Loving Lucy

Losing someone you love is never easy. The last month has been difficult to say the least. Lucy was my constant companion for 11 years. Since I work from home, she was usually with me all day, every day. In my lap, on my desk, on my bed, or seated nearby where she could keep an eye on me. The absence of her is everywhere I look. For such a small creature, she filled up an awful lot of space, all of which now feels incredibly empty without her.

I’ve been writing this a little at a time since she died. It’s been my way of working through my grief, but it’s more than that. I’m a writer, but I’m a writer who has always been afraid to tell any of my own stories. I’ve always been too reserved and self-conscious. Anytime I write something personal, it winds up deleted or buried in a folder somewhere, never to be seen by anyone’s eyes but mine. Lucy doesn’t deserve that. She deserves to have her story told to anyone who’ll listen, by the person who knows it best. I only hope I can do it justice.

Love at First Sight

I found Lucy in my driveway on my birthday, September 12th, in 2013. I heard urgent meowing outside, and when I went to look, there she was. She was announcing her presence from the middle of the gravel, right below the deck I was standing on. “Here I am, I have arrived. Come get me.” A prime example of the Cat Distribution System at work.

Here is the first video I took of her that day. She came right up to me and seemed so happy to see me. The feeling was extremely mutual.

She was only a couple of months old and very friendly, so someone must have socialized her before she found her way to me. But we checked with the neighbors and none of them were missing a kitten. Sometimes I wonder if someone left her there for me as a birthday gift. Perhaps she somehow detected a cat person nearby, ready to give her whatever she wanted. Or maybe she was dropped off by the mothership to observe us. We will never know.

I named her Lucy for a few different reasons. I had been watching a lot of I Love Lucy on Nick at Nite, and the name seemed to fit this little rascal’s mischievous nature. I also liked the name because it meant “light,” and she definitely brought that into my life. Third, something about her reminded me of Lucy Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia, which I had loved as a child. She was small, brave, and full of love.

Like most cats, Lucy accumulated quite a number of nicknames over the years, including:

My phone’s hard drive quickly filled up with pictures and videos of all of her adorable shenanigans and poses, and that trend would continue for the next decade. I have been sorting through all of those pictures and videos over the last few weeks, and it’s made me so thankful to live in a time and place where we can so easily preserve our memories. (It’s also reminded me of the importance of making these records in the first place; I really need to get better about taking pictures of and with the people in my life.)

I wish I could somehow encapsulate the entire essence of her personality in this post. I was lucky enough to be the person she spent most of her time with, and so it is my privilege to be able to appreciate, more than anyone else, just what an incredible little soul she was. There are others who were close to her too, especially my family and my partner, Dan. They all have their own unique memories and experiences of her. Our mutual love and grief for her has, in a way, been her final gift to us. Nothing strengthens bonds quite like loss, and I have been so moved by the care that our loved ones and friends have shown us over the last few weeks.

Lucy loved a soft blanket. She would sit in my lap for hours if I placed one of her blankets there. She also liked to crawl under the covers, so we would often find a “mysterious lump” in the bed or on the couch. If it was cold, she would crawl into bed with me at night, and I’d fall asleep to the vibrations of her purr against my stomach. If it was warmer, she’d curl up next to my head on the pillow. For a little while she developed an interest in grooming me by chewing on my hair, leaving me with a frizzy patch of short, ragged hairs that refused to lay flat at the top of my forehead. She was a fastidious groomer in general, and when she got started she’d just keep going – she’d clean your arm, the blanket, the arm of the chair, whatever was nearby.

She liked to hold hands, and would let me handle her paws in a way no other cat ever would, gripping my fingers like a baby. Other times she’d lay belly-up and knead the air with her paws – “air knobs,” as we called it. If I was working at my computer and she wanted to sit with me, I’d put a pillow on my lap so she and I could both be comfortable, with my arms stretched over her, cocooning her as I typed. When she got sick, she really liked for me to hold her higher against my chest like an infant. However we sat together, she would always purr and look up at me with her big green eyes, utterly contented. She had everything she wanted in the world in those moments, and so did I.

