I was just sitting down on Thursday to write a post about how I’m all settled in LA and loving it — the weather, seeing old friends again, redecorating, learning about my new neighborhood — when I noticed that my cat Pub had been hiding away an awful lot. Twenty-four hours later, I was sobbing over a little bundle wrapped in a white towel at the vet’s office. He died suddenly, shockingly, of a feline leukemia I had vaccinated him against just a month before. He must have already had it — must have been in the late stages even — too late to fight it off. He was a close companion made closer from the fact that we had just done this cross-country move together. I was shocked.
Friends and family near and far have all done a lot through calls and emails and texts and invitations to come hang out and posts on the Facebook. A few ideas have been repeated: I shouldn’t feel guilty about moving him out of Texas; the sadness honors his memory; I shouldn’t feel stupid that I’m standing around crying over an animal when people are dying all over the place of wars and famine and otherwise ordinary people-reasons. The overarching sentiment is that I should remember the good stuff. With that in mind, I’m going to tell you the story of his first months.
baby love
In 2005, I was working a second job folding clothes and ringing up customers at Banana Republic to pay my way through school. One afternoon, the stockers were taking hangers out to the trash compactor out back when they heard crying inside the machine. Inside a big jacket box, someone had deposited two kittens — one tabby, one black. They were badly dehydrated, with their skin wrinkling up. Their eyes were barely open and they were covered in fire ant bites. They weren’t more than ten days old. My shift was ending so I scooped them up, box and all, and took them home.
At home, I opened the box to show them to my boyfriend Justin. When I saw the look on his face, I burst into tears. I am not a big weeper-at-situations but the situation was pretty bad: my bleeding heart had already led to the two of us raising a stray who gave birth to five kittens, and paying for their resulting ringworms and parasites and fleas had drained the meager bank account. We were down to sharing bags of frozen peas for dinner, and here I came with two more problems.
Fortunately, Justin had as much of a ridiculous idea about living as I did. We stocked up on kitten milk and made a call to the vet for a checkup. The vet told us how to care for them, how to bathe them in bowls to help ease the fire ant sores. The vet said: don’t name them, don’t be surprised if they don’t make it through the week. We named them Banana and Republic.
six weeks
Weeks passed. They grew up in their box, on a towel our friend Michael gave us. They drank kitten milk from syringes and had to be coaxed to pee with a wet washcloth. I heard Pub’s first purr after one of his warm water baths — it sounded like a tiny motor starting. Justin was in charge of surrogate cat-mom activities, teaching them how to play by kicking their feet and cleaning their faces after feedings. It was total surrogate baby raising, except I was allergic to the babies and the babies would eventually learn to poop in sand. Banana was my favorite at first because Pub would get his claws stuck in the towel and fall on his face and cry about it over and over again. But when our friend Lauren came in to give Banana a good home at 9 weeks, Justin and I knew we wouldn’t work too hard to give Pub away. He was already chasing Turk around, scratching the furniture to hell, causing a ruckus. He was family.
nine weeks
Justin and I would part ways a few months later. I got to have Pub on the condition that I take the slightly-less-compelling large-calico Turk as well. (Justin and I remain good friends, and the call I had to make yesterday morning to tell him about what happened was the saddest call I’ve ever made.) Pub grew up sweet and spoiled and had six good years of chasing lizards and terrorizing the large Turk and getting love from everyone. Maybe it’s good that he went fast and young, because this was the cat I’d have spent too much money on to keep alive for too long. Justin says he was “nobody’s problem and everybody’s baby,” and he was like that to the end.
pictured: one former location of energy currently coursing through the universe
Well so, I am sad now and trying to balance the time between loving on Turk and getting out of the house with friends. If you have stories of losing an animal you’ve loved and assurances that it won’t feel terrible forever, drop me a line or say hello in the comments. Or send me some good thoughts using your mind. It’s hard to be in a new place and have this happen, but I’ll find my way. Thanks for all the help so far.
