death.

Today we noticed that your tail, once held so proudly erect, lists sideways, ballast as you scoot from one room to another.  

Eat, damn you. Eat.

Dear Butterscotch,

We have had time to ponder the bookends of your life.

You came to us half-starved, half-feral. You will leave emaciated, your silken pelt loosely stretched across a knobby spine, bones protruding like arthritic knuckles.

Memory puts stories inside these brackets, habit hits like a hammer.

Isn’t it time to feed you? Let you out, let you in. Open the slider only to watch you run away. Open it a second time, a third, cajoling you to creep past my looming size because we’re playing a game where only you know the rules.

There you are in the yard, basking in the summer sun. Now under a dessicated fern; next, the hedgerow between two houses. Drinking from the sump pump spigot that fountains water after each rain storm. Prowling the railroad ties that define our tiered garden. Butterscotch the huntress. Yellow cat playing lion.

That’s all done now, seeing you into another hot summer is every bit as wishful as hoping you will eat.

Years before you’d given up on me and my office, only to return in those last weeks: adamant that my space was yours and not just my office. My clothes, my chair, my time. Me.

Your biggest hunger is for my lap.

Hour after hour, night after night, I hold you. We read my tablet together, you nosing the screen, turning pages before I am ready. We discover Facebook videos and I learn you like watching LOL Cats as much as I do.

My eyes water, my nose runs. Allergies, I tell myself. I can’t possibly be crying--not like this. I thought a life shared at arm’s length would spare me the anguish of losing yet another pet.

You proved me wrong.

Dear Butterscotch,

You couldn’t lift your head this morning, so we knew it was time.

Maybe past time, but, no: you roused mid-morning and went outside. It was a sunny day, the kind of bright cold February offers as a promise of spring. You strolled across frozen ground, sniffing at sharp spokes of grass. In your not so recent past, you would have vanished for hours, today it was brief minutes before you returned, ready for your final trip out of our home and out of this world.

You nestled in a makeshift carrier, burrowed deep inside the plush robe you claimed some weeks before. This would be the place of your final sleep, your splash of cream against a purple backdrop.

The vet whisked you away to put an IV in your leg. Only to return, long minutes later, apologizing: she couldn’t open a vein. Two failed attempts before your hind leg yielded.

We gazed down at you, you in your red socks, two bandages brighter than blood binding your front legs, and ached to realize that our quest to spare you any pain had failed.

She held up the syringe and we nodded.

I put my lips close to your head, that velvety spot between your ears, and hum-crooned your name.

Dear Butterscotch,

The food bowl is gone, but the urge to feed you remains. The sliding glass door yields only a view of the yard, not a cat waiting to come inside. Wind chimes sing like the bell on your collar.

Inside is quiet, bereft of your chatter and wads of fur.

Dave and I are untethered, petless, for the first time in 24 years.

We can go back to Italy, visit the kids in Chicago, tour the country like we’ve always planned. And we will, I know this.