I spend a lot of my time at my desk, and so did she. When I had an L-shaped setup, she had a bed on the short end, and would lay in it for most of the day. When she wasn’t there she was usually in my lap, or she’d plant herself right in front of the monitor and try to figure out what I was so interested in. Sometimes she’d lay right on top of the mousepad, or sit next to it and nudge my hand with her nose until I gave her the attention she wanted. “My assistant,” we called her, or “my coworker,” or sometimes “my boss,” which was probably the most accurate.

She had no qualms about blocking my view, and more than once I would have to move her out of the way because she decided to plop herself down in front of my main screen in the middle of some un-pausable video game content. She did the same thing with the TV, sitting down right in the middle of the TV stand like it was a stage and we were her audience. I don’t think anyone ever got mad at her about it. It was usually more entertaining than whatever was on the screen at the time.

I named my World of Warcraft character after her: Luxrah, a combination of Lucy’s name and mine. The character was a priest, a wielder of the Light, so it fit. That name gradually replaced any other screen names for me. Now I use the name in my work, on my social media accounts, and in every game I play. I also began using a picture of her as my profile pic or banner on most of my accounts. She’s part of my identity now. My namesake. I answer to “Lux” as easily as I do to “Sarah” these days.

She loved to watch the birds and squirrels outside, and ruined multiple sets of window blinds trying to see out at night. She also had a deep appreciation for a good cardboard box, even more than most cats. The snugger the fit, the more likely she would sit. I would sometimes leave one sitting on its side, and she would take up different poses inside it throughout the day. A cat diorama.

Lucy saw me through a difficult period of my life. When she arrived I was feeling lost, with little hope for the future and no idea of how to pull myself out of my hole. It took me a good long while to figure things out, but in the meantime she was there, ensuring that I didn’t feel too alone or fall too far into despair. I’m sure anyone who has loved a pet knows what I’m talking about. The quiet moments when you withdraw from the rest of the world, but they’re still right there with you. When you feel most unlovable, but they love you all the same. And all they ask in return is for you to love them back.

When Lucy was about a year old, she developed some nasty polyps in her ears that wound up requiring surgery. I fretted over her as we dropped her off at the vet and then brought her back with her shaved ear and her cone of shame. She was so clumsy, bumping into things with the cone. That’s how she earned the name “Lil’ Bonks,” a twist on one of her other names, “Lil’ Squeaks,” which came from the tiny little meows she would emit when she opened her mouth (if she made any noise at all). Post-surgery, her closed ear was perpetually cocked to the side, giving her a charmingly curious appearance and leading us to call the operation “her cuteness surgery.” She recovered and thrived.

About a year after that, she somehow managed to escape the house. No one noticed her get out. We looked everywhere. I posted a plea on Facebook and printed “Lost Cat” flyers to put up around the neighborhood, but I had little hope of anyone finding and returning her. She was microchipped, but a microchip only works if someone bothers to scan it. The houses were far apart and there was no telling where she had gone – just as we had had no idea where she had come from in the first place. I persisted in walking around looking for her, calling to her, and left dry food out on the deck (which got eaten, though who knows by whom or what). Almost two months passed and I was sure she was gone forever. I was heartbroken.

Then one night, my parents happened to have their window open and were woken by the sound of meowing outside. They came to get me and I rushed outside, even though I was sure it was some other cat who had wandered into the yard and not her. But it was her. She came to me with a little coaxing and seemed so happy to be with me again. We’ll never know where she disappeared to or what she got up to during that time. Maybe she just hid in the woods or under the shed the whole time, too scared to come out, and finally chanced it when it started to get cold.

She was thin and ragged. I brought her in and she devoured the first bowl of food I gave her. From then on, she was the most food-driven cat. As god is her witness, she would never go hungry again. She would steal anything she could get her paws on. If I was eating and she was sitting nearby, a little paw would reach onto my plate and attempt to pull whatever was on it away from me. She grew even bolder about it when she got sick. We could not leave a greasy pan on the stove or any food in the sink. A takeout bag on the table was not safe either; on one occasion she chowed down on half of Dan’s burger after I walked away from the closed bag for just a moment. Our little Grimace, the burger thief.

