Photo by Graham Watson on Flickr

The reader…will hear the accursed cat, which is a symbol of unredeemed guilt, mewing behind the wall.
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

I don’t have much patience for animal stories: heroic dogs, cute kittens, playful puppies, disdainful cats. I’ve been known to defriend facebook friends just for posting one of those cute cat videos: cats playing pattycake, talking cats, the surprised kitten… The last thing I want to look at in my private web space is a cute cat! There are babies being born, people dying, cancer, books to read, litter to clean up—for Chrissake!

I am, however, a devoted pet owner, and I find no contradiction in loving animals and being intolerant of animal stories.

It wasn’t always the case that I mocked animal stories. As a kid, I read the requisite animal books; the horse books that every girl read— about the horses mistreated in Black Beauty, the wild horses in Misty of Chincoteague and Misty’s offspring—Stormy, Misty’s Foal, and the race horse heroes: Black Gold and Man O’ War and National Velvet. I read the dog books too, with their forgone dead dog conclusions: Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, White Fang. I don’t remember the cat books. Were there cat books? Maybe T.S. Elliot’s compendium of cats, Old Possums’s Book of Practical Cats that inspired the Broadway musical Cats. The Cheshire Cat and his slow fading grin. More than any book, however, I recall a movie about a cat most readily: The Three Lives of Thomasina, about a cat who is the pet of a Scottish widowed vet’s daughter. Thomasina is injured in a fall and the vet euthanizes the cat, breaking his daughter’s heart. There’s a funeral with bagpipes and mourners, and a resurrection. Because this is Thomasina’s first death, she loses her memory but comes back to life. Thomasina narrates, sounding a bit like Maggie Smith in the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “They say that to die is a journey from light to darkness but here is light again.”

When we moved to Chicago, we moved with two dogs and two cats. The dogs adjusted to the move as well as we did, which means they were disappointed in the size of the yard, by the unavailability of a sandy shore river bank, dismayed by the traffic, skittish about the frequency of car alarms and emergency vehicle sirens, and incredulous about the variety and quantity of garbage and litter in the streets and alleys. Their incredulity included a certain amount of wild joy and gratitude (Dead squirrel! Flamin Hot Fritos! Really old pizza!) that ours did not.

The brothers, cats

The cats, brothers, never moved to Chicago. We brought them along with us—seven hours in the car in their individual carriers crying piteously—in spite of frequent spritzes with a spray that was supposed to mimic a calming feline scent pheromone. We were very calm—a little drowsy driving, even—but the cats were unrelenting in vocalizing their unhappiness. They were older, accustomed to having access to the yard in Minneapolis, to living in proximity to a compost bin that attracted a steady supply of small rodents, to open windows, and the cool cat hideout under the neighbor’s front porch they accessed through a missing slat in the porch skirting.

Ida, the big-headed floppy rag doll, had a busted lawn chair on the deck that was his. And yes, his name was Ida, and he was a male. Sometimes my girlfriend told me she had named him for African-American activist Ida B. Wells, sometimes she said film director and actor Ida Lupino. Except when the temps dipped below zero during Minnesota’s frigid winter, Ida never missed a day in his chair, stretched out on his back, front and back feet hanging over the chair’s edges. He loved to be brushed. He loved a bath, but he had no social skills. His feet were enormous. He scratched the back of the couch, the antique area rug, the wall—everything in fact, except his multiple option scratching posts, trees, and condos—like a vandal. He shredded pillows and cedar deck boards, pin-pricked 400-thread count sheets and liked to clear surfaces like the dining room table and my bedroom dresser. He’d jump up on the table and leisurely sideswipe candleholders, salt and pepper shakers, pens, books, papers to the floor. There was no collar that ever stayed around his neck for more than a day or two. I suspect he bribed the dogs to pull them off. We finally gave up on collars and tags and had him micro-chipped.

His brother, Bone, was a brown tabby with a pointed chin and a white vest. Bone liked to travel—sans carrier. He once left home for nine days. It was April. I stapled a poster with his photo and the headline “MISSING” on utility poles and trees all over the neighborhood. I visited animal control and the animal humane society and submitted a missing pet report. I went back more than once to comb through the logs describing the dead animals collected without identification: “black and white, domestic short hair, male, found on the 27^th block of East Lake Street,” and the logs of animals killed at the shelter. We were sure he was road kill, or had been trapped in a garage, or was dead by some unknown but no less fatal means. Every evening during the time he was gone we walked around the block and down the alley, calling his name. Then one night, nine days after he had first gone missing, I was awakened by a cat meowing outside the front door. I woke up Polly and we ran downstairs and threw open the door. It was Bone, our wanderer and world traveler. He strolled in the house like he had just gone out for quart of milk and what’s the big deal. He was clean, seemed to have been eating well, and was much more casual about our reunion than we were. The next day I called all the animal agencies to update his status: was lost, now found. The woman on the phone told me that in the past two days three other cat owners had called to report that their missing cats had also returned home. Where did the lost cats go to be lost? Were they all hanging out together at a cat jamboree?

In Chicago the cats didn’t go outside. We coaxed them to join us on the deck, we left the back door gaping open. Ida stepped out a few times and turned around and came right back inside. As a poor substitute we made up window seat beds and look out posts. Every car driving down the street, every person walking by the open window, was a potential big scary loud threat that propelled the cats from their carefully constructed outside world views. In the big city, the cats’ space became smaller and smaller.

