None of This Should Have Happened

   Luci (short for Lucifer)

Last year about this time, we had yet another pet die. (We are. apparently, the place to send animals you want to see dead and buried.). It was heartbreaking because that cat, Diva, was a one-in-a-million animal who actually reconvinced me that I liked cats. One of the many disadvantages of living in a rural area is that, usually, all forms of healthcare (for humans and animals) is pretty dismal. We’ve been lucky because, so far, the Mayo Clinic has a facility in our town, but our luck with veterinarians has been more typical: as in dismal. We lost one cat, two years ago, due to repeated episodes of urinary tract blockages and insanely expensive and ineffective treatment. That cat, who was a pretty poor representative of the feline species as a pet in every way, Ms. Day had named “Doctor Zogar.” And I called him “Stinker” (to give you a hint about his personality and our relationship). After his demise, Ms Day didn’t give up and adopted another shelter cat almost immediately. A year later that cat, Diva, died after even more money spent and even worse diagnosis and totally, grossly, embarrassingly ineffective “treatment.” Being charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for ineffective pet medical care is the epitome of “adding insult to injury.” Ms. Day is a dedicated cat-lover and after a few months of going cat-less, she decided she needed another cat. I, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with either the decision or another pet. I’m still not clear on how Ms. Day convinced me to go along to the local shelter to look at cats, but I may forever regret that lapse in judgement.

She’d done some due-diligence, came up with some selection criteria and, after one really poorly-chosen attempt, had it down to three possibilities. Her main criteria, after Diva who was small and fragile from the start, was that our next cat needed to be strong and tough enough to survive. A large, long-haired cat the shelter had named “BB King” was the obvious answer. We felt the name was inappropriate and Ms. Day renamed him “Luci” (short for Lucifer) after a favorite character in a Netflix cartoon series.

Luci had been a middle-aged woman’s pet until she died in her home and went undiscovered for several days. After her body was removed, it was some time later before the house cleanout service came to remove her belongings from the home and discovered she had a cat. Luci had, in the meantime, clawed his way into a large bag of cat food and had eaten his way up to nearly 25 pounds of fat, upset, matted and dreadlocked cat. A cop delivered him to the shelter where he had to be drugged and shaved to untangle his matted fur. Then, because of his size and appearance, he was stuck in a small cage at the shelter for more than 6 months before he attracted Ms. Day’s attention.

I think, because of his sad and traumatic past, he was cautious, fearful, unsure of how to live in a house with people, and yet he was “a presence.” We are not sophisticated cat people. Ms Day loves cats and, mostly, I tolerate them, but neither of us are particularly alert to what's going on in a cat's head; me least of all. I guess it should be some sort of consolation that our local shelter doesn't know much about cats either, because we didn't get squat for guidance from them. We brought him home from the shelter, let him loose in the house, and he promptly disappeared.

For a large cat, he could find an incredible number of hiding places in an 1100 sq ft house. His first disappearing act was behind my office computer. This is not a neat area, with lots of cables, usually a stack of bills, and many other things that could be easily knocked over or disrupted to expose his hiding spot. Never happened. Because he was so careful and sure-footed, he went for days only coming out to eat hiding behind that computer.

 That was clearly not Ms Day's intention for having a cat. She wanted someone to cuddle up with on the couch, a companion. I can't, of course, speak for Luci, but I think he just didn't want any more awful stuff to happen and he was keeping his distance until further notice.    

Having spent 6 months in a shelter, the only food he was familiar with was the cheapest Purina Cat Chow. And, maybe, that was the only food he had eaten with his previous owner because that was the only thing he would eat. So, using food to entice him into expanding his behaviors wasn't a useful tactic. The only tool we had was to wait and see what kind of animal he would turn out to be.

After doing a little reading and some internet searches, I learned that the right move would have been to put Luci in a small room and let him become comfortable with that space. We have a small bedroom, that Ms. Day uses as a dressing room, and we set that up for a cat. He quickly settled in and spent most of his days on a couch looking out the window into our backyard. It didn't take long until he appeared to be looking forward to us visiting him in that room. After a while, we left the door open and he started exploring the house and us.

Ms. Day is not particularly patient. So, she started bringing other cats in from the shelter to see if they would meet her needs. The first one was a noisy, super irritating male cat that made me start to look for a camper and another place to live. Turned out he was sick and he went back to the shelter. Ms. Day is nothing if not relentless and she brought another cat home. This one was a small, noisy, but very friendly female cat. That cat moved into the room where we had tried to acclimate Luci. Which, of course, meant he could no longer go there. And things went downhill pretty quickly from there.

