It was late last night when I got home from my business trip. When I got home, Mina greeted me with a warm hug, and we opened the package that came in the mail. Her face got serious, and she told me it was about Alice. Her bloodwork had come back and it wasn’t good. “You need to talk to the doctor and decide what to do.” I normally defer to Mina when it comes to animals, she she knows so much more. But when there was no advice forthcoming, I knew it was serious.
Alice was my cat. Really she was the first animal that I ever really thought of as mine, and definitely the first to agree with me. When I had been married to E, before Mina, I insisted very early into our marriage that we needed to get a cat. She was a dog person, but I had always been a cat person. My sister had had a few when we were growing up, and I always enjoyed their idiosyncratic, independent nature. Since E and I were living in an apartment, we couldn’t have a dog, so she relented. We adopted an adorable, pouncy, 8-week-old kitten, Pixel, who was amazingly cute. Unfortunately, this cat decided that she preferred E. Within three months, I was insisting on a second cat. We thought we would try to find a cat much like the first one. In hindsight, we could not have picked an animal more opposite in disposition than Pixel if we had gotten bird. This cat would be Alice.
Since E was already taken, and Pixel was not about to share, Alice became my cat, my intention all along. Where Pixel was typically feline in her clever athleticism, Alice was a straight-up dunce, and a lazy one to boot. Although she was always ready to play, she never had any interest in chasing things around the room. Games that required her to get up were simply not her style. Alice was doddering klutz, who ambled about, never bending her back legs when she walked, never holding her tail high like a normal cat, and possessed of a voice that came out as a guttural squawk rather than the a melodic, feline meow. Her head bobbed side to side when she walked, and her stance always seemed unsure and wobbly.
But one day, she was pawing at E, who was on the computer. E let her jump up, and Alice confusedly circled in her lap. E smiled, and said, “Let me show you.” She then turned Alice around and laid her down in her lap, and gave her head a soft scratch. In that moment, Alice would discover the greatest love of her life – a person’s lap. From that day forth, any guest of mine would have a visit from Alice as she jumped up circled until she finally found the right way to sit, and then plopped down for a scratching session that would last as long as your fingers cared to work on her.
I called the vet who was in surgery. Just before lunch, she returned my call. We talked for a few minutes. Alice’s kidney was failing, and it showed in her bloodwork. She had stopped eating after a nasty bout of vomiting on Saturday, and the products of her metabolism were building up in her bloodstream. There were things we could try, giving her fluids to flush the chemicals out, and some medications to help her kidney, and Mina and I would have to administer the injections at home, performing an improvised feline dialysis. We talked about her one kidney, and her peculiar birth defects. “You know, a cat like this normally only lives a year or two,” the vet said.
“And she’s nine now,” I completed.
I took a deep breath, and told the vet I would talk about it with Mina, but I already knew what the decision was, since it was mine alone to make. I just had to say the words, and I couldn’t do it here at work.
Alice got dealt a really lousy hand in life. She was a black cat born close to Halloween, so no one was allowed to adopt her for some time. When I adopted her from the Humane Society, they claimed to have de-wormed her, but at her first checked she was infested with three kinds of worms. I stormed back to the Humane Society to tell them what awful shape this cat was in. The man at the desk was utterly nonplussed, and offered to take the cat back and refund my money. I told him there was no way, and that I was keeping the cat. (I hadn’t named her yet.) They weren’t sure of her age when I adopted her, and they guessed four months. The guesses ranged all over, but I stuck with the fourth month estimate. When Alice was spayed, the vet found that her body had underdeveloped, and that her reproductive organs and one of her kidneys were still fetal tissue. We sent the tissue out to a lab to be analyzed, and found no explanation. Sometimes it just happens like this.
Alice had a horrible infection after the surgery, and had to be kept in an Elizabethan collar for a week. Her natural wobble was amplified by the cone around her head, and her coat grew filthy. After the week, Dr. Rose, the vet who did the surgery, told us that she could go on a maintenance diet, but we needed to be careful to feed her food with good protein to reduce the load on her one kidney. Most cats die of kidney disease, she told us, and Alice would be especially vulnerable. A month later, we brought her in for a follow-up, and Dr. Rose gasped. “This is not the same Alice Bishop I saw a month ago!” Alice’s fur had grown thick and lustrous, and she would always have this amazing, beautiful coat. We had taken care, feeding her what had been recommended, and Alice surged to life.
