A Shameless Indulgence of Critter Grief

I rose early today but the cats that infest our house are happy to eat at any hour, and they communicate with the crystal clarity of the Associated Press that they’re ready to go whenever I’m ready to go. So I cracked open two tins of the mushy brown goop they greedily consume each morning¹ and evening only to realize that half a can per cat would lead to half a can left over. This was Yumyum’s portion, but the fifteen year-old tabby with the voice like a fork scraping across a plate and the disposition of a sack of overripe lemons is absent today, gone to frolic with her siblings in the great chipmunk hunting grounds in the sky. 

Yumbles was a notoriously difficult presence in our home. She was violently particular about being touched pretty much anywhere but the top of her head, and her relationship with the other three denizens of our admittedly too-small house was cool at best; typically their interactions involved much shrieking and sprinting from room to room and the shattering of glass and spillage of potting soil. She spent most of her time alone in my daughter’s room—Yumyum’s room, whenever Sailor was off at college. 

But the two of us had reached certain understandings and accommodations over the last couple of years. When she called, banging on the door and warbling abrasively, I would dutifully lug her from the bedroom to the living room so that she wouldn’t have to run the gauntlet of her three step-siblings. In the afternoons we would play a regular game of “stop working,” in which she would leap up on my desk and flop down on my keyboard, spewing a load of gibberish into whatever program I happened to be using at the time. I would work around her to the best of my ability for ten or fifteen minutes and she would loudly express her displeasure at said attempts until finally I would be forced to lift her gingerly from her spot, eliciting howls of discontent. 

It’s a curious thing, the way we pet owners mark time with the lives of these small ancillary beings that share our spaces. We acquired Yumyum and her brother Koko just a couple months after we moved into our first (and so far only) house in 2009. Koko died of FIP at seven, but Yumyum has been a fixture here, as much a part of the house as the kitchen sink or the front door. The house is a different place without her.

Before Yumyum it was Palestrina, the black and white stunner who undercut her own porcelain beauty with a habit of peeing on my clothes. I acquired Palestrina in 1993, living alone for the first time in my life. I had no idea how to properly care for a cat—I didn’t get her fixed until after she’d pumped out a litter of kittens, and until she was six or seven we visited the vet only sporadically.

She lived with me in my tiny studio apartment, then later in an apartment with two roommates and a dog, whom she despised. She lived with my then-girlfriend (present spouse) and her longhair tabby Pangur, then moved with me to Cincinnati where I attended graduate school for a couple years. Returning to Nashville she was reunited with Pangur, as the four of us became a family. We all moved to Boston together in 1998, where Pangur would exit the scene just as my daughter entered in 2002. And finally she came with us to Atlanta, where she greeted the birth of my son before her departure from our lives in the summer of 2007, if memory serves. Quite an adventurous life for such a small being. 

The period from Palestrina’s arrival to Yumyum’s departure was over thirty years—my entire adult life pretty much. Likely at least one among Biscuit, Banjo and Sapnap will carry me into my sixties. It’s quite possible that the next cat after that could outlast me.²

Yumyum in repose.

Somewhere far from here a sibling of Yumyum’s lives still, Portland, or Portly, as my friend Eric calls him. In Portland, Oregon, fittingly. At fifteen, Portly can’t possibly be long for this world, but it’s good knowing he’s still out there somewhere. The direct line stops with Portland and Yumyum and Koko, all of whom were fixed or neutered shortly after Eric’s wife discovered them as kittens huddled in an empty warehouse here in Atlanta. Cats are prolific though, and doubtless there are legions of cousins out there in the world. Whole populations—crowds of cats, through which we pass like fireflies, even as they pass individually through our lives as brief, flickering flames. We “owned” Yumyum in the sense that we could coerce her into going to the vet (at the cost of no small amount of blood). Conversely, people joke that cats own us, which is a sentiment containing a soupçon of truth, but really we’re two individual populations of beings owned by the world, evolved over thousands of years to share space and food and a certain common outlook—maybe even a sort of reciprocal love. We anthropomorphize them; perhaps they perceive us as big, awkward cats; then again perhaps we’re just a ready source of food and warmth. Who knows? For my part, it’s enough that they are simply here to share in the joy and sorrow of life. 

Farewell, sweet³ Yumbles. It’s absurd to say so for all the aggravation you brought, but goddamn it if you weren’t my favorite. Fifteen years was all too brief but I’ll carry the memory of your scratchy, insistent yowling with me for the remainder of my own journey until we are both once more dissolved together like dye in water, spreading vastly into the fabric of being and the universe. 

1. We don’t do dry food because Biscuit barfs it all over the house.

2. I mean, I could be dead this time tomorrow but you know what I mean. 

3. -ish.