Ocelopotamus

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories of the death of cats …
— Shakespeare, Richard II
(if it had been about cats)

I come not to bury Mr. Blue, but to praise him.
— Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
(if it had been about Mr. Blue instead of J.C.)

… and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
— Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

The past two weeks have been momentously awful. Mr. Blue, one of my two feline companions, passed away a week ago Thursday. His death was unexpected and wrenching and it’s taken me a week to be able to write about it.

Mr. Blue was only three years and seven months old, and the loss of his outsize presence and personality has been destabilizing, to put it mildly. I work from home most of the time, and it’s just the three of us: Mr. Blue, his little adoptive brother Kiwi, and me, like the crew of a three-animal spaceship on a long journey.

Without Mr. Blue, Kiwi is lost and bewildered. He doesn’t understand how there came to be so much less cat around the apartment, so much less wrestle and play and chase, or what to do about it, or what to do with himself. He cries constantly, especially if I leave the room and he doesn’t know where I’ve gone. He grew up in a house with 300 cats, and then he came to live with me and Mr. Blue. He’s never been alone for hours at a time before.

As for me, I’m still wrecked a full week later. For the first few days after Mr. Blue died, I looked like I was wearing purple eyeshadow when I saw myself in the mirror. (Which is not a good look for me — even in the glory days of the Pansy Kings I usually just stuck to a little eyeliner and some blush.)

I think losing someone you love is a little like getting a waxing: You don’t truly understand how deep below the surface the roots go until you feel them pulled out all at once, forcefully and without mercy.

But wait. As the gay male equivalent of a crazy cat lady, I should probably offer the following disclaimer before we lose sight of the shore, if we haven’t already: There is a sort of person in the world who thinks that people like me overvalue our animal companions, and treat them too much like human beings, and should just sort of take a pill and get over it. If you’re that kind of person, you probably don’t read my blog anyway, or you stopped after the first paragraph of this. But if by any chance you’re still holding on, hoping for a spark of what you consider sanity, you’ll do best to flee for the exits now, because I don’t really have it in me to try to sound level-headed at this particular time.

If you’re on the home page, click the “Read the rest” link below for some memories and photos of Mr. Blue … or just scroll on by if you’d prefer not to attend the wake.

Alors.

When my previous feline companion Dragon Lady passed away at the age of 14 1/2 in the summer of 2004, it was late at night and there was no one awake to call and sniffle into the phone to, so I busied myself with creating a memorial Web page for her. I’m a night owl and an insomniac, and sometimes don’t get to sleep before four or five am. It was something to do that night.

But with Mr. Blue, his death caught me so off guard that I had to let a number of days pass before I could face the thought of combing through his photos and writing up memories of him.

I’ve posted the email I sent to friends when I adopted Mr. Blue in 2005, to provide a little backstory on the friend I just lost. You may have read it before this post, or possibly you were one of the recipients of the original email. But if you want to go read it, I can wait a few minutes. Don’t mind me, I’ll just go look out my window at the tree branches covered in snow.

[Insert shot of snowy tree branches to convey passage of some nonspecific amount of time.]

***

Ah, you’re back.

Mr. Blue was obsessed with sticky rollers. You know, those adhesive tape-roll things you use to remove pet hair or lint from your clothing? When I took down the sticky roller from the shelf, he’d spring up to the highest nearby piece of furniture, stand up on his hind legs like Yogi Bear, and make little gestures of ecstatic longing in the air above his head, like a mime trying to communicate the idea of unimaginable bliss in the stars. I wonder if I’ll ever witness a purer expression of yearning.

Usually I’d run the roller up and down his back and around his sides for a minute or two, while he chirped and purred and tried to bite it in joy.

What else will I miss about him?

His ballerina-like leaps into mid-air when he was surprised or startled.

His slow, placid 1-2 stretch, first one paw reaching out ahead of him and then the other, with his rump in the air and his eyes squeezing shut. He generally liked to perform this slow-motion choreography in a doorway I need to get through in hurry, late for work or trying to answer the phone, and in no way could he be rushed until it was complete.

