In late Spring, 2009 I rolled up to a country house in Crescent, Iowa — answering a Craigslist ad for kittens. I knew from the photos exactly which one I wanted — the one with the white boots. But there was a problem. Firmly nestled into him was the runt of the litter. And so I went home with both of them, mewing and hiding under my car’s seats as my roommate, Sean, tried to pull them out.
Today, closing out a very long, strange, and stressful week, we took the one with the white boots, Romulus, for one last car ride. The receptionist at the vet shuffled the two red-eyed strangers and the ragdoll cat quickly and quietly to a beautiful room with a big floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto trees with falling leaves. It didn’t look anything like any veterinary office I’d ever set foot in. It’s got nice, marble floors. The PA system overhead played weirdly serious and somber orchestral music to really give the whole thing a sappy Lifetime movie feel. Basically, “hello, here’s the very dramatic room where your pet is going to die.” It was awful, but it was also lovely and thoughtful. It was exactly what you’d want a room like that to be, which is precisely what made being in a room like that so hard in that moment.
For a cat with perma-socks, it was fitting that Romulus moved like somebody trying to run sock-footed on hardwood floors. Completely unbeknownst to us at the time of adoption, we had acquired a pair of either Mainecoon or Ragdoll kittens who grew up to be some of the largest cats I’ve ever encountered outside a zoo. Romulus’ fuzzy, lanky stilt legs coupled with his 20lb mass made for plenty of ill-timed Tokyo drifts when his feeder would go off, his back legs slamming into the wall as he frantically scampered to eat dry pellets off an unfinished basement floor. He never mastered that turn, but he never missed a pellet.
His food obsession was the stuff of legend: from shoving his head into ice cream cartons until he got stuck, letting out strange guttural groans when you had some treat he really wanted, to fishing an empty bag of cat food out of a lidded trashcan and nearly suffocating to death. 5 years ago, we had panicked when we found his limp little body on the basement floor, making shallow breaths, his body seizing, his back legs not working once he came to. Yet before all the IV’s and heating pads, we knew everything was going to be okay once he started army crawling to get some food we threw in front of him. When I would tell this story to friends, I’d usually cap it off with something like, “even death wouldn’t deprive him of one last meal.”
Last Saturday, he stopped eating. Over the course of a week or so, his abdomen had swollen to the size of a basketball. His legs were strangely dragging. We hadn’t seen him drink more than a small amount of water for more than a week. Monday, while I was in the middle of loading a moving truck and clearing out our home, Tara left work early to get our boy to the vet. God, what inconvenient timing, right in the middle of the move. Based on our prior vet visit less than 2 weeks earlier, we were still viewing all this as a hassle due to a lack of fiber and liquid in his diet. My phone rang and I set down what I’m carrying. Tara tells me the vet suspects lymphoma. I step out on the porch so the movers wouldn’t see me cry.
Romulus, or big-guy as we most frequently called him, was all love. All you’d have to do is rest a hand on him and he’d absolutely melt. The purrs would roar up, he’d flip onto his back, begging you to rub his belly. If I had a leg out on the couch, he was sleeping on it. He’d sit and purr until I finally got up.
Even with a belly full of what turned out to be more than 2 liters of excess fluid that was eventually pulled out of him, he was still yours at a single touch. The same purrs. The same derpy chin tuck as he looked back at you like “go on.” Though he cried and trembled as we drove the hour to the veterinary college in Manhattan, Kansas, all I had to do was reach my hand in his carrier and touch him. The purrs would fire up and he’d settle down. In Manhattan, the site of the great 2-liter cat de-juicing that we had hoped would get him on the road to recovery, we got more bad news about some tumors discovered via ultrasound. After 8 hours of agonized waiting, they gave me back a pet carrier that was more than 4 pounds lighter than it had been that morning and a small bottle of pills. Once back home, we saw this skeletal creature emerge from his cage looking nothing like the cat I’d known for the last 10 years. All our attempts to deny the reality of the situation were firmly dismantled in that moment. But my optimism wouldn’t give out. I was damn sure our interventions and this little bottle of pills had bought him some time.
It’s a strange thing, owning a pet. You bring this foreign animal into your house. You feed it, care for it, care about it under the understanding that it’s there for you to love and, hopefully, for it to love you back. That’s the whole deal. That’s the arrangement. And you know there’s a shelf life on this loving exchange, but you never really engage with that thought for long. Until you have to. And suddenly you’re finding yourself seeking out what is best, what is right, what is most natural — in an arrangement that was never really natural to begin with. In the wild animals just die, usually excruciatingly. There really aren’t any correct answers in a world full of pet beds, plush toys, electronic litter-boxes, and modern medicine. Is it really fair to your family if you spend $6k on chemo on a cat just to buy it 7 more low-quality months? Should you even own a pet if you aren’t willing to have the cash on hand to deal with something like cancer? How much pain and suffering are you willing to put on your pet, just so you can keep them around longer when nature running its course would’ve made a hard stop a long time back?