I will never be able to explain how this happened, but, somewhere in that period, Luci and I made a connection. Especially in the winter, I like to get up before the sun, make a bowl of cereal and fruit and coffee, and head to my computer and write. Lucy started sitting on the couch near where I would work and overtime he moved closer and closer to me. Eventually, he was sitting close enough that I could easily reach over to pet him and hear his gigantic purr. When her territorial acquisition tendencies forced me to give up my spot in the corner of our sunroom and move upstairs to ride, Luci moved with me.

When spring arrived, I started to spend those mornings on our back porch and trained Lucy to come out with me on a leash tethered to our clothesline. It took him almost no time to learn to put up with the tether for the opportunity to be outdoors. He and I spent hundreds of hours quietly enjoying each other and that space. Ms Day developed something between tolerance and love for Luci because of his and my connection. He was never "her cat," but he certainly was our cat. But, in many ways, he was my first pet. Every other animal that has come into my life, was brought and kept there by someone else, usually Ms. Day. As for cats, way over 3/4 them would have been out in the cold in minutes if it weren't for Ms. Day or our daughters or grandkids.

Ms. Day deserves a lot of credit for putting up with Luci. We had serious behavioral problems with him, particularly in his territorial marking of the spaces the second cat had taken up. And, in retrospect, he probably had urinary tract problems right from the beginning. Most of the time, he was absolutely house trained, but there were instances where he tried to “reclaim” (as in piss and crap all over) that small bedroom and even our bed. The first time he marked our bed he almost ruined it. But Ms. Day helped clean up the mess and tolerated him for me. We did not, by the way, work out what was going on until after Luci died and in our grief looked back to evaluate those moments.

We had experienced another cat, only a few years ago, going through the rapid decline of a urinary tract blockage and having been raped-and-pillaged by the local vet for well over $1,000 in failed "treatment." When Luci clearly started showing those symptoms, we tried to treat him ourselves (as the local shelter often did for similar reasons). His first bout was serious and with warm baths, for which he had to be sedated, massage, and diet he came out of that one as strong as ever. But, a little more than a month later, those symptoms returned and we tried the same tactics. It seemed to have worked but, after we had been gone for a day visiting friends, when we returned he was well past the point of no return.

We spent almost all of his last day together. The weather was kind to us, slightly cloudy, mild temperatures, with enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes off. Luci loved the yard and our house and as the day went I moved him back and forth from his favorite places to another. There is a spot in one our gardens, under a clawfoot bathtub on a bed of Moss where Luci liked to watch birds. He spent most of the day there and I sat on my swing chair a few feet from him making sure he had water and something to eat. He didn't eat but he did drink. Late afternoon he started to crawl from that spot towards me on the swing chair. I picked him up and he wants to be held. So, for the first time, I brought him back to my swing chair and we sat together on the phone for almost an hour. He tired of that and struggled to get up, so I brought him inside and laid him on a towel below the couch where he spent so many hours watching birds in a feeder I had made for him. And that's where he died.

Luci, the strongest, quietest, least demanding, most gentle friend an introvert ever had was dead. I buried him in a spot behind our backyard, next to Gypsy and Diva. I have put so many hours of love and enjoyment into holes in that spot that I can barely walk by it without breaking down. When Gypsy died, I planted four small Cedars in that area as a memorial. I maintain it like a more intelligent person might maintain a cemetery.

Cleo, the replacement cat Ms. Day found to satisfy her cat needs, was a total territorial bitch to Luci most of the time. Anytime he made an attempt to approach her, she would hiss and swat at him, but now she wanders the house looking for him. She used to sleep on the corner of our bed, guarding the bed as if it were her private territory and making sure he knew he was no longer allowed there. Now, I find her sleeping in his old spots at night: the "cat shelf" or on the pad I laid out for him on my electronics parts bin in the basement, my upstairs office chair, the wicker chair he used to like the claw on the back porch in the morning, or the couch with a bird feeder view. All of Luci’s old hiding spots.

I am not going through this again. I loved the animals in my pet cemetery, but there is something wrong with me that obliterates the memory of all those good times with the pain of losing them. Our house and yard was haunted for months by my memories of Gypsy, when she died, then Diva, and now Luci.

Someday I will stop looking for Luci whenever I see a dark shadow in the corner of the house or the yard. Someday, when I get stuck in a spot in my writing, I will stop automatically reaching out with my left hand to pet him for comfort and inspiration. Someday, I won't wake up at 5:00 in the morning, looking forward sitting on the back porch watching the sunrise while my giant cat pounces bugs in the yard and terrorizes squirrels. Someday, when I see some walking their little dog, I won't think, "My cat could beat up your dog." But I will never want to go through this pain again. I am 76 years old and Luci was barely five. I expected him to outlive me by several years. If I had the option, I would have split my remaining years with Luci in a heartbeat. We have friends who have nearly 20-year-old cats, but cats rarely live beyond five or six years with us. We are clearly not a good home for cats and I don't have the temperament to grow attached to them and watch them die.