I've lost my taste for the lugubrious. The intractably sad. The unhappy endings. So this diary, while touching on a bit of the sad...there's a happy ending here. A death and a rebirth.
We lost our cat Io about two weeks ago. We had her euthanized before, we hope, she felt pain.
Frankly, and just between you and me...Io and I never really were best of pals. Io's love and fixation was my wife. The other cat, Oedipus, adores me in her own catlike way. But Io was my wife's cat. A fixation. A pathological fixation on my wife. Night and day, on her lap whenever possible, purring and purring and purring...she wanted to fuse with my wife. Nuzzle her until the two became one. Adored. She adored my wife. Unquestioning love. Devotion. Obsession. Io loved my wife.
She never much liked me, for some reason. We just co-existed as peaceably as we could. But Io earned my respect for her depth of patience and tolerance for my two children. This is a video of our first son trying to grab Io's tail when he was an infant.
The could chase her. Leap on her. As infants they'd reach out and try to touch her eye. Pick her up and waddle all around the house with her. And that cat....she'd just take it, purring and purring and in love with having some attention. She never hissed. Never bit. Never scratched. She just endured the poking and prodding of toddler boys. Endured...no. Reveled in.
In mid January we were petting our Io and discovered a lump in her neck about half the size of a pea. We thought "Huh...that's weird." We took her to the vet a week later when the lump didn't go away but grew.
Cancer. Obviously. The biopsy showed it to be an aggressive melanoma, fairly rare in cats. Over the next few weeks the lump would grow to the size of a golf ball and she started to swallow hard. X-rays showed that the cancer had metasticized. Our once chubby, comfort-eating, 10 year old girl lost several pounds over the course of a month and had begun to look thin with a large growth coming out of her neck.
The vet tried to impress on us early on not to wait too long.
And our hope was to let her go before she started feeling pain.
We mourned her loss for six weeks before we decided it was time to euthanize her.
Today...we finally got around to burying Io's ashes in my wife's flower garden. It was something we had put off for some time. The remains of our once chubby kitty took up about 4 cubic inches.
Today we visited some friends for their daughter's 4th birthday party. A small flock of four year olds ran and tumbled together.
We heard that the no kill shelter would be at the local pet store with cats needing homes. Our four year old kept talking about seeing the kitties, so we left the party just a little bit early to look...just LOOK at the kitties.
Yeah, like that was going to happen. Just look. I think my exact words to my wife were "Right. We're just going to look at fuzzy cats and then go home."
My seven year old focused in on a black and brown tabby and he thrust his hand into her cage. She balled up and rolled around and let him pet her belly. My four year old reached in and grabbed her and carried her around like a doll for a brief moment.
No aggression from the young cat. No hissing. No scratching. No biting. She just took it. And she purred, happy for the attention and affection.
And I guess that's all I want from a cat. I just want a cat that's going to treat my boys well. So we took this little girl home and named her Crocus.
As I write this she's wildly chasing a play mouse around the house, possessed with a case of the night crazies. Our older cat Oedipus is watching her with a tired and slightly annoyed look on her face.
I don't know if you've ever watched the British Sit Com Red Dwarf.............basically, the main character is the only remaining human in the universe and the ship's computer has generated an avatar meant to keep him sane.....and the ship's computer generated the person who most annoyed him, realizing that this would be the best and only way to keep the main character sane.
I think the same would apply to our cat Oedipus.
Anyway.....Crocus seems to be making herself at home quite well.