Senility isn’t restricted to people. With modern nutrition and veterinary care, more and more kitty cats are becoming über-senior citizens, so feline gerontology is very much an ongoing concern. My cat April has recently passed her 25th birthday; that puts her well past the century mark in people terms. She’s an old girl.
And she’s senile. She displays several common symptoms of old-age feline dementia. She was always a whisper-quiet cat, but now she is a downright obnoxious loudmouth. That’s typical of kitty senility—she becomes disoriented and upset, crying out in her insecurity. She has also learned that she can manipulate me easily with those yowls, at least for the most part. I have been determined not to be enslaved by her cranky demands, but my success along those lines is limited. Most of the time all she needs is to be picked up for a few minutes, and that’s hardly any imposition. But other times she just yowls for no particular reason until she conks out—which means that it never lasts very long. She conks out easily.
Physically she’s in decent shape, all things considered. She still watches after her fur and maintains a conscientious relationship with her litterbox. To be sure, sometimes she doesn’t quite remember that if her front feet are in her litterbox, it doesn’t necessarily follow that her hiney is in there too. So I have surrounded her box with several square yards of plastic to catch the occasional off-target dribble.
April used to conform to my schedule, but now she has trouble sleeping at night. Part of that has to do with needing frequent trips to the litterbox, but it’s also just old-age jitters. Since she wakes up a lot, so do I. She is also awake at the first sign of dawn, and wants me up too. But here it is summer and there’s no reason for me to spring out of the sack at first light. Some of the experts recommend my wearing earplugs and closing my bedroom door, but April has been sleeping with me since I adopted her seventeen years ago. Cats don’t deal with change at all well, and to lock her out would be downright cruel in my opinion. No: I can’t weasel out of April’s sunset years just by closing the door. She and I must face this period together. However, I plan to place a low-power heating pad on the pillow beside me. That just might keep her put.
She has always been a deeply affectionate cat. She remains cuddly but now with an edge of clingy dependence. That can be annoying, but I realize that it isn’t her fault per se. She’s ancient and she cannot get along without my care and attention. So if I’m home, she panics if I’m out of sight. At least for the time being she has been handling my being at work just fine, although she has become downright puppy-dog-like when I return home. Well, spoiled puppy dog.
Of late the dementia has intensified. She stands motionless and stares off into space, generally unresponsive to the world around her, with that same vacant stare that one sees in the hyper-elderly. Her mind wafts into a fuzzy gray space and time. It looks especially poignant if the arthritis plaguing her front legs is showing—as it usually does when she is trying to sit upright. Her elbows have to poke out so she can keep her balance, and her feet are splayed out so much as to be nearly sideways. She’ll just sit or stand there, absentmindedly licking her lips. Then she returns to reality, gives out a few heartbreaking yowls, and then she’s back to sleep. I imagine that she’s often uncomfortable when she’s awake; she’s probably suffering from a lot of stiffness and aches from the arthritis. Both eating and eliminating cause distress.
I’ve been prepared for the inevitable for several years now. Something is going to fail, if not the kidneys then the liver. Or a tumor will grow. Or she’ll just lose her kitty marbles altogether. I’m watching her carefully; we’ll make that last visit to the vet once her life has become a burden for her. But for now she’s handling the process with admirable grace, all things considered. She’s not ready to pack it in yet, from what I can tell, and as long as she’s willing to chug along, so am I.