“Meoow. Meooow. Mew.”
Tonight I said goodbye to my cat, Mac.
When I was little I loved cats. They were small and furry–what wasn’t to like? At some point, when I was about five I convinced my dad to let me take a cat home from my cousin’s farm–the same farm my mom grew up on. I got a soft little calico kitten and named her Furball like the cat from Tiny Toons. She was a great cat.
I don’t remember if it was due to finances or laziness, but we never got her spayed, and over the years she had a number of litters of kittens. We named each and every little kitty–some with descriptors based on personal experience, some names because we liked them. In her first litter there was a black and white cat that had a black stripe across it’s face over its eyes. It reminded him of the visor worn by Geordie LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Thus, we had a cat named Geordie. A litter or two later, another cat came along with a similar black and white coat. Thus, Geordie, Jr. (or GJ), she became.
One day, Furball didn’t come home. She was missing for a couple of days before my brothers reported (rather heartlessly) that they had seen her on the side of the road while they were on the bus this morning. She had clearly been hit by a car. I remember spending that afternoon riding my bike around in circles on my driveway singing Disney songs to myself in mourning.
While we had made it a habit of giving away the kittens that Furball (and our other strays) gave birth to, we were never able to give away GJ. She refused to be given away. She was terrified of people and never wanted anything to do with any of us. When we gave away her siblings (all to very nice people), she would hide under the bed. If we wanted to pet her she would run into a different room. Occasionally she would allow petting. Occasionally, but then only under her rules.
Shocker, GJ was never spayed either, and on two different occasions she pushed the window out of my second story window and got knocked up. The second time I barely had time to notice she was pregnant (as I mentioned, she hid ALL the time), but one day I noticed a set of little tails poking up above the stuffed animals when I peered under my bed. I don’t remember if there were four or five kittens in that litter, but, like always, there was a runt.
We named him Mac, or rather, my stepmom named him Mackenzie, and my brothers and I thought it was a stupid name for a boy cat so we took to calling him Mac. He was black and white and the fluffiest cat that ever passed through our home. He was adorable. But, he was also the runt. One day when the kittens were about three weeks old, I found Mac sprawled out on the floor in my bedroom a fair way away from his brothers and sisters. I picked him up and he moved just enough for me to know that he wasn’t completely dead. I brought the little tyke to my dad and we headed off to the nearest vet.
“Looks like he’s going to die,” they told us. Apparently the actual vet wasn’t in that day and that’s the best the nurses could do. So we headed off to a different vet. They said he didn’t look good, but they’d see what they could do. They kept him overnight, got some food and fluids in him and when we went back the next day he looked mostly alive. They gave us some formula and taught me how to make him pee and poop (gross aside: after kittens feed, their mom licks their genitals. The sensation causes them to go to the bathroom and the mom eats the excrement. As a human caretaker I wasn’t expected to repeat this procedure exactly, but I needed to take a moist cotton ball and rub him in his nether regions to get him to do the deed. I realized pretty quickly that I could just shove his butt in his mom’s face and she would gladly take care of it for me. It was better for all of us.)
We took him home that day and stuck him in a small box full of towels in the living room. A couple of days later my dad was laying on the couch watching golf (or something) and he started hearing some crazy scratching. Turns out Mac had tangled himself up in some frayed edges of the towels. My dad cut him free, but at that point we all joked he had used up two of his nine lives.
Mac wasn’t like other cats. I don’t know if it was the close human attention he got from a young age, or if it was just in his nature, but he was the sweetest cat ever. He was super cuddly. If people were visiting he would walk right up to them and lay down in their lap for a nap. If he knew you were crying, he’d come offer a few meows of comfort and settle in for some petting. He also took over the entire bed if you tried to share it with him, but it was a small price to pay.
One day my parents got a new dog. He was an adorable yippy little thing and my parents got him when he was still just a few weeks old. This dog, Patch, was fascinated by Mac and wanted nothing better than to play with him. Mac, however, was older and more relaxed and wanted none of this crazy dog’s nonsense. One day when Patch started trying to strike up a game of “harass the cat,” Mac escaped to the upper level of the house and jumped up on a chair. Patch was still too small to jump on the chair (now he can jump on the kitchen table. My, how things have changed) and he proceeded to spend the next few minutes attempting to get to the cat’s level, while Mac watched anxiously. Eventually Patch stumbled on a way to get up on the chair: jump up on the couch (which was slightly lower),and then jump up on the chair from the side, between the seat and the arm of the chair. It was genius. He started making attempts at this plan, and after trying and trying and trying he succeeded! Unfortunately Mac caught on to his game much quicker and by the time Patch finagled his way onto the seat Mac had nonchalantly jumped off and found someplace safer to rest.
