goodbye, kitty andrews

dad, leaning over: now do you remember that time we were coming back from that vet in penn hills?
me: she went right under the brake pedal!
dad: you let her out in the car, and she went right for that brake pedal. she just went right for it.
me: ha ha!
dad: and she was under there, and i was trying to brake, and she started—she started clawing my leg—
me: ha ha, h , a. oh j , jesus.
dad:
me: s sorr y.
dad: it’s okay.
me: i feel like a moron, c cr , crying like this.
dad: she was a part of your life.

for the past nine years, she wasn’t, though. that’s the heartbreaking part. she was my birthday present when i turned eight, in 1990. i had been agitating to get a cat for years, although what i had really wanted—in all honesty—was to be a cat. so suddenly there was a kitten nervously stalking the shadows in my room, and i didn’t know what do with myself. i was paralyzed. i was happy and terrified and everything that kids are when they get a gift that they’ve wanted so badly that they’ve transformed it, in their minds, to something fully abstract: a vague huge ocean of want. meanwhile, there was kitty, whom we had already begun affectionately calling “kitty.”

names brainstormed for kitty and ultimately rejected while in the meantime we addressed her consistently as “kitty”
rocket (jesse)
laser (jesse)
tiger-gun (jesse)
stinky (lena)

i chased her around with water guns and made her a home out of cardboard. i wanted to incorporate her in death-defying adventures, somehow. that desire was thwarted again and again. she was a sweet, sleepy cat, and she did not understand english or want to be harnessed to a Big Wheel.

above all, she was good-natured. “sweet” was the word everyone used. watching her stalk birds was the most pathetic thing any of us had ever seen. she had no idea what she was doing out there. when she pounced, it was in slow-motion, somehow, and it emphasized the generous flab of her hips.

i loved kitty more than most humans. she had a very sweet face. she was much, much easier to talk to than girls.

dad: growing up, we had a cat—well, i don’t want to get too graphic.
mom: oh, gross.
me: what.
dad: we had—we had a cat who developed, uh, a kitty GI disorder. like kitty crohn’s.
dad: to the point where, every day, the cat would go like this:
dad:
dad: ROWR
dad: —and dive for cover, under the nearest piece of furniture, and explosively
mom: reid, do we really have to talk about this.
dad: and my dad would go: GODDAMMIT.

and then i went off to college, and from then on, when i came home, i felt guilty about it. i had left her behind. i had been a guy in her life who petted her and said nice things to her and loved her, a lot, and then i abandoned her for another, better life. this ripped me in half, sometimes. she herself was not nearly as affected by it. i’d come home and find her sprawled out in the grass of the backyard, and her reaction was: “hi! hi there! i’m pretty sure we’ve met. uh—hang on. are you the guy who YES SCRATCH ME THERE OH GOD YES.” there was a spot behind her ear that you could scratch and she would ram her head into the palm of your hand, and that was The Thing that i did that she liked.

after fifteen years she went deaf and began going off like a car alarm at 4am every night. she was earsplittingly loud. she wasn’t in pain, either, or sad, or angry. it seemed to be her way of saying, “YO. YO, EVERYONE. I THINK IT’S 4AM. YO-O-O-O.” eventually mom would get out of bed and, muttering angrily, lock her in the basement until morning. this happened every night for a year and a half. after she mysteriously dislocated her shoulder (the circumstances will remain forever unclear), her walk became jolting and creaky, like that of the four-legged war machines from The Empire Strikes Back. also because of the shoulder injury, she had trouble licking all of herself, which led to cat dreadlocks. they were, and i say with this love, disgusting.

i tracked all this from afar, usually through check-in phone calls.

