Dear Baby Boy,
Just a little over two years ago I held you in my arms while gentle hands eased you from this world to the next. It's a tribute to how very loved you were that everyone -- literally everyone -- at the vet's was in tears that day. We knew that day was coming, but it didn't make it any easier.
For nearly two years you'd been living with dilated cardiomyopathy. Feline cardiomyopathy, unfortunately, is quite common but you had one of the more unusual forms of the disease. Many heart kitties have the hypertrophic form, where the walls of the heart thicken. You had the dilated form, where they thin. I knew our time together was limited the night I rushed you to the vet, the night when you suddenly started having problems breathing, and Dr. Best Vet Ever told me he thought you were in heart failure. He told me it could be managed, but I knew, and he knew I knew, that 'managed' meant at best a few months.
But that didn't happen, sweet man. You lived a lot longer than anyone thought you would, longer than even some of the best veterinarians thought you could. And more importantly, you lived as a normal cat for much of that time. We don't know how this happened to you, there are various causes for feline cardiomyopathies. The vets at Tufts Veterinary School thought the most likely cause was a virus, since your heart was normal at a well-cat vet visit just six months before you got sick. But, it could have been genetic. Whatever it was, it didn't really matter to me because the end result was going to be the same. My beloved Baby Boy was going to die.
You came into my life nearly seven years ago. I had just lost another cat, my lovely Grey Kitty, unexpectedly and I was a mess. One of my lab techs, who happened to live in the same town, told me about a stray who was living around an apartment house near me, a house where a friend of hers lived. This stray, she said, was desperate to get into a house, and was being fed by at least six people, none of whom could adopt him for various reasons. Maybe it was too soon for me to get another cat, but ...
In some ways it was too soon, but the thought of a stray cat, any stray cat living in the open at the mercy of traffic and the foxes and coyotes which abound around here was too much. So, I walked up the street, found you sleeping under a lilac bush, verified with some of the residents of the apartment house that you were the stray in question, scooped you up and brought you home.
Thank God for that impulse. You were a joy and a delight. Every single night you curled up on the bed next to me, and every morning you woke me up by purring loudly and often wetly in my ear to let me know the cat needed to be fed. You played with your many toys, and you played with the dog and her many toys. You cuddled and you teased. You never met a stranger. You were, my sweet man, the perfect cat -- that combination of loving snuggliness and playful felinity.
When the dog died (it's been a bad few years for pets around here) you were so lonely. Within a week it was obvious that for our combined sanity, I needed to get you a pet. I thought about getting another dog, but due to the fact that I worked a lot and the fact that my dog was a rare soul herself who was just fine being left alone for 8+ hours a day, so long as there was a cat around for companionship and someone to come in to walk her in the middle of the day, the likes of which would be hard to find in another canine, I decided to get another cat instead.
That's how we got Thundercat. When I brought him home from his miserable foster home (another post entirely), you were less than thrilled. He spent the first three days under the bed, while you spent those three days hissing at him and generally acting pissed at the world. But, sweet boy, I've had cats all my life and I knew that with a little time you'd both get over it and at least coexist. And I was right. On day four I came home from work and found the two of you knotted together on my bed, giving each other a bath. You were fast friends after that.
You loved your brother cat so much, and he loved you too. You played together, even though Thundercat was shy at first, due to his sad history. You groomed each other and snuggled together on the couch. And after you got sick, Thundercat appointed himself your nurse. In the first, early, awful days when you were so sick and weak, he groomed you when you didn't have the energy to clean yourself. Before we got your meds and supplements worked out, when you were barely eating, he let you go to the food dish first, as if he knew it took very little to turn you off eating altogether, and that his presence would distract you from the one or two mouthfuls you would take.
One of the most painful things about your illness, which came just three years after I adopted you, and only two years after I adopted Thundercat, was how your inveitable death would affect our big boy. He loved you so much. Then came the night when my brother called me, a little after midnight, to tell me he'd found a flea-ridden kitten in a snowbank, and he was worried because he'd bathed it and it looked like it was bleeding and could I come over and check it out ...
As I drove over to J's house I tried to convince myself that I was not going to be taking that kitten home. You were so sick then, little guy, that night had been particularly bad, and the last thing you needed was excitement in the form of a kitten. But when I got there, and saw the scrawny little creature that was our Minx, I couldn't resist. J had said he'd keep her until the morning, and take her to a shelter. He's not a pet person the way I am, despite being raised in the same house with all those pets, and felt he couldn't give a pet his full attention anyway, but couldn't leave her out in the cold and snow. He was worried because she was bleeding from all the flea bites, and figured his crazy cat lady sister would 1.) know what to do about it and 2.) drive ten miles in the middle of the night to check it out.