In a week of trying to force-feed my cat water and foul-smelling pureed fish, I keep thinking about his brother. Since they were kittens, the two of them were regularly piled on top of each other on the couch. That never went away. Their daily grooming sessions were unrivaled both in intensity and in stench. The little one, Remus, groomed Romulus so aggressively and regularly, he had actually worn partially bald spots on his brother’s temples. What’s the little cat, the one who gets anxious any time we shut the door behind us when we go to bed, going to do without his lifelong companion? Could he ever be so bonded to another animal? Is that even a serious question?
Yet after a day of picking up strange smells at the vet and losing 4 pounds, Romulus was suddenly a stranger to his brother. We bathed both cats to get the smell off, but some other smell still lingered on Romulus. Even we could smell it. Eventually, we locked away his best friend who was ready to fight off anyone bearing the smell of death. The bond had been broken prematurely, and it was absolutely gut-wrenching to watch. But that’s just nature playing out in an unnatural environment, I tell myself as the little one hisses and growls at the door.
The decision was finally made only just a few hours back from the grocery store today, where I had been picking up yet more things to try to keep Romulus alive. It hadn’t even been 5 days since we found out cancer was even a possibility. But there’s bile on the blankets now, which means renal failure and a whole lot of pain are on its way, if not already here. Optimism dissolves into a wet depression and I have to come to terms with the fact that my cat hasn’t wanted to eat or drink for more than a week, even with appetite-stimulating drugs. He was barely responding to stimuli, eyes unfocused, purrs rarely coming even with prolonged touch. I realized that the things I was fighting to preserve might already be gone. And I realized the things my cat cared about are gone now too, which is why there hasn’t been any drive to carry on for some time now. Maybe it should’ve stopped at a phase that would’ve felt like throwing in the towel at the first signs of adversity. Was I an asshole for holding out hope when it maybe meant a week of pain, terrifying car rides, a whole day spent surrounded by crying, dying animals in an absolutely hellish veterinary college hospital? Would his brother have been so unkind if he had just stayed home? All this crossed my mind more than once.
In the beautiful room with the sappy music, I cried my eyes out intermittently, taking turns with my wife holding this little companion of ours on our laps, saying kind words, sometimes eliciting hoarse purrs and pulsing movements on his little white mitts. Oh god, if he can still do that, maybe there’s still some life left in him? And when the kind, grandfatherly vet from central casting walked into this movie set room, we gave him the full rundown. In my mind, I was looking for absolution — some proof that I held up my end of the bargain to care for my cat and that I didn’t walk into this room, sign his death warrant when there was actually a real reason to hold out hope. As we laid it all out, he chimed in, calmly arriving at the same conclusion as us and adding more kind words to reassure us. It helps.
Gymnopédie №1 by Erik Satie came on the speaker just as the vet left to get the sedatives and begin the procedure. It was the first track I’d recognized and it’s one of my all-time favorites. Goddamnit, please don’t let it be this song when it happens; I really like this one. Mercifully №1 wraps up before the doctor can return. His arrival is to the tune of some other anonymously sad classical track. Romulus slowly drifted asleep, his tongue hanging out in a truly derpy fashion that is oddly fitting. Another shot. Eventually, his heart stopped.
Romulus was a steadfast companion with a terrible singing voice for more than 10 years. Some of those times were pretty lonely: living in a new state, running a solo business from home for long stretches of the day. His presence meant a lot to me. He was part of my routine and I was a part of his. I loved him and he loved me. My wife loved him and he loved my wife. That was the arrangement. It was never natural, but it was good. And I can’t help but feeling his end was as good as we could’ve made it. I’ll be damned if any dying cat in the woods ever heard Erik Satie on his way out.
We’re all going to miss him a lot, the two humans in a fairly standard, sad way: choking up when we unpack his Christmas sweater he had a love/hate relationship with, realizing there’s no real reason to call little-guy little-guy, or watching as his brother calls out for his friend who isn’t around anymore.
And for Remus, I think the missing will be manifest in some strange and primal grief rooted in routine and instinct that I don’t know I’ll ever be able to wrap my head around.
When we move to the new house, now a family of 3, we’ll be planting a tree with Romulus’ ashes in the soil. While I’m there, I’ll love and care for that tree. And it will remind me of a dumb little cat with white socks that was a good part of my life. That’ll be the arrangement.
Originally published on Medium, October 26, 2019.
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