Kitty

I'm breaking radio silence to note that Kitty has died. I think she was about eighteen years old. She was sick. We had the vet come to our apartment to put her to sleep.

I thought I should set down a few details about her. (What did Don used to say about web-logging? A self-important bulkwark against my own poor memory.)

Mer and I adopted Kitty from Bideawee at the end of 2003. I remember Mer saying she wanted a gray kitten, but the woman at the shelter &em; small, pale, long hair; I remember her wearing a too-big t-shirt &em; pleaded with us to take an older cat. She consulted a wall of cages. One half of the room was a free-range play area behind a pane of glass. I asked why only some of the cats got to go in the play area. "That's for the bad kitties," I remember her saying. I know, it doesn't make any sense. It drives Nina crazy because she can't square it &em; why would the bad kitties get to play in there? But that's how I remember it.

I don't know how many cats we "interviewed" in the small exam room, but Kitty was the first one that really responded to us. They told us she was five years old, that her name was Mimi, and that she'd been abandoned by her owner when he'd moved in with a woman who already had cats. She'd been left at the shelter with her sister, but the sister had been adopted separately. It was clear that she'd had kittens at some point. They told us her stomach has been shaved for a medical procedure, which turned out not to be the whole story &em; she licked that area obsessively for the next eight years or so, despite our interventions with scolding, ointments, and even an expensive regimen of histamine injections to cure any allergies she might have. None of it worked. She licked herself 'til she bled, and then one day she just stopped.

When we first brought Kitty home, she ran out of the carrier and hid in our narrow beroom under the crummy, impractical work desk I'd bought at the Fulton Mall. But when we went to bed that night, she came out and wanted to get in bed with us. She had shit in her fur from not taking care of herself, so we wouldn't let her in the bed until she took a bath.

I fed her Friskies, which made her fat at first. The salmon flavor turned her poop pink, so I told myself that she preferred "beef and liver entree" instead.

She tried to drink from the toilet. We were surprised by that.

She ate waterbugs when they showed up in the kitchen or bathroom, crunching them enthusiastically, and often leaving a serrated leg behind &em; as, what, an offering? There were never that many mice in any of the apartments I lived in, though she killed a couple in the place on 12th Street, depositing one in the leg of a pair of jeans I'd left puddled on the living room floor.

When we got bed bugs and had to box up all our stuff into a kind of Tupperware box fort that we lived in for a year, Kitty got depressed. She'd spend all day in bed, only getting up to eat and use the litter box. It was Nina who brought her out of it, coaxing her with daily play and catnip. When we had to have the apartment fumigated, Chris picked me and Kitty up in his dad's car and drove us to his apartment in Murray Hill, where she stayed for several days. I remember driving through Chinatown, Chris yelling about the traffic, Kitty purring loudly from her carrier wedged between the driver's and passenger's seats. She liked boys' voices, we think.

She went through a period of a year or so when she wanted to lick us all the time. She licked my feet in the morning when I woke up. When we would pet her in our laps or in her bed, she would signal that she'd had enough by licking our hands. She licked the arms of guests, especially if they were boys, especially if they had hairy arms.

As she got older, got sicker, there was medicine we had to give her, and she had to keep to a special diet to ease the burden on her kidneys, which were failing. I'd planned for some kind of liberated moment near the end, when we'd tear up the rules and feed her a whole order of chirashi. But the terrible irony was, of course, that once it was clear she was dying, she didn't want to eat anything. We brought her baby food, tuna, a roast chicken, chicken broth, whole yogurt, herring, Fancy Feast, cat food medically engineered to be appetizing, cheese, butter; but she was too sick for any of it. We gave her saline injections under her skin to keep her hydrated, but there was something wrong with her bladder, too, and the injections just seemed to make her swell up and get heavier, and towards the very end, she couldn't even walk across the room without taking breaks to rest. As the visiting doctor from Animal Kind gave her the preliminary sedative, I bent down and whispered to Kitty, "You did such a good job."

Why did I wait? Why did I wait?

I'd spent the final few nights next to her on the couch, the sofa-bed extension halfway pulled out to serve as a step in case she needed to get somewhere in the middle of the night, since she couldn't really jump any more. The very last night, Nina woke up to go to the bathroom, and heard the characteristic thump of Kitty hitting the floor. She came out to the living room to check on us, and once I'd woken up, we searched the apartment for Kitty. Had she gone into the closet to die, like it seemed like she'd been trying to do? Had she squeezed her way under a bureau? We finally found her in the bedroom, where she'd dragged her way to the foot of the bed. I scooped her up and we got under the covers with her like we'd been doing for years, and we all passed the early morning together. She wasn't purring any more at the point, but it was nice for us, at least.

That might be enough to say about that. When I gave Chris the news, he said, "Kitty was a good little friend." It's true; they really become your friends. It's not fair.