Of course I ended up bringing her home, cursing my stupidity all the way back with that kitten cuddled inside my coat. But it was Thundercat I was thinking of, Baby Boy. It looked, frankly, like you wouldn't be with us too much longer and I wanted Thundercat to have a friend when you passed on. As it happened, that kitten was the best thing I could have done for both of you. She distracted you from your illness, gave you something to think about besides how bad you were feeling. Your innate curiosity rose to the forefront and you took to your new little sister right away. So did Thundercat, who now added 'nanny' to his list of duties. Thundercat is not an especially playful cat, but several times I watched him deliberately engage Minx in play so she'd leave you alone.
A month or two later, not so long after Dr. Best Vet Ever told me I needed to seriously consider euthanizing you, you made a miraculous turn around. I started you on co-enzyme q10, taurine and L-carnitine as well as B vitamins, supplements I learned about through a wonderful support group I'd joined, the Yahoo Feline Heart Group, and this in combination with the meds that Dr. Best Vet Ever and Tufts Veterinary School came up with for you made you feel so much better. Medically, your heart was the mess it always was, clinically, you were normal. You ate like a horse, you ran, you enjoyed your new cat tree (you'd make a running leap, five feet in the air to the top of it all the time, this with practically no heart function at all!), you napped in your cat bed and on the windowsills, you played and cuddled with your brother and sister. You were your old self.
We lived in this grace for fifteen months, sweet boy. I still knew you were going to die, I'd accepted that, but I was then, and continue to be now, so grateful that I had all this extra time with you. Everything I'd done, every penny I spent was so worth it just to have this time with my Baby Boy. Even the twice-daily ordeal of getting your meds and supplements into you was worth it -- how you hated that! But to my mind, the ten minutes of not-so-great time per day was more than compensated for by the other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes of good. I think you felt the same way. You were even more attached to me during the last year of your life than you had been before -- you used to get on my lap and throw yourself over my left shoulder so I could stroke your back and tell you how much I loved you. You literally could do anything you wanted (except skip the meds, sorry, little guy), everything a cat could want, you had because I knew that each day could be our last.
The end came swiftly, and in the way I thought it might. Despite the fact that clinically, behaviorally, you seemed normal, your poor little heart was failing. And because your heart was failing, so, inexorably, were all your other organs. I'd guessed that because of the chronic under-perfusion of your liver and kidneys and so on, you would eventually go into systemic organ failure, and sadly, I was right. On Thanksgiving Day, you showed the symptoms of acute kidney failure. The next day, I sent you on to your next home, with messages for all my other babies who waited for you there.
This was a sad decision, but not agonizing, the way it was when you were first sick. Back then, back when everyone was telling me I 'needed to think' about euthanasia, I just couldn't do it. Which was strange for me, Baby Boy. All evidence pointed towards that being the humane choice, the right choice, a choice I had sadly made many times before with different pets ... but something in me said no. It's not time. And, as it happened, I was right to wait.
And, as it happened, it was right to send you on when I did. You knew it was time, too. That afternoon, as we were lying on my bed, I asked you, "Is it time, sweet boy?" and you turned your head and looked at me. I saw then, in your eyes, that you were ready. That you trusted me to help you with the last thing we needed to do in this journey. I wrapped you in your blankie, and the other cats came and said good bye. I walked outside with you, walked you around the yard so you could see the trees and the birds one last time from the outside (you were a strictly indoor cat). Then we drove to the vet's, and it says a lot about how ready you were that you didn't even need to be put in the carrier for this last trip. You just lay there, cuddled in your blankie, not even trying to move. And there, in the same exam room where I first learned you were sick, you lay peacefully in my arms, not resisting at all while you transitioned from this world to the next.
Despite knowing that this was the right thing to do, and despite a generally peaceful feeling about it, I was still quite obviously a sobbing mess that weekend. But, just four days later, Morsel came into our lives. More on that later, but ... if that wasn't you materializing back on earth as a little orange kitten, then it was you from heaven directing the most perfect cat possible into our lives.
I think of you every day, Sweet Boy, literally. For many years I have made it a practice to review my day -- not prayers, exactly, more of a shout-out to the universe -- and each night I have said good night to you, along with my other beloved dead, human and otherwise. I learned so much from you, and from our journey together. It was because of you that I ended up adopting our lovely Lilly, who also has a form of cardiomyopathy. It seemed a shame to waste all that specialized knowledge I'd gained while helping you, and I'd learned that I had it in me to love and cherish a pet even knowing that the time I would have with that pet was going to be painfully short. And because of you, a cat who was considered unadoptable is living out whatever time she has as a cherished and pampered princess in the home you loved so much.
We love you, Baby Boy. And wherever you are right now, I know you love us too.
Mama Cat