For the four years I was away at college, I lived a far way away from my beloved cat. It just didn’t make sense to bring him, but there were times when I would have dreams that Mac had laid down next to me on my bed as I went to sleep at night. I would always wake up disappointed. When I would return to LA after a trip home, Mac was always one of the things I missed most.
When I moved to New York for grad school I remember a number of people telling me I should bring my cat. It seemed like a hassle. It would cost me a couple hundred dollars to get him on the plane, and that didn’t count the added cost of taking care of an animal or the trouble of finding an apartment and roommates that would accept a furry creature, but I took their advice, and I’m so glad I did.
He had a tough time at first. The plane ride and change of scenery terrified him. But when he finally calmed down after a couple of days, he settled in and he was a friendly reminder of home everyday.
He made life better. It didn’t matter what kind of crappy day I had, Mac would be there to meow sweetly at me when I got home. Every night when I’d lay down to go to sleep he’d jump on top of me and then paw at my blanket until I let him under it to snuggle up next to me. I’d wake up with him laying on my chest, his head facing me, eyes closed in sleep. He’d play with any little string happened to be dangling from anything, he killed a mouse at the ripe old age of 12. He refused to eat human food because he found it gross (except for tuna, there was no faster way to get Mac to pay attention to you than opening a can of tuna).
He was, and I mean this, the greatest cat ever.
I think I grew out of my cat age at about the age of 10. Most definitely by the age of 15 when I no longer found myself surrounded by tiny adorable mini cats every spring. Since then I’ll see cats in stores, or visit the houses of friends who have cats and watch the animals run in terror. Or cats let me pick them up and then start growling and hissing. Or there’s my parents’ new cat who follows me around only to slash at me with its claws and emit a low growl if I move even a millimeter closer. I run across these cats (pretty much every cat I’ve met in the last 10 years) and wondered, why the heck do people like cats? They’re obnoxious! It wasn’t until a few months ago that I realized I no longer thought of Mac as a cat. He wasn’t a cat. He was my pet. My friend. My cuddly black and white furball that was hogging all the cute in the world.
A year ago today I brought him to the vet. He had stopped eating and drinking and was foaming at the mouth and doing that little butt-scraping move animals do when they’re constipated. The vet gave him some meds and told me the best he could guess was that Mac was constipated. I gave him some drugs for his kidney and started mixing some laxative into his wet food. In not too long he was back to his usual peppy self. And he was like that for a year.
But then a few days ago he started acting silly. He seemed to be having a little harder time breathing. He stopped eating and drinking altogether. I thought he might have a hairball (he seemed a little constipated) so I got some hairball laxative stuff at the pet store. He refused to eat it. He started hiding under my bed a lot.
Today I pulled him out from under my bed so I could try to force feed him some fluids. Instead he was like a rag-doll. Not unlike the way I found him when he was three weeks old. He started foaming at the mouth, and from the looks of it when I loaded him into the kennel to rush him off to the vet, I think he was peeing himself.
As I rushed off to the vet my roommate reminded me to think about it. The cat is old. After they do triage, think about how much I can afford to spend on him over the next few years. He’s getting older and older. He’s probably just going to get more and more health problems.
The vet made my decision a lot easier. He doesn’t know exactly what was wrong with Mac, but they needed to do some CPR. He was barely breathing, so they put him on oxygen to revive him and get some color back into him and get his heart pumping again. The vet showed me two syringes full of orange fluid that was filling Mac’s chest cavity and making it almost impossible for him to breathe. The vet basically said at Mac’s age, it could be anything, and even if they figure out what’s wrong, fixing it could cost thousands and thousands of dollars. “If I had to bet on him, well, I wouldn’t.” He told me.
We put him down not long after.
I know the vet knows I don’t have a lot of money. I made a big deal about it a year ago when I didn’t want him hospitalized because I couldn’t afford it. I know that’s why he said things the way he did. I also know that’s why he gave me a $200 discount on putting him down. I just hate the way I felt a year ago when I walked away thinking that they thought I wasn’t fit to take care of a cat. I wasn’t doing a good enough job. I felt a little like that this time. Because I kept bringing up money, because I had to, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love my cat any less.
On my way home I ditched the cat carrier in a garbage can. They didn’t give me back the collar and the tag. I thought about it briefly, but I was so out of sorts and embarrassed the whole time I was there that I didn’t push it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back or if it will be cremated with him. I probably shouldn’t care, but, dammit, I loved that cat.
There’s two giant bags of cat food in my room, along with bowls and a food mat, leftover cat treats, a litter box and litter. It’s all a reminder of the kitty I had to say goodbye to tonight. Heck, even the way my room is arranged, to make a space for the litter box, will nag at me until I find a way to rearrange it so it doesn’t remind me of the longest friendship I’ve ever had.
So here’s to Mac, the best animal to grace this earth. I already miss you.