“and how is kitty?”
“oof.”
“hee hee.”
“she is louder than ever.”
“nnn hee hee.”
“it is like a siren going off. it is like someone is being murdered.”
“ha ha.”
“i managed to cut off some of her dreads, but she is still looking pretty sad.”
“oh no. ha ha, ha. poor kitty. ha.”

on monday, we three children and grandma got an email:

Dear Children and Barbs,

I write with the sad news that Kitty has come to the end of her long and successful run at [address redacted]. She has a very aggressive mouth cancer that has laid her very low (she has not been able to eat solid food for a couple of weeks now) and for which there is no realistic prospect of a cure. Mom and I have therefore decided to have her put down tomorrow afternoon, at 3:45. I am sure you will all be thinking of her and remembering her fatter and jollier years (which were many!).

Much love to all,
Dad/Reid

i didn’t start crying until i was on the phone with dad, and then there was a lot of crying.

jesse: i just , jus, —,
dad: oh, honey.
jesse: nted to say , . tTHank, thank you ,
jesse: f,
jesse: ,
jesse: fortakingcareofkittyallthoseyearsafterileftohjesus
dad: honey, that’s being a parent.
jesse: ; . i kn , knowbutthanks ,—
jesse: jus, just , thTha, thanks . ,
jesse: th ,
jesse: OH jesus. oh g god.

i am not an attractive cryer. i make honking noises like a goose and can’t really finish words. i was thinking of kitty’s small and bony body, ravaged by age. i found lena on gchat and told her i was going to pittsburgh to be there for the end.

Lena: really?
how much would that cost?
me: i know, it’s stupid
Lena: dad would be psyched
you were there for kitty’s beginning
me: i know
1:43 PM Lena: how much are flights?
1:44 PM me: $70 for one tomorrow morning
Lena: that’s not bad - how would you get back though?
me: probably flying
Lena: shouldn’t you get round trip
me: yeah, return is $80
1:45 PM Lena: that’s not bad
are you going to come?
me: is it stupid?
i’m crying right now
i feel like a moron
Lena: no it would be nice
the parents would be happy
kitty was a big part of your life
and eve is not going to be able to make it
me: yeah, i’ll do it
Lena: wow ncie!

i thought the most i was going to cry was that afternoon, and then the next day when it was 3pm and kitty had less than an hour to live and i went out to the back porch to do The Thing behind her ears, there was way more crying. she still liked The Thing. she wasn’t purring, but she still pushed her head into my hands. meanwhile, my face was bleary with mucus and i was repeating a noise that sounded like “HUNGK.” she had lost a lot of weight, and her little white jaw was bloated and surreal. from it dangled a congealed polyp of saliva and maybe a little blood. robins flew by, past a cat that had never given them any remote cause for fear. mom came home and i hid my face. “honey,” she said. ‘HUNNGGK,” i said, and was capable only of saying. “SNORT. HRUNNNGK.”

then we carried kitty into the car and drove her a few blocks to the vet, and she was alert and grouchy, and the vet took her into the back room, and we heard her yowling and hissing from where we were, with really awesome and heartening vigor, massively pissed off, and we knew that while it was awful, it was also funny, and we were all sort of laughing, and then after laughing i was crying even harder, trying vainly to keep it together, choking and chin-twitching and wet-faced, because honestly there is nothing sad in the same way that a dying animal, a dying pet, is sad. when a human dies, it’s obviously bigger—a bigger moment, and different. a human death is a thing we don’t understand. but a dependent animal, a housecat, dying, leaving our protection and approaching its own death with the terrible dark wordlessness of a thing without language: we don’t understand what we don’t understand about it.

they brought kitty back out, and she was grumbling and her eyes were glowing, and they asked if we needed a moment with her, and we did not (i personally could not have handled it), and they injected her with anesthetic, and guided by the vet’s hands she slumped stiffly over to one side, and then they injected her with an overdose of barbiturate, and she was a dead cat on a fur-strewn pillow.

we went home, talked, began to feel better. “she did not go quietly,” i typed to eve, who is in argentina. “why did you tell me that!!!!!!” she wrote back. much later, mom noted: “her fur is still all over everything.”

goodbye, kitty. you had a long and happy life, and i will never know what it meant to you. but i’m happy that i was there for the end.