She got to be quite roly-poly until I eventually put her on a diet. She was little and round, and when she’d flop over on her back she looked like she was over-inflated. We would joke about juicing her like Violet Beauregard in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Anytime my brother Matt came to visit, he’d say he was coming to squeeze her.

I met Dan about four years ago. Lucy was wary of him at first, as she is of most new people. But she very quickly decided he was going to be part of her tribe. I still remember the first time she decided to come up to him instead of hiding. She checked him out, and immediately sat down with us. When we moved in together, she adopted him fully and he became Cat Dad. I think she spent almost as much time in his lap as she did in mine. She liked that he played with her and let her bite his hands, and didn’t object (much) when she kneaded his arms or legs. She let him hold her like a baby, and she would cry at the top of the entryway stairs if he was gone for too long.

She was the only cat who could handle my parents’ dog, Oliver, and she had him wrapped around her little claw. He would chase any other cat out of the room, but she never ran from him, and she would bat at him if he tried anything funny. He became her dog, and she would rub all over him when they were together, and he would lick her face, her ears, and her butt. Let’s just say he was thorough, and it was the source of much amusement in our household.

She had a funny sibling-like relationship with my other cat, Teddy. They’d sometimes sit together watching the critters outside, or groom each other. Other times they’d playfully bat at each other or wrestle, with poor scaredy-cat Teddy usually running off to hide when it went too far. Teddy is 16 now, and he’s never been an only child before. He seemed confused for a few days after Lucy didn’t come home again, and has been extra attention-hungry since then.

Lucy loved to play. Her favorite toys were a set of little felt mice that rattled when you shook them. She would get excited to chase them if you threw them, and would even bring them back to you to be thrown again, like she was playing fetch. Anytime I would move a piece of furniture to vacuum or rearrange, I’d find a pile of her toys underneath. We also had a pair of wands with a long felt rope attached, and she loved to chase those. She would absolutely tear around after them if we dragged them across the floor. And then there was this nylon tunnel that she would crawl inside, and if you poked the sides she would pounce at them.

Her curiosity was always piqued by water. She’d often jump up on one of the bathroom sinks and wait for someone to run the water, as if she wanted a drink. But she never drank any, just sat and watched it as if she was trying to figure out how it worked. When she drank out of her water bowl, she would sometimes do it by dipping her paw into the water and licking it, rather than lapping at the surface directly. More than once I caught her licking the drain in the bathtub, which I never figured out… did she like the taste of soap residue? She would also come check on me when I was in the shower. Maybe impatient with my slowness, or perhaps just wondering why I would subject myself to such torture.

She loved to be talked to, and sometimes I’d even sing to her (only if we were alone – no human ears need be subjected to such sounds). I would sing to her in the car on the way to the vet’s office. Stevie Nicks somehow seemed appropriate – she was my familiar, after all.

The Hard Part

I’m going to talk about some stuff now that is not as pleasant, so I wanted to put a big ol’ header here to warn you (and myself, since I may not always want to think about this part when I scroll through). I don’t want to make this too morose, but illness and death are part of life, and they’re part of Lucy’s story and mine. This post would be incomplete if I just glazed over it. I’m also a believer in the necessity of talking about the hard stuff, because anything that people don’t talk about becomes a lot scarier and lonelier when it happens to you.

Sometime last year, we noticed that Lucy was losing weight. Before that, we’d had her on a diet and she had gotten to a good size, and seemed to have a lot more energy and stamina when we played with her. But around August we noticed she was looking a little too thin. She had also developed some pretty stinky breath. So we took her to the vet, and sure enough, she had some serious tooth decay. It’s pretty common with cats and a lot of it just comes down to genetics. Unlucky, but there we were; we weren’t going to let her starve to death because of some aching teeth. Surgery it was.