His running monologues, of course. I wish I could have installed mikes and recording equipment around my apartment to document his amazing vocabulary for posterity. At least his most common turns of phrase, such as his quizzical Mrrrit mrrroo? and his plaintive Mwee mwee mwee, and the more declarative REEE-oww!

When I adopted him I had a cubicle mate named Maria at the office where I was freelancing downtown, and I told her that for some reason my new cat kept asking to talk to her. She took the bait and I explained that Mr. Blue was in the habit of calling out “Ma-REE-aa!” about 43 times a night, and I had to break it to him that Maria lived way out in the suburbs, but I could give her a message the next day if he wanted.

Maybe I should have just put them on the phone together.

***

I suppose I should explain how Mr. Blue died.

About six weeks after the move to the new apartment, I started to notice a lot of cat litter scattered around the floor — as if someone had tossed half a bucket of litter across the floor of my front room, in fact. I soon discovered that Mr. Blue was jumping in and out of the litterbox about thirty-five times a day, and it sounded like he was trying to dig a hole to China while he was in there. I spent about 45 minutes a day vacuuming.

Various fellow cat people I know suggested that it might be some kind of medical problem, rather than just an escalation of the obsessive clawing and scratching behaviors Mr. Blue had always been prone to, which was my first thought. Both he and Kiwi had taken the move pretty hard — their first relocation from the only home they could remember since kittenhood — and had been acting that out in all sorts of ways.

So I was a little slower than I should have been to get him to the vet. But after a few weeks of the problem getting steadily worse, I made him an appointment at the animal hospital.

On the first visit the vet figured it was probably just a lower urinary tract problem, and gave him an anti-inflammatory injection, and sent me home with a course of antibiotics to give him in case there was an infection involved. The injection seemed to work wonders — for two days Mr. Blue’s litterbox obsession vanished and I didn’t have to vacuum the floor in the morning before I could walk across the room.

But then the problem gradually returned, and though I dutifully wrapped Mr. Blue up in a towel and squirted the antibiotic down his throat — while he editorialized vigorously against the situation — it was clear that it wasn’t doing any good.

I made him another appointment, got him another shot, and this time the vet prescribed a 30-day course of anti-inflammatory steroids to give him. For some reason Mr. Blue actually liked the liquid prednisone, and our towel sessions became much less contentious. In fact, when he saw me setting up the towel and the little table with the bottle and the empty syringe, he’d get excited and start mree mree mree-ing at me to hurry it up and give him his candy drink already.

And after I’d give him the medicine, I’d sit there holding him in my lap for awhile, still wrapped in the towel and purring while I stroked his big muppety head. I guess I’m glad we had that time together in his last few weeks.

But I knew things weren’t improving the way they should and he’d need to go back to the vet yet again, when the prednisone was finished if not sooner.

And then about the beginning of last week he suddenly took a very bad turn for the worse. He stopped eating, became lethargic, didn’t respond to catnip. Most disturbing for Mr. Blue, he completely stopped talking. I didn’t hear him speak once for the 24 hours before I bundled him into the cat carrier for what would turn out to be his last trip to the animal hospital.

He was still drinking water, and making his way slowly to and from the litterbox every so often, but in the last day or so he started throwing up bright yellow-green bile and at that point I couldn’t get him to the vet fast enough.

At the animal hospital they did an x-ray and discovered that what we had thought was a simple lower urinary tract inflammation was actually some fairly serious and advanced bladder and kidney problems.

I was presented with a few very bad options, and ultimately I had to choose the only one within my power that would spare him further suffering.

It was a horrible moment, a shitty decision to have to make without enough time to properly consider all the possibilities, and one I’ll be second-guessing for the rest of my life. Friends have told me I was right not to put him through the surgery the vet proposed — at the minimum 24 hours of cat hell, with no guarantee that he’d survive, or that the problems wouldn’t recur even if he did. Several years ago my sister lost a beloved ferret to surgery everyone thought he’d survive, and he died at the hospital and she didn’t get to say goodbye to him.

So I don’t know. 24 hours later, in the depths of the purple eyeshadow festival of feline bereavement, as Kiwi and I were both crying in alternating fits, I told myself I should have agreed to anything they wanted to do, just to bring Mr. Blue home for a few more weeks of catnip and spoiling, and figure out how to deal with the staggering bills when they landed. But I made the decision I made in the little room, and no backsies.

