A Brief Visit

We said goodbye to Darwin yesterday, who in his short, five month tenure with us still managed to become a fixture in our house. Darwin was, for a cat, incredibly old, and the part of his story that we know is a sorry one. At some point in his life he had developed kidney disease, which causes cats to urinate frequently and not always in the litter box. Peeing around the house caused his family to evict him to their barn. At some point after that, his family sold the house and moved, but they left Darwin. Acts like this defy my comprehension and reinforce my uncertainty about a shared, inherent goodness in our species.

Neighbors later found him sleeping in the middle of the road and delivered him to the animal hospital where Lauren works. The neighbors related the scant bits we know of his story; veterinary records confirm that Darwin was 20 years old when he arrived in our care. Lauren’s hospital agreed to keep him as a “hospital cat” for the remainder of what time he had left, which seemed likely to be short, maybe only weeks, since he was malnourished and suffering from various maladies. Instead, we brought him to our house.

By the time we met him, Darwin was completely deaf. It was easy to surprise him if he had his back to you, so you had to be careful about walking around him, lest he step into the very spot you might be moving to. He wasn’t really a cuddly cat, but he did like to come into the living room in the evening when we were sitting down to dinner and sit on the carpet near us. The easiest way to elicit soft purring was to give him neck and ear scratches, so long as you avoided his chin; his teeth were a horrible mess and I imagine his mouth was always in a fair bit of pain. His grooming habits were poor, probably because of how his mouth felt. As a result, his coat was ragged and he always smelled bad; the grooming he did do transferred his very bad breath to his fur. But it was impossible to begrudge him for this. He was sweet and friendly, if not overly affectionate.

He quickly found tenuous peace with The Beedler, despite her initially taking offense at his manner of interaction with cats, which was to charge at them — as fast as his badly arthritic limbs could move him — and then stare intently at them from a distance of a couple inches. Once Beedler realized this was the totality of his purpose, and that there was no aggression to follow, she basically accepted him, even if she generally kept her distance.

In the warm days of summer when Darwin first came to us, he always wanted to go outside, unsurprising for a former house cat who spent an unknown number of years relegated to living in a barn, with all its associated difficulties and freedoms. I would join him on short jaunts around the yard. He was in no state to venture out alone amidst the foxes that cruise our yard, much less navigate the screaming traffic on our road with no hearing to protect him. If Beedler was outside, he simply had to go wherever she was. She’d move on, away from him, and he’d follow with me in tow, forming a ludicrous train that circled our house. In those warm days he loved the cool retreat of the basement, where he had staked out an old armchair as his territory. As summer progressed into fall and the rest of the house cooled down, the upstairs became his haunt. Much to our surprise he once killed a mouse in our office, suggesting either that he was still fast when he needed to be or that he had encountered an exceptionally ill-prepared mouse.

I wonder what Darwin’s life was like, the vast majority of which I have no knowledge of. He was born in 2005. At that time I was living in Los Angeles and months away from embarking on a period as a ranger in Montana. During the time he lived that I did not know him, I started and finished a career as a high school teacher, I spent countless days as a vegetable farmer, and I survived an eight year tenure as a magazine publisher. What was he up to during all those events? What things did he see and how happy was he? It is difficult for me to process knowing so little about someone I grew so quickly attached to.

I know only these past five months, during which he he rapidly improved…and just as rapidly declined. He ate well in our house and gained weight, filling out the diminished frame in which he arrived. He quickly discovered that I was a sucker with the cat treats (kept on a shelf in the office) and whenever he saw me sitting at my desk (which is too much of the time) he would scamper over and croak out an old man’s meow at me. I’d dutifully deliver him a pile of treats. He always ate them all.

Every animal we’ve said goodbye to lingers in echoes of routine. Aging or sick pets have special needs — a daily dose of medicine, a special arrangement of the blankets when I get out of bed, a spot you expect to find them at a given hour. In his short time with us, Darwin went through a series of daily needs and habits, from special bowls of liquid food for kidney support to standing right in front of the dishwasher in the evening so that I’d have to carefully navigate around him as I did the dishes. When these moments disappear, I contend with warring emotions — relief that I no longer have that daily job to perform alongside grief for its absence. Lauren and I share a list of things to do each day for the animals in our house so that medications aren’t missed or the cats can’t deceive us into thinking, for instance, that they haven’t yet been fed. Removing tasks from it has a sorrowful finality.

Darwin’s decline happened quickly, or so it seemed to me. Always with cats do I only see in retrospect the now obvious signs. He’d lost most of the weight he’d regained since joining us and, for the past couple of weeks, was less often seen downstairs, instead preferring a spot in the cat tree, upstairs. We started to deliver him food up there rather than make him come downstairs to eat. The past few days he didn’t eat very much of it. We noticed him spending a lot of time in the litter box without much to show for it. He was badly constipated, surely a result of dehydration tied to his ever present kidney disease. Lauren brought him to work with her for an inspection on the chance there was something we could do. By the end of that visit, it was clear that saying goodbye was all that was left. In confirmation, Darwin sniffed at but refused the cat treats I brought him from home, in my pocket. But, as the doctor came into the room to expedite the completion of Darwin’s story, he vibrated with purring as Lauren and I gently assaulted him with neck and ear scratches.

When I was in my late 30s I befriended a man who is a decade my senior. He is an intellectual and artistic person, and we enjoyed talking, hiking, and drinking applejack, a favorite liquor of mine at that time. However, I was always put off by his fatalism. He has a dark sense of the world, focused on loss. I didn’t understand it and vowed to myself that I would never share it. The intervening decade has mocked that pledge. Perhaps I was lucky for so long to have largely avoided emotional losses. Or perhaps not. They have manifested relentlessly as the years pass, and the wall of grief they slowly expand extends ever more shade into view. I understand this friend of mine much more now than I did when we first met and I harbor some envy for those who are free from the burden of introspection.

Despite Darwin’s original owners’ shortcomings, they did manage to give him a fitting name. Twenty years of life places him in near-legendary feline company. He must have been graced by exceptionally robust genes to have persevered for such a long time. I think he enjoyed some level of comfort, contentedness, and affection during his final chapter and I’m glad we had the opportunity to know him, even if it was too brief a visit.