But first they ran some labs to check what else might be going on, and her liver values were elevated. That’s something that can happen with periodontal disease, but it was also possible there was something else going on, some underlying condition. Either way, she needed the teeth taken care of so she could start eating again. Then we could see about next steps if her liver values didn’t improve.

So she had many of her teeth removed, including her little fangs in the front. She recovered well from this surgery just as she had from the ear surgery all those years ago. She started eating again and put on a little weight, and we were hopeful that we had resolved the problem. We kept her on steroids and kept an eye on her. But unfortunately, she started losing weight again earlier this summer.

The vet this time was rather grim about her prognosis. Her liver was not in good shape. We increased her steroid dosage and added some other drugs to the mix. I started taking her twice a week to get fluid injections. She had prescription pet food. At one point I was giving her three pills in the morning and two at night plus Miralax in her food and an appetite stimulant that I rubbed into her ear flap. Plus constantly trying to entice her to eat more by heating up or watering down different kinds of food. I did not mind any of it. I needed to feel like I was doing something for her. I wanted to believe that I could make her better through my efforts, as if through sheer force of will.

We were getting ready to get an ultrasound in hopes that maybe, maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as we thought, when she came down with a pretty bad respiratory infection. When she started hiding under the bed, I became alarmed – she had never done that before, ever. Even when she was sick, she wanted to be snuggled and comforted. But here she was wheezing and hiding from me. So we took her to the emergency vet, where they were even more grim about her prognosis.

It’s very hard to hear and process someone telling you that your loved one probably won’t make it. But our minds are built to protect us. We resist it at first. “She might be okay. I thought I lost her once and she came back, maybe things will work out again. I’m not going to start grieving her when she’s still with us.” But we knew. Over that weekend, I think I came to grips with it in a way. And I just spent every second I could caring for her. Holding her. She was incredibly sweet and loving those last couple days. Like she was taking care of us, making sure we’d be okay.

Monday, August 12, a month before my birthday, when she would have been with me for 11 years. I put her favorite blanket in her carrier and took her to the vet for the ultrasound. I tried not to think too much about it, to put it out of my mind until we heard back. Hoping for good news. At worst, I thought we’d probably continue as we had been, buying her whatever months or years we could with hospice care.

But that’s not what we got. Her liver was bad, and it wasn’t just that. All signs pointed to late stage cancer. She still had a liver infection she couldn’t shake, plus the respiratory infection, but the thing that caught the vet’s attention and ours was that she had an ulcer in her eye, and the vet had never seen an animal with an eye ulcer who wasn’t constantly messing with it and drawing attention to it. Maybe, somehow, it wasn’t bothering her at all, or maybe she was in so much general discomfort that it was just one more thing.

Where we’d previously been discussing hospice, we now realized that’s what we had already been doing for the last month, with all the drugs and vet visits. And sooner or later, hospice ends, and it only ends one way. And we were there. We were there. It felt sudden, even though we’d been dealing with this for a month, and seen what a rough time she was having. It was devastating to finally accept that her quality of life wasn’t good enough anymore and we – I – had to make a decision, and there was only one rational option, one that I did not want. I did not, not want to be responsible for my cat’s death. But I also did not want to be responsible for her suffering. An impossible, but necessary choice.

Maybe we could have brought her home first to get a little more time with her, but what would that time have been like? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to make her endure any longer for our sake. I didn’t want to have to go to bed that night and wake up the next day with the dread of what was going to happen. I didn’t want a long drawn-out goodbye where I would have just been hugging her and crying and stressing her out. I had sat with her all weekend. I wouldn’t say that I had already said my goodbyes, but I knew that however long I dragged it out, it would never, ever be enough time, and I’d only be torturing myself, her, and Dan.

It felt abrupt, though. Just that morning she’d been in the apartment with us, wheezy and tired and not eating well, but still as sweet and intrepid as ever. Now she would never be there again. I’d never hold her or pet her again. Never have her headbutt my hand when I was trying to type, or stare at me like a weirdo while I was on the toilet. No cute sideways looks from her favorite window or frantic meowing when she smelled meat cooking. This was it. We were going back to the vet and it would be the last time I would see her, talk to her, or touch her. The last time.