They brought in a clipboard and had me sign some forms, and then left me alone with him to sob like Laura Petrie and stroke his fur and tell him how sorry I was. He lay there peacefully, just glad no strange people were poking and prodding him, looking tolerant of whatever I was carrying on about.

And then they came in with the needles, and I held his face in my hands, and a few minutes later they carried him away, a limp blue cat wrapped in the deep red towel from his carrier.

***

A lot was written about pet food last spring after the whole Menu Foods debacle, and most of the cat experts I read made the point forcefully that dry food isn’t really good for cats — especially male cats, who for best results should be fed a diet of mostly or entirely wet food.

Stuff like this:

• Urinary tract disease. Plugs, crystals, and stones are more common in cats eating dry diets, due to the chronic dehydration and highly concentrated urine they cause. “Struvite” stones used to be the most common type in cats, but another more dangerous type, calcium oxalate, has increased and is now tied with struvite. Manipulation of manufactured cat food formulas to increase the acidity of urine has caused the switch. Dogs can also form stones as a result of their diet.

• Kidney disease. Chronic dehydration associated with dry diets may also be a contributing factor in the development of kidney disease and chronic renal failure in older cats. Cats have a low thirst drive; in the wild they would get most of their water from their prey. Cats eating dry food do not drink enough water to make up for the lack of moisture in the food. Cats on dry food diets drink more water, but the total water intake of a cat eating canned food is twice as great.

Mr. Blue was a kibble addict and as hard as I tried to shift him to wet food, he never wanted more than a few bites of that and then he was back to the dry food. He was ten months old when I got him and I think he’d only been fed dry food through his kittenhood, and was set in his ways.

In the end, I suspect maybe his love of dry food helped to do him in. It was his version of a greasy cheeseburger and fries, maybe.

***

Mr. Blue wore a lot of different names and nicknames in his short life, as befits such a theatrical creature.

“Mr. Blue” was originally intended to be just a temporary label, a sort of code name to use in referring to him while I figured out what I wanted to call him permanently.

But people kept telling me they loved the name Mr. Blue, and that there were songs by that name by everyone from ELO to Yaz to Garth Brooks. As it happened I didn’t know any of those songs — the name came from a children’s book I’d read growing up in the 70’s about a talking blue cat adopted by a classroom of children. This fictional Mr. Blue had a vocabulary of something like 25 distinct “words,” and there was even a glossary to his different utterances in the back of the book.

I eventually gave my blue cat the official name Barabajagal, after a favorite Donovan song, but I quickly learned that there were not nearly as many hardcore Donovan fans in the world as there ought to be, and nobody I met had any idea how to spell or pronounce Barabajagal. This mattered keenly at the vet’s office, so I wound up putting Mr. Blue on all his forms (with “aka Barabajagal” in parens). Out in the world, it was just easier to refer to him as Mr. Blue in conversation, and before long Barabajagal was relegated to the role of secret mystic alias, while Mr. Blue became his everyday name.

Of course, when he came to me, he bore the unlikely name “Cuddles.” The lady who had rescued him and brought him to me told me she’d named him that because he was so gosh darned affectionate, but of course I was free to change it if I didn’t like it.

As it happened, by the time he got to me he wasn’t so much in the mood to be cuddled anymore. Possibly he just didn’t like being relocated, or separated from the nice lady, but at first he didn’t like to to be held for more than a minute or two and then he was squirming for his liberty. He seemed to be into the the feline equivalent of the teenage years, like Veda in Mildred Pierce, turning away from Joan Crawford’s attempt to kiss her goodnight: “I love you, Mother. Really, I do. But let’s not be sticky about it.”

I called him Cuddles sometimes just to tease him, because the name fit him about as well as a baby bonnet on a full-grown orangutan.

But irony likes to travel in a circular track, and by the time Mr. Blue left me he’d become Cuddles again. Over the two and a half years I had him he gradually developed a need for occasional laptime, sometimes lasting as long as four or five minutes at a go. And after the move to the new apartment — which was upsetting for both Mr. Blue and Kiwi — he became downright clingy, jumping into my lap anytime he had a clear shot at it.