Bone’s lament

Almost immediately after we moved into our orange brick bungalow, we launched into a few house projects, and then, as happens with house projects, a few more: the new back door, the new window, the front door, the front steps. Our first year we lived with sanding dust on every service in the house, the sound of sawing and pounding, and a shifting crew of carpenters, masons, painters, and electricians. The cats had gone through two house remodels in Minnesota but they weren’t having any of it in Chicago. Ida camped out in the basement, Bone retired to our upstairs closet. We saw Ida when he came out to eat. Bone came out at night to remind us of his vast discontent. He sat on the rug at the foot of our bed and cried through the night. He ripped out great clumps of his hair. Food did not soothe him, or treats, or petting or thrown pillows. If we had houseguests he made a point to visit them at night and speak his grief around the hair hanging from his mouth. The nine-year-old granddaughter of a friend made him a sympathy card. It said, “We don’t know each other. I’m sorry you’re sad.” The young son of Minnesota friends who visited, sent Bone a package of grass and dirt from the yard at our old house in Minneapolis. He thought a relic of the old country might lift Bone’s spirits. It lifted ours but did nothing for the cat. Night after night, Bone was inconsolable. He would not be deterred or distracted. He would not shut up.

Ida shrinking

As Bone got loud, Ida got smaller. He was always a big cat, sixteen pounds plus and longhaired, so he looked bigger and bushier than his actual size. One day I was brushing him and felt bumps and edges that I’d never noticed before. His bones were poking out and his coat was dry and thin. There were other signs: excessive drinking, profuse peeing.

We started at one vet, a reasonable neighborhood clinic, although with no chairs in the waiting room, no computerized recordkeeping, which rubbed our finicky middle-class sensibilities the wrong way. When they diagnosed Bone with diabetes, and the treatment protocol of daily insulin injections and prescription food didn’t ease his nightly lamentations, we started over with another vet—with waiting room chairs and computers and higher rates—who diagnosed Ida with diabetes as well.

Skipping ahead

In Minneapolis we’d had the same vet for a dozen years. She’d known the history of our pet-keeping, she had fostered our yellow lab’s mother and attended his birth; I once saw her kiss our old orange cat, matter of factly, as a point of conversation. She referred us to the Veterinary Center at the University of Minnesota when tests revealed the unlikely scenario that both our dogs shared a genetic enzyme deficiency although they were not related except by household. When the old cat went through a bout of uncharacteristic aggressiveness, she demonstrated soothing touch to help clear the cat’s heart chakra. She’d been with us, witness to our terrible grief both times, when we said good-bye to Polly’s gray lhasa-poodle and the old orange cat.

In Chicago, after months of insulin dosage adjustments, glucose monitoring, pureeing chicken thighs and livers in a blender, nights chronically disrupted by Bone’s lamentations, Ida swinging his shaggy head from side to side, dragging his back legs behind him, blindness and muscle weakness brought on by hypoglycemic reaction, we had the option of walking through the nicely furnished waiting room at the new vet’s office past all the healthy, happy pets and pet owners into an exam room with a cold metal exam table. The vet suggested a twenty-minute appointment, so we wouldn’t be tempted to linger. Feeling foolish, feeling like we were indulging the worst of Americans’ misplaced obsession with our pets, I found a Lincoln Park euthanasia specialist—a Dr. Death for pets. The boys could have a whole death experience with a personalized soundtrack and scented candles and an everlasting forty-minute appointment. So could we.

The Rainbow Bridge

Alice Sebold’s version of an individualized heaven in her novel The Lovely Bones includes reunions with our dead pets. The Lovely Bones, published a year after the September 11 attacks, is in the pile of formulaic and enragingly simplistic post-911 artworks that attempts to address how to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense. What happens after the worst thing—the fictional rape and murder of a child—happens? Not to worry—the dead girl goes to heaven and hangs out with her old dog.

I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he had slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down.—The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

When the worst thing happens, or just a bad thing, or a part-of-life sad thing, I am all for taking comfort where you can, even if comfort comes in the form of mawkish depictions of the Rainbow Bridge that we will cross with our dead animals before we enter heaven together.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

We moved to Chicago carrying the ashes of dead animals—cremains in plastic bags in a shoebox. We didn’t want any more dead animal ashes. I didn’t want to have to find a final resting place for the cats who never rested in Chicago, who never felt at home here. so we eschewed the individual cremation, the paw print impression, the hair clipping. We felt heartless and cheap, guilty, and, finally, irredeemably sad.

There’s an Edgar Allen Poe story about a cat called, “The Black Cat.” It’s a gruesome fable: the narrator adopts a black cat that he loves at first and then, inexplicably, grows to hate. He maims the cat by cutting out one of its eyes; the cat recovers and is hanged by the narrator. The narrator’s cruelty seems to be provoked by the cat’s devotion:

[I] hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence…

Following the murder of the cat, the narrator’s house burns down:

On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing…. The destruction was complete. … I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.

His despair doesn’t preclude another cat and another attempted cat killing though. He swings an ax at the cat that lands in his wife’s head instead. To hide her body, he walls it up in the cellar. In the process he accidently walls up the second cat with his dead wife, sealing his fate. His crimes are discovered when the cat’s howling behind the built wall attracts the attention of the authorities.

Poe’s narrator kills his cat from depravity, from an unbearable burden of love. We despair of our own mortality, accumulating an anger that anticipates the inevitability of the loss of all we love: pets, places, people. Our choices are to knock down our reason with cute and sentimental—we are the surprised kitten being tickled by death’s hand; or we can blind our love, choke devotion by the neck until dead, build brick walls to hold back our terrible love, our terrible grief, lie down shaking in our beds at night listening to the cat that calls to us, our hearts engulfed in flames, still waiting for the light again.