I’m grateful for our vet, who has such a thoughtful setup in her office. On previous visits, I’d come to appreciate that we did not need to go back out into the lobby after an appointment – no awkward small talk and paying of the bill when you’ve had bad news. For this visit, we went back to a room we’d never been in. They have a special room just for what was about to happen. Soft lighting, soft rug and couch, soft music. They brought in Lucy, and she was anxious at first, checking out the room, less interested in us. It didn’t feel real, and then it felt way, way too real. I was a mess, Dan was a mess. Was I doing the right thing? Part of me wanted to call it all off. Maybe she’d be okay, somehow. She’d get through this, and get better. But I knew that was a lie. I took a good look at her: her labored breathing, how much you could feel her ribcage, how her velvety fur had become so scraggly. She settled down and came and sat with me like she had over the weekend, just satisfied to be in my arms, purring despite her wheezing, looking up at me with her big eyes. She was tired. She was so, so tired.

I ugly-cried. They came and gave her the first injection, which numbed her and “put her on cloud nine,” as they described it. She grew very calm and still, and eventually a little limp. I just held her and touched her face and kissed her forehead, and when I could get it out, whispered to her how amazing she was and how much we loved her. She just gazed up at me like she’d done so many times in my arms, all love and comfort. I was so scared that I wouldn’t be able to do it, to hold her and watch this happen, but I would not trade those last moments for anything. It was my duty and honor to be there for her in the end, to do everything in my power to make her feel comfortable and loved. To give back even a fraction of what she’d given me in the 10.92 years we’d spent together.

The second injection worked fast, so fast. The vet let us know when. We couldn’t tell. There was no magic moment when I saw her slip away, she just faded, with her eyes still locked on mine. She could have just been sedated for all I could tell. Her body wasn’t cold yet, wasn’t rigid. I touched her face and kissed her forehead again. Whispered to her. Said goodbye. Cried harder than I have ever cried. Received some nice words from the staff, which are just a blur. And we left. We left her there, never to return with us again except as ashes in a box two weeks later.

I saw a thread on Reddit later that week where a question was posed along the lines of “what would you tell your pet if they could magically understand exactly what you were saying for a just a few minutes?” I thought far too long about this question. What would I say to Lucy? Now, I’m a writer, and I value words very highly. But I could not think of a single thing that Lucy and I could say to each other that we did not communicate just as well, or even better, without ever saying anything at all.

Of course I would have loved to know what she was thinking and feeling at times. If she was in pain, if she was scared. At times I’d love to have been able to tell her “look, I know it sucks getting poked and prodded, but it will help you feel better.” But I forced pills down her throat twice a day and she put up with it. When I opened the crate to take her to the vet, she would walk right in. She already knew. She trusted me. I hope I was worthy of that trust and that everything I did was the best I could do for her.

I do envy future humans who will very likely find some way to communicate with animals through technology – the collar from Up is probably not as far off as we think. It does make me sad that I will never have that opportunity with her. But it will take some of the magic out of the empathy that we experience with them. We learn to listen to them in other ways. We learn to read their body language and observe their behavior. They learn to do the same with us. There are some lessons in there for effective communication with other humans. Sometimes you just want someone to sit with you and say comforting things. Sometimes you just want a hug. Sometimes you really, really want to be fed, right now please, thank you.

I miss her more than I can say, every day. I don’t think a day has passed that I haven’t cried at least a little. I’m covetous of my sadness. I get to be sad for her. It’s a gift to miss her this much, because it means I got to have her. I got to love her and be loved by her. I got to be her person. As unfair as it feels that she isn’t here anymore, I am so, so grateful that she was.

It’s our burden to bear that we can only experience time as a linear, relentless march, unable to ever again access those moments except through our own flawed memories. But they happened. They still exist, somewhere in space-time. They don’t disappear just because we aren’t in them anymore. Someday the sun will swallow the Earth, erasing everything we have ever known, every trace of what the human race did and built here, and even then a version of me will be loving a version of Lucy somewhere, in some pocket of the continuum. Forever.