The day before he died, when he was sick and sluggish, I held him in my lap wrapped in his towel, and we sat that way for an hour or so, just being sticky about it.

***

When I told people he was a blue cat, they would invariably say, “A Russian blue?” I don’t think so, I’d say. He’s not any kind of purebreed, and he seems more like a British Blue than a Russian Blue anyway.

But whatever his lineage, he was indeed blue, and on this fact I will not budge. Sometimes people would call him grey, and at the animal hospital they wrote grey on his form.

It’s true that in dim light he looked grey (in a cave all cats are grey), but in full light you could always see his fabulous azure tint. It was hard to capture in photographs, but if you saw him in the sunlight you knew he was gloriously, radiantly blue.

Sunlight also illuminated the reason for one of his other nicknames: Secret Tiger. There must have been a tabby ancestor or two lurking somewhere in the recipe of his muttdom, because his tail had faint tabby rings that were only visible in the full glare of the sun, like lemon juice ink on paper held over the toaster. (Do kids still do that?)

“You stand revealed, secret tiger!” I would call out to him when the sun’s rays exposed him. “I know the furtive mystery you try so fecklessly to conceal. No, good sir, you cannot hide your subversive, decadent stripes from me!”

Tabby in hiding. Lurking lemur. Ring-tailed raccoon in the stripey-cat closet.

I called him Pantaloons, sometimes, too, because his legs looked like he was wearing furry blue breeches.

And the most special-est nickname of all, which I only whispered in his tufty ear on those rare occasions when he was tolerating a few minutes of laptime:

“Little man in a catsuit.”

***

I should admit that my relationship with Mr. Blue was not nearly as idyllic as my announcement of his arrival seemed to predict.

In point of fact, Mr. Blue was a handful and a caution and a very high-maintenance cat. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, he and Kiwi together were like the Bart Simpsons of the cat world for the first couple of years, and while Kiwi has settled down and become gradually less destructive in his third year, Mr. Blue never showed any signs of mellowing in his need to lay waste to all manner of stuff.

Although he was always gentle with humans, he had an almost canine need to shred, chew and throughly grunch the bejeezus out of a wide variety of inanimate household goods.

Shower curtains? Shredded into ribbons. Open trash cans? Toppled and the contents tossed hither and yon. Window screens? Clawed full of holes in order to welcome in all the passing bugs. Any newspaper he could reach would be shredded into confetti and the confetti dispersed far and wide like dandelion seeds on the wind. Plastic bags would meet the same fate.

I junked my sofa when we moved last fall because he’d effectively disemboweled it.

None of this was done viciously or maliciously, of course. Mr. Blue was peacefully, meditatively destructive. Pulling something apart was a form of yoga for him. If I scolded him he’d stare back with a placid, implacable innocence and then return to whatever he was currently chewing holes in.

Nonetheless it cost me considerably in time, money, and headaches. I resorted to bizarre arrangements of bric-a-brac to protect vulnerable objects from his claws and teeth. I kept the bathroom door closed so I wouldn’t have to keep replacing the shower curtain, until the humidity caused black fungus to grow on the bathroom walls, and then I had the joy of bleaching it off the walls once a month until we moved out.

And his fur, oh my heavens, I must speak of his fur. It was thick and woolly and it came out in handfuls, everywhere, all the time. I could vacuum every morning, and by afternoon there would again be colossal tumbleweeds of blue fur drifting lazily across the open prairies of my apartment’s floor. I could wash the sofa cover, and within three days it would transform from black twill to blue-grey mohair. “He sheds like a goat!” I’d tell my sister on the phone, and my sister would calmly point out that in point of fact your standard goat doesn’t really shed so much at all, but I just liked the sound of it. Perhaps I meant that Mr. Blue’s shedding had all the aggressive incorrigibility of a goat in a quarrel.

Most cats I’ve known have soft, smooth fur that they keep meticulously clean. But Mr. Blue’s coat felt flat and strangely oily, and early experiments with various techniques of washing and bathing failed to have any effect on that. I eventually accepted it as part of his unctuous charm.

