Pet Calculus

NOTE: I wrote this rant the day Luci was dying, at the end of August. Then, it sat in my computer waiting for either exposure or deletion. Since I still miss my big guy and his death still stings, I went for exposure. So, I swapped the current verbs for past tense and shipped it.

In late August. I watched another of the many pets we have survived suffer the end of his life. Like our last cat, we had Luci (short for “Lucifer,” a character in one of Ms. Day’s favorite cartoon series) for about a year. He was a shelter cat who suffered a lot of unintentional abuse and misery in his life before us. We don’t know much of this story, but his previous owner, an older woman, died in her house/apartment and her body wasn’t discovered for several days. Luci wasn’t discovered in the house/apartment for an unknown but extended time after she had been removed. When a company was hired to empty the property, those folks found him grossly overweight (he’d opened a large bag of Purina Cat Chow and helped himself) and his long black fur was matted into dense dreads. A police officer delivered him to the shelter and while he struggled, he did not bite or scratch her. Our best guess was that he was a Norwegian Forest Cat or very close to that. Depending on the season, he weighed between 16 and 18 pounds and it was all muscle. He weighed closer to 30 pounds when he was brought to the shelter. His fur was so messed up that he had to be sedated and shaved. After all that, he was in a tiny cage in the shelter for more than 6 months before Ms. Day decided to adopt him.

When we brought him home, he was a mess. He was terrified, disoriented, and still never made the slightest attempt at lashing out from fear or anger. He would struggle to get away from us, but never using any of his formidable weapons: 1” fangs and claws nearly that long. For a big cat, he could hide incredibly well. It was several months before he would willingly be touched, but slowly he began to sit beside me while I wrote in my corner of our dining area. Ms. Day says we bonded because we both come from train wreck histories. All my life, I was the black sheep of my family and Luci was, literally, a black cat. We are both introverts, easily overwhelmed by people and situations. He always fled whenever I would grab a guitar, so he had far better musical taste than me. He was a shop cat, there was nothing he liked more than to relax in our work areas while we work.

But he was on his 3rd urinary tract infection in less than 3 months. He battled through the first two, but the last one was his last. There is math involved in living with a pet, especially one you unwillingly become attached to. The area-under-this-curve is the pleasure you derive from their lives vs the pain you will suffer when that ends. Ms. Day says she looks at their short lives as “brief, beautiful flowers.”

I have outlived so many people and animals in my 76 years that I do not have the emotional resources to do that again. When their lives end, I am stuck with wishing it was me and not them and feeling like my heart has been ripped out. Nothing about the brief time I had with them compensates for their loss. Fuck “better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all.” I can see how that philosophy could work with “beautiful flowers,” but not with a living, thinking, responsive being that had become my friend and, even, family. As you can see from the chart above, the area under the “misery” curve is substantially greater (longer and deeper) than the brief pleasure of that life, if the life is a short one. And the fact is clearly that we suck at keeping cats alive and healthy.

These are awful times in history and, particularly in this country. Half of the country is unable to tell fact from fantasy; and they are proud of that fact. I am incredibly tired of being disappointed when I discover someone I once thought might be a decent human being is a Trumper. I try to keep a sense of humor about the decline and fall of the United States, but it is hard for me not to look at the sky and hope for a planet-killing asteroid. The way we have chosen to kill ourselves is going to be slowly, painfully, stupidly and sadly and I’m not up for that.

It is embarrassing and unrelentingly painful how much I miss my big, beautiful, black cat. It has been more than a month since he died and I still catch myself hoping to see him bounding around the kitchen when I wake up, trying to get me to let him outside on his leash to watch the sunrise and the life in our backyard. I miss how he would hug me, with no claws involved, when I’d pick him up to carry him outside or bring him back in at night. I miss his silent presence. I miss him sleeping, purring loudly beside me in my office while I write. I miss his undeniable sense of humor and intelligence.

The pets we’ve lost in the past 3 years have given me an appreciation for the wild hope that there is an afterlife. I, honestly, have fewer than a handful of humans who I’d like to see after death, but at least a dozen beautiful, soulful animals have passed through my life and I can almost imagine an eternity with them that would be pretty fantastic. 

When people ask “If you miss him so much, why don’t you get another cat?” my answer is “I don’t want another cat, I want Luci.” Irrational, I know. Even delusional, I suspect.