I have completed 48 hours without a cat. It’s been a long time since I was catless. I’m out of practice. But I’ll adapt.
Sixteen years of living with an 8-pound furball has produced a set of still-active conditioned reflexes. If I am sitting at my desk in my home office (as I am right now) I do not move my feet without a tentative preliminary exploration as to whether the space is cat-free. I do not roll my desk chair without checking for tail and feet. Every time I walk into the kitchen I automatically eyeball the floor-space under the spice cabinet: food dishes still OK? Enough water, and is it still clean? Has a careless little someone made a mess around the double-thick placemat of Bounty paper towels?
I’m undergoing a sagging lassitude that I recognize as tension draining. Coping full-time with an old lady’s dementia is incessantly stressful. I am braced against a torrent of howling, ready to shut it out if possible or try to ease the fit before putting her into a closed bedroom for a time out. But I needn’t be on guard now and I can feel all those defensive muscles letting go, letting go. Yesterday I was obliged to pitter-pat over to the bathroom frequently. No mystery there.
A steely band of discomfort around my lower middle — passing right over the chakra that lies about an inch below the navel — has kept up a watchful reminder that I have been churning in an emotional tempest made up of dread and fear and guilt and denial. But I made the decision I had to make, and the irrevocable action has been taken. April isn’t here any more. So that tight corset will begin to loosen. I did the right thing. My body hasn’t gotten the point yet, but it will.
Grocery shopping yesterday morning had a slight air of unreality as I walked right by the cat food without even glancing at the Fancy Feast section to see if Mollie’s had one of their ten-can specials on, and without mentally reviewing the stock in the pantry. There is no stock in the pantry. I took the half-dozen cans remaining to the vet’s for another kitty cat, to join the sturdy beige cat carrier that I left behind.
For much of our sixteen years together April and I had a morning routine. When I awoke I would gently remove her from the crook of my elbow where she always nested during the wee hours. She would let out a few drowsy ruh-ruhs and drop back to sleep. I would go to the bathroom, take my shower, shave, dry my hair, all that. After I returned to the bedroom to dress for the day, it was time for action. April would be sitting alert and prim on the edge of the bed, ready to jump down and do her best to swarm around my feet while I sought socks and underwear and trousers, as I did my best to avoid stepping on her. It was good healthy sport for both of us.
I would head for the kitchen, often with her acting as advance scout. (All ten paces or so.) However, she always made a detour into the bathroom where, for some reason known only to her inscrutable kittycat mind, she always liked to lick up some water from the shower floor. (I’ll probably leave the shower door open by instinct for the rest of my life.) Then as I gathered and washed her dishes, she would join me in the kitchen for some light miaowing and swarming while I made her breakfast. It consisted of a can of Fancy Feast in her "good" dish—paté style only, none of that sliced, roasted, or flaked shit—and no fish, either—dried food (Iams Senior) in a china rice bowl, and a double bowl of fresh water. Later on we nixed the dried food because her teeth couldn’t handle it. As she got down to her breakfast, I got down to mine.
At that point our morning routine was complete. Either I headed into my home office, at which point she would follow me and curl up under the desk for a bath/nap combo, or I would leave for the day, in which case she did whatever it was she did when I wasn’t home. I like to think she picked up the phone and called over the neighborhood cats for bridge and gossip and soap operas, but I know she just dropped off to sleep, maybe looked out of the windows for a while, reviewed the house to make sure nothing had changed overnight, ate, pooped, peed, and slept some more. When she was younger her day included a fair amount of rowdy play, but it had been a long time since hijinks were on the menu. I adopted April when she was eight years old and she was therefore already approaching senior citizen status; she went on for sixteen more years, so for most of our time together she was a sedate old lady, a coddled housecat down to her toes and a world removed from her wild forebears in the veldt. A huntress she was not; even birds flittering around on the back porch left her unamused. She was the only cat in my experience who didn’t like people food, not even people chicken or people tuna.
Our morning routine had begun to crumble over the past several months, as her increasing dementia required banishment away from me and any stimuli that might set off a fit of howling. But the fixing-breakfast part of the ritual remained intact, and I felt unrooted yesterday morning as I fixed for one rather than two. The process seemed less strange this morning, although a lingering frisson of oh-dammit-I-forgot-to-do-something-now-what-was-it remains.
Last night I was feeling pooped so I spent the better part of the evening curled up on the living room couch with the TV and a few books. April just loved that, and to the last her dementia was mostly at bay at such times. I felt incomplete. I still made room in the crook of my knee, her usual place to hang out. I stayed awake, not the usual state of affairs when April was around. I’m convinced that she emitted alpha waves; whenever she cuddled up into somebody’s lap that somebody was headed for slumberland posthaste. She was a furred sleeping potion, a feline Mr. Sandman.
I’m a widower still reacting to a newly absent spouse. Inane kitty-talk remains on the tip of my tongue. But I’m adjusting. Two days isn’t very long and two weeks isn’t really that far in the future. I’ll be just me again, not the Scott/April symbiosis that has inhabited this century-old house for the past 16 years. As the house glides into its future with a snazzy new paint job, I look ahead as an independent, free to roam whither I will, a guy without a cat.
At least for now.