Descanse Bien Mi Gato Dulce

Flanagan, my big orange and white tom cat, died last Monday. Died suddenly. Died painfully.

It was dawn, before the vet’s office was open and I awoke to discover him in the startling throes of the dying process. Sides heaving, eyes pleading with me to help him as he stumbled toward me drooling and delirious. People are uncomfortable with death, with my telling of the details but I don’t care. I lived it. The reader can look away, the listener can tune it out…but not me. I was locked into that traumatic experience by the depth of my love for that cat. Sobbing the instant I saw him, following him every step of the way as he dragged himself from place to place in a desperate attempt to get more air into his fluid-filled lungs. Telling him that he could go. Begging God or the Universe or Whoeverisinchargehere to take him and free us both from this dreadful reality. I witnessed the panic and the pain of that wonderful creature’s last hour in this life with me and I held him in the cool grass of our front yard as his last breath failed him. As a writer I am compelled to retell it. As one who loved him and whom he loved back so much better than I ever could, I am driven to honor the gift our relationship was in my life.

For some of us, pets bring to our lives an added dimension of richness born of love, personality and loyalty. Truly these relationships never falter. Not on the pet’s side anyway. Pets don’t ever dabble in the moody or the fickle. They adore us unconditionally no matter our faults. We might be unemployed, unpopular, even un-bathed and still they delight in our company. Other than food, water and the occasional diversion the only thing they truly want is to accompany us through life. Prior to losing Flanagan, I always felt like two cats and a dog were too many pets for one single girl and yet strangely since he’s been gone there is a deep sense of lack. The loss, albeit a bit paler in comparison to that of our most beloved human relationships, is still profound and it bounces against the empty spot he once took at my fence when I’d come back home and against the quiet of the morning when he’d typically plaintively meow to be let out and it echoes back into my heart. The pain repeating and repeating and repeating. The intricate threads of a pet’s personality weave their way into our daily lives and for a time after they die those broken threads bleed an achy, melancholy sense of vacancy into our lives. Now I’m left wondering just how long it will until the bleeding stops completely.

Finn mourned his brother by remaining at his grave for days.

Please don’t mistake me. I’m not dysfunctional with grief. There are no contemplative glances at the razor or Google searches on noose weaving. I still laugh and tell bad jokes. My Twitters aren’t tamer, my Facebooking hasn’t faded. No, I’m still breathing and bathing and imbibing in all that I was before he left. I’m just telling the story of my loss as plainly as I know how. As plainly as I must to to honor that big, fat, sweet cat of mine and the tiny yet unbreakable threads that wove him into my heart.

I didn’t find him. He found me. I was at my landlord’s house which is on the opposite side of the block and as I headed to my car I heard a loud meow. I turned to find an orange and white tom cat. Scruffy, dusty and unkempt but teeming with amiability and warmth, he came right to me and I bent to pet him. “Well aren’t you sweet,” I told him “but can you please tell your brother to come back because we miss him?”. Three months previous another orange stray had come my way, so charming and comical, but with a penchant for wanderlust. I had considered making him my own and had named him Finnegan, but hadn’t seen him in almost ten weeks. I was sure he’d been taken in by someone else or worse, had suffered a more tragic fate. I gave this friendly new stray a few more scratches, climbed into my car and drove off. Hours later, when I returned to my house what I saw on my porch stopped me. There on the top step was the friendly stray I’d met at my landlords house and with him…Finnegan! His first act in my life was give me what I’d asked him for. This would set the tone for the kind of animal he was through and through.

Once, when he was still merely a friendly stray in my life, he arrived in my door completely wallpapered in deep, bleeding scratches from what was clearly a vicious fight. Without a second thought I ran a warm, shallow bath and placed him in it. He didn’t fuss a bit. While it was clearly a foreign experience, he trusted me implicitly and quietly complied. I bathed his cuts, toweled him dry and followed this up by putting first hydrogen-peroxide and then Neosporin all over his back and loosely mummy-wrapping him in an Ace bandage. He never once fought me. Never complained. Instead, he purred from start to finish. When my doctoring was complete he made for the couch and napped for the next five hours straight.

While Finnegan would leave loyalty offerings of dead mice and bird’s heads on my doorstep; Flanagan, a pacifist, would instead leave crumpled bits of paper trash that he’d fished from the neighbor’s trash. Daily I would open my door to a discarded paper towel or an empty candy wrapper, perfectly centered on my porch’s top step.

I called him the Ambassador. In spite of his large stature, tall from paw to shoulder and weighing in at nearly 18 pounds, he had no interest in fighting. I would sometimes catch sight of him sitting in our backyard passively observing all of the strays and scalawags. He was the first to attempt to socialize with them and the first to retreat if they balked. I only saw him fight when cornered or to finish one of the many fights that Finnegan had started but could not carry on his own. He was protective.

My neighbor’s yard could double as a wrecking yard. A jumble of non-working cars, industrial parts and decrepit homemade shacks, I tried to encourage my boys to stay out of there. One day I heard him meowing from that direction and so I went to the window to call him home. Instead I witnessed my cat’s altruism in all of it’s glory. He was standing in the middle of their concrete yard and meowing toward a junked BMW. Out from beneath the car emerged a small black kitten. After licking and nuzzling the kitten he meowed at it, turned on his heel and led it out, down the front of our property line and straight into our yard. Once inside the safety of our gate, he lay down and the kitten joined him. The two napped in the sun for hours, the kitten spooned up against Flan’s side. I loved my cat for the heart he had. That immense and giving heart.

Never was the size and depth of his heart more obvious than on the Tuesday after my father had passed away. I had been cemented to my parent’s house by the arrival of family and by emotional obligation and this was my first chance to steal away to my home and be alone with my grief. At this point in time, Flanagan had not yet officially crossed the line of “Stray Cat I Find Lovable” to “My Cat I Could Never Part With”. When I walked up my steps, he was there on the porch waiting for me. I let him in and then sat on my couch to just sit still in the silence. After a moment or so I bent down into my own lap and began to sob. Right away I felt Flanagan carefully get up onto the couch behind me and climb his two front paws slowly up my back. He then lay his upper body and head down on me and purred so, so loudly. He stayed there without moving while I cried and when I stopped, he climbed down and lay beside me. It was such an obvious act of comfort. I decided in that moment that he was mine. He never again repeated that act, but throughout the years when I would cry openly, he would come from where ever he was in the house to lie beside me while I wept. In the deepest part of me I have always felt that that cat was a gift that the Universe sent my way to comfort and love me in the same calm, steady way my father once had. My Dad passed on April 16, making that Tuesday’s date April the 20th. I lost Flanagan on April 20th exactly five years later.

When he’d get sick or injured and a substantial vet bill had to be paid, people would comment on how lucky he was as a stray to have found me. But I know that’s not true. What I know now for sure, here in the wake of his hasty and heartbreaking exit, is that it was me who was lucky to have had the chance to share the space in my life and in my heart with that incredibly unique and endlessly loving feline.

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