Old friends, old friends,
Sat on their park bench like bookends.
A newspaper blowin’ through the grass
Falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.
On August 3, 2003, after nineteen years and citing irreconcilable differences, I moved out of “the marital home”, as they say.
I moved into what I would refer to, sometimes affectionately, as my “two room slice of heaven”. This was the first time in my life I had lived on my own. At one week shy of twenty-two years of age, I married my future-ex and moved out of my mother’s home and care and into my own home but still the care of another. It would remain that way for another 20 years.
It’s interesting to note that while I have assumed responsibilities greater than one would ordinarily expect at various times in my life (5 years old, 8, 11, 15, 19, 22) known of these has ever included the basic care and feeding of me. I could and did make million dollar decisions but in 2003, when living alone for the first time, someone had to teach me how to fry an egg. Not one of my proudest moments and very, very shameful.
In those first weeks, I slept on a cot. I had a refrigerator that held a quart of half & half, a bottle of water and a bottle of Gatorade. And I was crazy lonely, and crazy scared. My life was collapsing around me. I was still functionally unemployed. Trying to work some hours at the start-up that would become my HP experience and making ice cream.
I have had at least one cat in my life since the time of my earliest memories. I picked out Bambi, the runt of the litter, when I was four years old. She lived to be twenty and a half. Babette, who was hit and killed by a car the day I buried my father. Sam, Ted, Max, Missy, George. I’ve been fortunate that all my cats have been long-lived which is part of what makes this particularly difficult. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
I decide that in my new bachelorhood that I should adopt a cat. The FX suggested perhaps I take Brewster with me and I would have liked to have had him as a roommate. We were pals. But I didn’t feel right taking him from his home. So I called our friendly, nearby, shelter looking for a kitten. “Yup, we have a littler of five”, they say. I called my landlord to clear it with him, arranging to go the next day and he will be available to answer the call. Well, the next day the are no more kittens.
“I’m looking for a lap cat, someone affectionate. I need a friend right now.”
“We have a black, long-hair named Sparky.”
On August 18, 2003, I drive down there, go in back, open up his cage, hang out for 10 minutes or so. He’s affectionate, purring, let me pet him. He bites, but I chalk it up to over-stimulation and that his former owners had him declawed. (Don’t get me started!) So I start the adoption process. The woman at the desk asks “who” and I reply “Sparky”.
To which she asks, “Sparky?” And the woman walking past us says, “yeah, I saw them together. I think he’s right for Sparky.”
My first thought is “Sparky? who the fuck names a cat ‘Sparky’? ‘Sparky’ is a dog’s name!” But seeing as I was asking him to accept me on my terms who was I to ask any more of him? Without realizing it, I had adopted Holly Golightly’s attitude toward the cat in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”.
So Sparky, he was. Sparky, Spark, Spark-man, Sparkles, Sparticus, Sparkinator, Sparkplug, and often, Asshole. But I loved this furry beast. We developed a tenuous relationship. We would come together for a few minutes at a time. Always in private. When company came over to the two-room, slice of heaven, Spark was always hanging with you. He didn’t want to be pet, or fawned over. Fuck you, he was hanging with the guys. We even had the same birthday.
But when we were alone. Especially at bed time, we would snuggle. and every time I would wake to go to the bathroom, he would want to snuggle again. It was our routine. There were nights when I would jump back in bed, pull the covers over my head, and pretend I didn’t hear him because another 15 minutes of love was expected.
In January, 2012, as I began to realize that I really was going to be moving to Seattle, I began to condition Spark to the cat carrier. It was set up in our place, and it became the only place I would give him his snacks. Then in April, 2012, I lost my job with HP. I put some snacks in the carrier and when Spark went to eat them, I pushed him in and closed the door. We drove for 20 minutes (to Newburyport), I turned around in a McDonald’s drive-through, and drove 20 minutes home.
A week later, we drove 2 hours to the Cape, stayed an hour, and drove 2 hours back. He tolerated both of these car rides really well. I was no longer crazy anxious about the trip across country. It was the logistics I was concerned with. On day three of the trip, we opened the carrier and let him out. He never went back in.
He would ride in the car, the wind in his fur like he’d been doing it all his life. He never tried to get out. At the end of the day, I would check into the hotel, come back out to the car, call him and THEN he would come to the door. I carried him into the hotel, and carried him back out to the car again the next morning.
About 4 months after we arrived, he started to urinate in inappropriate places. We took him to the vet and he thought it might be a condition that young cats will get as the days lengthen and they believe they are going to starve due to a lack of nocturnal hunting time. The vet thought that with the move and being unused to the seasons in the Northwest, this was the most likely diagnosis and we treated him as if it were.
This spring things started getting really bad again and when we returned to the vet, we treated him the same way again. Three weeks later there didn’t seem to be the improvement like last time so I took him back and scheduled an ultrasound.
On May 20, 2013, my furry roommate was diagnosed with inoperable cancer: a tumor in his bladder near the ureters from the kidneys occupying 40% of his bladder. The doctor gave him 2-3 months to live. We talked at length about his quality of life and how I would know “it’s time”. The doctor prescribed an anti-inflammatory medication that has been known to shrink bladder tumors in dogs and humans. I decided to also treat him with a high-CBD, low-THC, cannabis-based tincture. This had no observable positive or negative effects.
This has been extremely difficult for me. I have never had to watch anyone, pet or human, die slowly. My father died of a massive heart attack. My sister was murdered by her partner. I’ve had cats hit & killed by cars. Killed by other animals. But never have I had to watch someone I love die like this.
Over the past five days, I’ve watched my dear friend deteriorate to the point where he is eating very little, and has stopped grooming himself. I bathed him last night in an attempt to help him preserve some dignity. He has lost a third of his body weight since September, he is frail, and deserves better than this. And although I desperately wish otherwise., I know “it’s time”.
In a few hours, I will say goodbye to my dear friend of nearly ten years.
I love you, Sparky.
Old friends,
Memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears.
wondering aloud 