Then there was Birdie, a long haired beauty we got from a local family. After a while, she decided she was a house cat which was fine except that we expected her to do her business outdoors in good weather. In the winter, we provided a litterbox in the garage attached to the house. But Birdie decided she never wanted to go outside at all so she started using the upstairs of the house for her business. An argument erupted between us, leading me to chase her every morning to put her outside. When she disappeared soon after we moved to our current home, no one in our house was upset.
Cats three and four were brothers, Freddie and Barney (yaba, daba, doo) who came to us through friends. They were absolutely fantastic. Freddie proved to be a remarkable gymnast, climbed everything. Barney was the more cerebral type. They took walks with us in the woods. Freddie even trailed us on the ice when we snowshoed to our island in the winter. I have a vivid memory of watching Barney investigate a pair of great blue herons who were fishing in the river one fall morning.
They were happy and so were we.
Then Barney disappeared. We looked, we called shelters, we put up posters, we called and called his name but Barney was gone.
I know that some people believe that animals don't grieve but I'm here to tell you that that's nonsense. Freddie grieved, hard. I remember one night, about a week after Barney disappeared, when Freddie crawled up on our bed to lay between my husband and I. He literally sighed and stretched out a paw toward my hand. I reached out my fingers to stroke the paw. He sighed some more while I cried.
Don't ever tell me that animals don't feel pain just like us.
Three months after Barney disappeared, just when we thought that Freddie was finally recovering, he was hit by a car. My husband found him very soon after it happened. Freddie was still warm when we buried him in our front yard near his favorite climbing tree.
No more cats, I said. Too painful.
But my husband started yearning for the sweetness of a kitten so for Father's Day, I found a sister and a brother in a shelter, both black, and brought them home. George and Gracie we named them. And they were going to be inside cats. No more losing our pets to the road or foxes or coyotes.
This pair proved to be a challenge—eye infections, heart murmurs, Gracie's vehement insistence on going outside, George's inability to keep food in his stomach no matter what we did. And finally, about four years ago, I discovered that one or both of them had decided to use a corner of our finished downstairs as a toilet. We had no idea which cat was causing the problem. We kept cleaning, consulted the vet, tried this and that but to no avail. Finally, at wit's end, we put them outside before our whole house smelled like a litterbox.
A week later, Gracie got hit by a car but lived to crawl home. After an agony of guilt and indecision, we had her put to sleep. My husband still agonizes over that decision. He was the one who held her, wrapped in a towel, as I drove us to the vet on a very rainy Sunday night. On the way there, Gracie was calm, looking straight at him as if she believed that he would save her.
She is buried in our front yard too, not far from Freddie.
The day after we buried Gracie, we discovered that George had a urinary tract blockage, and it's not too much of a stretch to figure that he was the original cause of the out-of-the-litterbox problem. A thousand dollars later, he was back home, eating very expensive cat food and taking Prozac to help ease him back into a normal routine.
Really, I think we should have been the ones to get the Prozac because giving George pills is very difficult. He's normally a placid cat but he becomes an enraged panther when faced with medication.
Fast forward four years to last month when I discovered that George's bad toilet habit had returned. I cleaned it up, cleaned everything having to do with that part of George's life, and hoped for the best.
A week passed and all was OK or so we thought. But when I was gone last weekend, my husband discovered that George had returned to the scene of his crime to commit it again. He was reprimanded severely and the area cleaned again. But he returned to the scene of the crime, and committed an even worse offense. When the solid waste was found, George was unceremoniously booted out of our house to sleep outside.
Yesterday, I got him to the vet to see if the original problem had returned but there was no evidence that there's anything medically wrong with him. On top of that, the vet said that the solid waste indicated a behavioral problem, notoriously difficult to cure in cats. It felt as if he was flipping us his middle finger in that universal gesture of disrespect for reasons that escape us entirely.
When I got him home, we set up a warm place for him to sleep in a shed with an open door, and put out food and water. We can't trust him in the house but I feel guilty and sad, as though a friend suddenly stopped talking to me and I don't know why.
This solution doesn't feel right and yet I don't think putting him in an already overwhelmed shelter is an ethical choice because it's our problem, not theirs. And yet abandoning him to the dangers of the outdoors when he's lived indoors all his life doesn't seem right either. Vets will not euthanize an animal because of behavioral issues, which I can understand, but I can't help but wonder if that would have been the more responsible choice in this instance.
I mean, what do you do with a ten-year old cat who has a heart murmur, who's into what one vet called "sport puking," and for reasons unknown, won't use a litterbox any more?
One thing is for sure—the no-more-cats vow will be upheld this time.
Update: George may have disappeared. We haven't seen him all day, and when we checked the spot where he was hiding before, he wasn't there. His food doesn't seem to have been eaten though the bowl was empty this morning.
Last night, my husband said that sometimes, animals want the freedom to go off by themselves to die. Is that what this was all about?
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