I always felt comfortable congratulating myself for adopting her. She never had the instinct to make in the wild, or to catch her own food. And a lot of black cats get abused for superstitious reasons. Plus, with her medical challenges, there was no telling what another owner would have done. Alice lived with me as I moved through seven different addresses, from Southeast, to Los Angeles, and now to New York. I moved her almost 6000 miles. When my relationship with E was breaking down, there was never a doubt who would keep which pet.
I came home for lunch, and told Mina what had been discussed. I was going to have to put her down. I sobbed, feeling sorry. I couldn’t help feeling at first that I had failed her. I knew I hadn’t been the best owner ever, and I always let her litter box go way too long between scoops. When she come up on the sofa, wanting some lap time, a foul mood would always let me push her away. She would always come immediately back, and I would push back away again. She would bounce back up like a superball, no matter how many times I pushed her away. She loved me like that, unfailingly, in a way that I took for granted. I half-joked about giving her away a little too often, and some of that was hoping that someone who would pay more attention to her would take her. Mina hugged me, and told me I had done good by her, and she was very lucky to be mine.
Alice was hilarious to have around the house. She would stare out any window she could reach, but she could not not jump to any shelf above her head, so she often improvised stairs out of surprising objects. When she saw bird, she would chirp at them. E and I used to joke she was doing bird calls. I was looking forward to spring her, when there might be songbirds outside the window again. They never came to our house in LA, and I was looking forward to treating Alice to that once more, but that wasn’t to be. Alice frightened easily, and her Halloween green eyes on her black body would open comically wide in shock. When angry, her ears would fold back into a Yoda-like posture.
At night, Alice would sleep in E’s foot space on our bed. I take up the full length of the mattress, and it takes more than a cat to budge me when I’m asleep, so it would always be my partner who suffered. I had forgotten she did this until we moved to New York, and had to sleep on an air mattress, which was low enough for Alice to reach, at which point she promptly resumed claiming Mina’s foot space. Alice had a loud purr, and her whole body shook when she did, as she slept with gusto. When I first moved into my first house, I could hear Alice thundering back and forth along the full length of the upper floor as she explored the house. She excitedly ran (ran!) around, coming to a stop, squawking, and pounding back where she came from.
I came home from work, and dragged her out of her crate for a scratching session, which she happily took. I sat with her off and on, and she never really seemed to notice my lap. I could still get a good purr out of her, but I could see that there wasn’t much left. Knowing that she had less than an hour left in her life was hard for me, and it was harder still that there was no way I could help her understand. Mina drove us to the vet. They gently led us to a side room with its own exit from the building, so you could leave when you wanted in privacy. They took her away to put a catheter in her arm, then the vet brought her in, along with a syringe filled with pink liquid. I help turn Alice so the vet could reach the catheter. She slowly pumped the fluid in. There were a few trembles, and she listen for Alice’s nonexistent heartbeat. A few reflex breaths later, and she was gone. The vet left us alone, and told us that we had the room as long as we needed it. I absently scratched her body for a minute, then finally, let go the shuddering cry that had been leaking out all day. Mina waited patiently, silently as I let myself go. Finally, I got enough control. I walked over, took a last look into her emerald eyes, and whispered into an unhearing ear, “Good bye, Alice.” I found enough voice to say, “Let’s go home.” I took the empty crate, with an empty bed, back to the car, and Mina drove us back.
Alice was the first animal that was ever mine, and really the only one. I’ll always remember her happy, dopey life, the way she made you sweat if she sat in your lap too long, blaming her for all sorts of mischief she was clearly incapable of, and her explosive purr when she finally found out where the scratches were hiding. I wish I had been a better owner to her, but I know she could have done a lot worse than me. She has been with me through a lot of tough times in my life, and there is a part of me gone that I only know in its absence. I hope dreams of scratches and laps may come, and I’ll miss her.
Alice. 2001-2010
Posted by Mina 