What else? Oh, he liked to dump over his water bowl and flood the kitchen floor so he could splash around in the puddles. I had to buy big heavy ceramic dishes from the dog aisle of McCorporatePetChain so he couldn’t tip them or push them around. When he ate, he’d throw some of his kibbles into the water bowl, turning it into a swamp of disgusting meat-murk.

I had to keep anything I wanted free of clawholes and blue fur in my bedroom with the door closed. Once, when I was away for Christmas and a friend was catsitting, Mr. Blue and Kiwi managed to get into the bedroom. They cleared everything on the nightstand to the floor, pulled the curtains out of the window, toppled the stacks of clean folded laundry and strewed them around the floor.

The Who never trashed a hotel room so thoroughly at the height of their powers.

Speaking of powers: The nice lady who rescued him warned me before she brought him to me that he was “muscular.” In fact, he was freakishly strong even for his size, and could actually move small pieces of furniture around if he wanted to. Coffee table in his way? No problemo. It’d look better on the other side of the room anyway.

Part of what’s made this past week a stew of difficult emotions is that the pain of losing the magnificent Mr. Blue is coupled with the guilty realization that my life will be distinctly, measurably easier without him to contend with, contain, and clean up after.

But that ease that can’t begin to make up for the loss of his conversation, his acrobatics, his peaceful gaze, his big rounded paws in the air like furry tulips when he sprawled lazily on his back.

***

And then there’s Kiwi, Mr. Blue’s adoptive brother.

The two of them had taken a long time to truly bond, and the process wasn’t nearly finished when Mr. Blue left us.

The irony was that I originally brought Kiwi home to keep Mr. Blue company, and there were times when it seemed like Mr. Blue’s reaction to Kiwi ran a circuit from toleration to annoyance to outrage, and perhaps on some days he could have done without Kiwi’s company entirely.

Kiwi, on the other hand, was entirely focused on Mr. Blue. Sometimes Kiwi would spend the entire day just sort of gnawing on Mr. Blue, trying to induce him to wrestle or race around with him, until Mr. Blue would let out a series of exasperated yelps.

Sometimes they fought bitterly for control of a perch or a blanket. Kiwi, though he was smaller and scrawnier than Mr. Blue, had a burning need to be the alpha cat — and Mr. Blue would allow this with bemused tolerance when it was about meaningless things like the status of who eats first or uses the litterbox first. Mr. Blue was a philosopher and not concerned with material things or petty pecking orders. Kiwi wanted all the toys? Fine, he could have all the toys.

At the same time, Mr. Blue did have a certain line he couldn’t be pushed across, and days when he got tired of being bullied by a pushy little tabby half his size.

And on those occasions when Kiwi tried to push Mr. Blue out of a place in which Mr. Blue most sincerely wanted to remain, Mr. Blue could swat Kiwi down pretty quickly, just by applying his huge advantage in both weight and stubbornness.

But for all of their squabbling, there were times when they did seem like brothers, leaping playfully from couch to coffee table, or crouching side by side on the windowsill, avidly watching the birds and squirrels outside with a conspiratorial unity of purpose. “Look at that,” Kiwi would mutter. “I know,” Mr. Blue would breathe back.

And in their last months together, in the chilly new apartment with the noisy, incompetent furnace, on the coldest nights of December and January, I saw something I’d come to doubt I’d ever see: the two of them sleeping back to back on the futon, curled up like littermates at long last, at peace in the animal truce of a cold winter night.

It seems intolerably cruel that they’ve lost each other just when they’d finally learned that a little trust could pay off in warmth, comfort, and security.

Now Kiwi, who would never have chosen to do without Mr. Blue, will have to. Even being the undisputed alpha won’t be any consolation: After all, what’s the point of eating first if nobody eats second?

Prior to this, when I held Kiwi on my lap, the petting session usually ended at whatever point Mr. Blue trotted by, mrroo mrroo-ing about something or other. Kiwi would spring to attention and bolt from my lap to follow him, because whatever Mr. Blue was about to get into, Kiwi needed to be there by his side to supervise it. He would never have admitted it, but despite his alpha pretensions, he would have followed Mr. Blue — the true leader of his pack — anywhere.

This time, Mr. Blue’s gone somewhere Kiwi can’t follow.

At least, not for many years to come, I hope. For the time being, I need him here with me.