The writer’s cat

A companion animal for a solitary life.

Dear friends, I will not speak of the devastation of these past two weeks. The next years will be a nightmare. 

But let’s not go there. Let’s focus on something wonderful. 

Cats.

Portrait of a not-childless cat lady. 

I live alone, sort of. My two kids left home years ago. Now there’s a tenant who rents the top floor of my house and walks through our communal area to get there, and a tenant in the basement who enters through the garden. I encounter these nice people regularly. But the middle two floors are mine, and when no guests are visiting, I live there alone.

Except for my cat.

She contacted me through Facebook. After the death of my last cat, see below, I’d not been eager for another, but one day a whiskered face was staring at me from a friend’s FB page; her owner had died and she needed a home. Like my childhood cat, she was a tabby with soft grey stripes and insistent green eyes. So, a few emails and a long drive later, she was mine. Her given name was Twiggy, which I had to change, because any woman who weighed over 80 pounds in the sixties is haunted by that name. I called her Tiggy.

Tiggy is eccentric. She has never purred and is more relentless in the constant hunt for food than any cat I’ve had before, always jumping onto counters and even fishing in the compost bin and chewing through plastic bags to get what’s inside. She yowls in the morning and at suppertime to remind me of her desperate starvation. But then she comes to settle on my lap. Nothing feels as good, as comforting, as the soft warm weight of a cat on your lap.

I’m grateful to share my life with another species and marvel at her aloof self-importance — nine or ten pounds of fur, and yet she demands attention. This very small mammal has needs and desires, just as I do, and it’s my job to tend to her and my honour to do so. There’s a reason many great writers — Stephen King, T. S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Doris Lessing — like cats. Felines and scribes are mostly difficult, independent creatures who spend a great deal of time in silence and are careful about commitment. Between writer and cat, there’s mutual recognition and love. Of a kind.

Here’s a love story, written some years ago, about my last cat.

Her big small life.  

I have to kill my cat. 

Here she is beside me, lying on the sofa, where she spends 23 ½ hours a day. She’ll be fourteen this year, old in cat years, but she’s still lovely, a tabby — the best kind of cat — with magnificent stripes, a thick glossy black streak down her back, graduated lines on her black-tipped tail, a white bib under her chin, and pretty white boots on all four paws. Even in the dark, I can always see Mewmew’s neat little boots. 

Mewmew has been nicknamed “the crabby cat” since my daughter, on her way to college, bequeathed her to me. This cat has never once sat on my lap. On countless occasions, as I stroked her soft fur thinking this time would be different, she’d suddenly turn, hissing, and bite and slash, ripping skin. There was often blood. I had to warn admiring visitors to keep their distance. 

What’s the use of a cat, I’d say to her, who won’t sit on your lap and purr? That’s what cats are for! And yes, that is a preferable kind of cat. We had a rule when I was a kid — if you were called to do a chore but had a cat on your lap, you did not have to get up. Not once in our years together has this creature given me that comforting pleasure.

But there are other pleasures, mostly just looking at her — folded gracefully into a perfect package as she sleeps with a paw over her nose; as she sits at the back window, tail lashing, lusting for sparrows; as she winds around my legs in the morning waiting for breakfast, even if she then turns away in disdain. It’s good for the human soul to be subjected to that kind of feline self-possession and haughty dignity. And she always cheers me up with this thought: even if I’ve had an unproductive day and accomplished nothing, I’ve accomplished a hundred times more than my cat.

Mewmew was in perfect health until a year ago, when a swelling began to grow on her right back paw. The vet, an old-school no-bells-and-whistles guy, ascertained that it was a tumour, possibly benign, possibly not, but causing her no pain, and he advised me to wait and see. Eight months later, the lump was enormous, and I went back. In forty years, the vet said, he’d never seen such a thing. She could walk fine, but now she was eating poorly, due he thought to an unrelated condition, something internal he did not name. I’d been trying different fancy foods, expensive specialty tins for kittens or old cats, but she wasn’t interested. She once weighed fourteen pounds. Now she was down to seven.

Nothing to do, he said. Taking off the growth would mean amputating the foot, too much for a cat her age. Let me know if she seems to be in pain, and we’ll discuss the next step.

So, one $85 consultation later, my cat and I came home for the last time. In seconds, she was on the sofa again, snoozing in the sun. 

I thought about my beautiful grandmother, who, at ninety, stopped eating. She wasn’t ill, just tired and fed up. Despite her loved ones’ efforts and entreaties, she just faded away.

Shouldn’t a cat, I thought, also have the right to end her days when and as she chooses? It’s not up to me. And so we went on together, the crabby old cat and I. 

One morning, there was blood on the sofa. The tumour had split open. She kept the wound clean and the split healed, but a few days later it opened again, and again. Every surface on which she might sit had to be covered with cloth or newspapers. She was eating less and less. 

I called a mobile vet for information and spoke to a nice man with a thick Russian accent. We arranged that I would call him to come to the house when I was ready.

I am not ready. And I don’t know if she is. Look at her, sleeping there in her patch of sun, which is all she asks of life. Does she want to give up that warmth?

But I want the ordeal to be over for us both. I also want her to live forever just as she was. When I walk in the front door, I who’ve lived alone for years, I call a greeting to my cat. Every morning, she greets me. When she’s gone, without even seven pounds of fur to keep me company, I will truly be alone.

But it must distress my bad-tempered companion when that horrible thing bleeds. It hurts to watch her get thinner, now just a feathery bundle of whisker, fur, claw, and bone.  

I will call the Russian vet tomorrow. 

For another day, I’ll sit beside her and carefully stroke her stripey back and tell her how beautiful she is. Maybe she’ll even let me hold her while the Russian vet does his work. And then, a life that mattered only to her and to me, a fierce, unique, tiny marvel of a life, will be gone.   

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