A Death in the Family

My dear cat Chloe fell asleep for the last time last Friday.



Here's how we met. Chloe lived with three other cats in a house. I met a girl who lived in a room in that house. I'd go over to visit her and Chloe would come into the room and hang out with us. She would jump on my hip when I was laying down and just sit there, content, purring like mad.

Even then, she was partial to me. She could come to visit us, but she would sleep on my side of the bed. She'd rub her face up against me and I'd just pet her and pet her. We connected with each other instantly. She adopted me: I didn't adopt her. She chose me.



Chloe hated the other cats in her house. She became a bit of a thug - she would hiss and slash at the other cats when they walked down the hallway. When that girl moved out to move in with me, Chloe came with us. That girl became Mrs. B, of course.

According to her former staffer's best estimate, Chloe was six when she came to live with us. I put her in a carrier and drove her to her new home - a cinder block one-bedroom apartment. She looked around, saw that she was the only cat in the house, and began purring madly. She was home.

If the math was right, Chloe was twenty years old when she finally left this mortal coil. She stayed with us through four moves, and when I moved into my own apartment, Chloe came with me.

She was frail. Her hips were especially painful. She had hip dysplasia - her hips would slip out of joint. Also arthritis. There were days when she could barely walk across the room. She couldn't jump anymore. The kitty who used to jump up on the bathroom sink couldn't jump onto a foot-high couch.



I had cat stairs - one so she could get onto the bed, and a shorter set of stairs so she could climb onto the couch. It helped. Not enough. But the stairs helped.

She had other stuff. She had the inevitable thyroid problems. She had chronic renal disease - that was diagnosed a couple of years ago. One of her kidneys seemed to have stopped functioning completely.

Because of the kidneys and everything else, she became dehydrated easily. I was giving her fluids every other day, plus pain medicine once a day. Plus kidney medicine. Plus glucosamine in her food.

At some point, it just wasn't enough. None of it was enough, because cats get old, as we all do. Cats get old, and at some point, their life becomes just existing from day to day. One of my friends asked me if there was joy left in her life.

I like to think so. I don't like to think that she was just existing. She still ate. She still curled up with me - even when she could barely move on the bed, she would curl up next to me and purr her soft, fragile purrs. She loved being cradled and she loved being next to me. And Oliver. She was a snugglebug to the end.

Chloe would follow me from room to room, waiting for me to stop moving so she could sit down next to me. She always did this; even when she was at her weakest, she would do that. I was always her person.

Last Friday night, she fell asleep, and she was gone Saturday morning. Her body was still there. But Chloe had moved on. She was someplace where her hips didn't hurt, and where I didn't have to poke her with needles and fill her up with fluids like a water balloon. Some place where she could frolic and be free and joyful and happy.

I buried her in the backyard with one of her crinkly toys. And I cried. I cried because I missed her, and I cried because I was relieved. She was finally free of the pain and the suffering. When she decided she couldn't take anymore, she just let go.

I did the best I could with you, Chloe. It was an honor being your person and your staff. I hope you have sunshine and warm fuzzy blankets and grass to roll in. Thank you for giving so much of yourself to us and for filling our lives with joy. We will never forget you.

Three Questions

For the last couple of months, Oliver has insisted on us telling him a story every night. It's exhausting. Usually, we're exhausted by the time we get to putting him to bed, and the sheer brainpower to come up with a new story is painful. Usually, I resort to telling him fables or new versions of old stories: "Once upon a time, there were three bears, and they lived in a third-floor walkup apartment..."

So I tried something new last night. A friend gave me the idea: he can ask me three questions, about anything he wants. And then I struggle to answer. Easy, I thought.

So these were his three questions last night:

1) Why does the world spin around and around?

2) Why does Chloe have a tail?

3) Why do they put that floaty stuff (helium) in balloons?

Easy. No problem. I just had to explain planetary rotation, the basic principles of evolution, and the elemental properties of helium. That's it.

I just looked on Google to try and find a simple answer for 1), and this is the best I found. It's mind-boggling.

I think he's going to be a scientist, and a brilliant one at that.

The Things He Says

Eight! Nine! Fourteen! He is learning numbers, in his own peculiar way. He knows the numbers eight, nine, and fourteen, which he will shout out, countdown-style, at random moments throughout the day. "Eight! Nine! Fow-teen!"

Once, I was putting him to sleep and his eyes had closed tight. Suddenly, he lifted up his head and said softly, "eight, nine." Went right back to sleep after that. I'm guessing he was counting in his sleep.

"Over here! Right there!" These are his versions of "near" and "far." It's hilarious to hear, because he pronounces them with something like a New Yawk accent. "Over heah! Right dere!" I'll be playing with his Legos - by "playing," I mean that I'm putting his Legos together and he's directing me as to where each piece goes. "Right dere!" he shouts excitedly. Next piece? "Right dere," he smiles. "Right dere."

"Daddy, come!" He commands us to join him for very important missions. Like, say, climbing into his kid-sized tent. "Daddy, come!" Or reading stories with him. "Mommy, come!" Or just walking around the house at his whim. "Daddy? Mommy? Daddy? Mommy? Daddy? Mommy? Come! Daddy, mommy, come!"
He says this, too, in the funniest way - long on the vowel, and resonant. It sounds like he's summoning us, in the most anachronistic, 19th century way imaginable. We are his servants, and he our benevolent dictator.

He's tried this command with Chloe and is shocked that she can refuse him. "Chloe, come!" he demands of her, trying to entice her off the couch or coax her out of his tent. She has not once obeyed him. I tried to explain to him that obeying is not a cat's strong suit, but he doesn't quite get it yet.

Repeating everything. And I mean everything. I've said five-syllable words before and heard him try to repeat them. He repeats back the oddest phrases, and picks up on the strangest concepts. One morning, he brought all of his stuffed animals from the playroom into the living room and onto the couch. Mrs. B asked if he was bringing out his buddies, and he absorbed the word immediately. "More buddies," he'd say, carrying an armful of stuffed bears and cats.

Shortly thereafter, he got the idea to put all of his "buddies" back into the playroom. All the while, saying to himself, "put buddies away." An armload at the time, he hauled all of his "buddies" back into the playroom.

Another example - today I was playing the killer new album by Los Straitjackets, and he was rocking out to it - dancing, wiggling around, wild-eyed. So I asked him if he was rocking out, and he repeated, "rock out." Then he started wiggling around in front of our cat Chloe.

"Oliver, are you trying to get kitty to rock out?"

"Chloe. Rock out," he commanded in all seriousness, while still wiggling around. Chloe, alas, refused to rock out in any discernible way.

The Magic Word. We have tried to teach him that the magic word is "please." So when he's demanding something from one of us - say, if he asks me fifteen times to move across the couch - I'll ask him to use the magic word. "Move, pease," he says finally, and I scoot over on the couch to make room for him.

But the real magic word for him is another word. It's the one word that can coax him to getting his diaper changed, and the only word that can instantly bring a smile to his face, whatever the situation.

That word is "naked."

Our baby is a flasher. He loves running naked around the house (well, he's usually got on a diaper), shouting "naked! Naked!" And he loves it when other people get naked, too. When Mrs. B or I need to change our clothes, he asks with a glint in his eye, "naked?" When he sees one of us without clothes, he giggles with mad delight.

I don't know what this portends for his future, but it's fun for now. If he's seventeen years old and still loves to run around naked, giggling like a schoolgirl, it'll be a whole different story.