The Worst Fucking Summer
I cannot wait for this summer to be over. It sucks so hard.
First it was Bean, way back in March. Never really talked about Bean here on the ‘crawl. Buns were really more The BUG’s thing and they tended to live down in the basement anyway, so we didn’t interact as much as we did with the cats. But Bean was cool. She was small and feisty and didn’t take shit from anyone. She would sneak upstairs when we were in bed and feast on cat litter fresh from the box (not as disgusting as it sounds; our cat litter is wheat-based). She would glare at me, side-eyed and defiant, when I approached to shoo her out of the box; she would wait until the last minute before hopping back into the kitchen and down the stairs, giving me one of those patented bun “fuck you” thumps with her hind legs before disappearing.
Back when we first got her, I was the one responsible for delivering her meds after we got her fixed. She hated those meds. She would watch me coming from across the room, holding her ground until I was in range, and then— whap-whap—just punch the syringe right out of my hand with those spring-loaded forepaws of hers. (I’d never really thought of where the term “rabbit punch” came from before. I would not want to go one-on-one with one of those things in the ring.) She was small and fierce and unafraid.
She died in March. Something shut down in her GI tract, and all the drugs and Critical Care we stuffed into couldn’t start it up again.
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Then it was BOG, in June: beloved companion for over a decade, victim of an unsuspected brain tumor. I told you about BOG just last post; there’s nothing more I can say about him here.
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Then it was Potato, a geriatric rabbit we’d inherited only a few weeks after Bean died: one-eyed thanks to a dog attack in early life, wracked by intermittent and undiagnosed seizures for his first two years, a prey animal with enough baggage to justify a life spent hiding in corners and jumping at shadows—and yet he was the most fearless, friendly, in-your-face lagomorph you could ever hope to meet. Forced into exile by an allergy issue amongst his previous humans, he showed not a moment’s trepidation when introduced into the Magic Bungalow. It was a new adventure, and we were his new friends, and he would bound across any room we entered to greet us. We were a little worried that Doofus would try to eat him (and Doofus did, for one scary moment, close his jaws around Potato’s neck—but his eyes were on us the whole time. He was making a point. And he let Potato go, unharmed, when he decided the point had been made. Potato was amazingly chill throughout. He may not even have noticed.)
There was also the time when the Li’l Spud tried to hump BOG (humping’s a dominance behavior in rabbits), which made us cringe a little for BOG even when he did manage to get out from under.
Potato bounded across the room to greet us whenever we entered. He zoomed around our ankles. He leapt to the roof of his hutch and stood up on his hind legs to beg for treats. He ate like a black hole in the four months before he started going downhill.
That was what tipped us off; he stopped eating his hay, then his greens, then his kibble. We took him to the vet, started him on oral antibiotics and eye drops (his dead eye, quiet this whole time, had started acting up). Started feeding him Critical Care through a giant syringe. Even then, he was irrepressible; where every other rabbit we’ve known had to be force-fed when sick, Potato sucked back the stuff like it was crack. He couldn’t get enough.
But when he stopped coveting even the Critical Care we took him in again, squeezing him between two other appointments at a vet who was already fully booked. His core temperature was so low, the vet said, that he should by rights be dead already. There was nothing they could do but keep him comfortable and sedated until he actually was. He’d lived for over nine years, they reminded us. That’s old, for a rabbit. We should celebrate his long life, not mourn his inevitable death.
We did both. Potato died on August 2nd.
And now—just yesterday—Nutmeg. Meggles, aka The ‘Gles. The Junior Emissary from Moo.
This summer, it just doesn’t fucking stop.
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I underestimated Nutmeg, at first. Didn’t give her the credit she deserved. I admit it.
She was one of only two cats in the Magic Bungalow back then, before it was even called that, when Caitlin and I had just started dating. Minion took one look at me and decided she hated my guts: hissed and glared and left the room. She was clearly the one I had to win over, the hard case to prove to the BUG that I was Worthy. Nutmeg? She climbed into my lap and started purring the moment I sat down. She was a furry little slut, she loved everyone. No standards at all. She came pre-won and taken for granted, lost in Minion’s antagonistic shadow.
She continued to love everyone as I embarked on my months-long quest to get Minion to not hate me. We had to warn visitors: better make sure your bladder’s empty before you sit down in the Bungalow, because once The ‘Gles climbs into your lap she ain’t leaving. Long before we’d met our neighbors across the street she had already made first contact, sitting appraisingly to one side as they built their boxy ecofriendly homes from the ground up (those neighbors, we learned later, dubbed her “Supervisor Kitty”). She loved half’n’half. Her furry little brain put together the twin inputs smell-of-coffee and biggest can-opener walks into kitchen and integrated them into the output Follow Big Can Opener and Yell Until Served. And she always got served. She drank more of that stuff than I did.
Every night, as we settled into bed for our evening’s entertainment, Nutmeg would choose one or the other of us (she was carefully egalitarian) and settle down on our chests to watch with us. Every morning she would appear and climb up our bodies and rest upon our shoulders, just a few minutes before the alarm rang. She had learned about House Rules, you see: when a cat chooses to settle upon you, you cannot forcibly displace or remove her. You can only lure her off (to which end we’d preemptively stashed little caches of cat treats at strategic, within-reach locations throughout the house). Meggles exploited this by becoming Shoulder Cat every morning; the only way we were going to get up was if we bribed her. Naturally, the other cats noticed what was going on, and were not going to let it pass. Thus the venerable morning ritual of treating every damn feline in the place at 7:15 each morning.
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Three years ago her eyeball exploded. We thought we’d lost her then.
She came around the corner, screaming: her left eye a featureless red-black ball, something out of an exorcist movie. We rushed her to the usual 24-hour emergency clinic and learned that Nutmeg had hypertension, blood pressure so high that the vessels had begun literally bursting inside her. This particular rupture had not only flooded the eyeball with blood, but had torn the iris itself into a strange and alien shape. For months afterward Nutmeg was in the care of a Cat Ophthalmologist (nice to discover such things even exist); she’d be on blood pressure meds for the rest of her life.
She also had thyroid issues, so she was on meds for those too. But the thyroid meds made her hypertension worse; and her hypertension meds complicated the thyroid issues. Her whole continued existence was a tightrope act.
She walked it well enough, until the kidney disease. She hovered around that threshold for a couple of years: Stage 1 symptoms showing up in the blood work from one check-up and then No, wait, back to normal the next. But kidney disease is a patient and implacable fucker; two thirds of all cats come down with it by the age of fifteen. Older than that, the percentage goes up to 81%. Meggles was no BOG, and she was sixteen years old. When the disease finally hit her, it hit hard.
She went deaf almost overnight; it was The BUG, typically, who first noticed. She stopped spending the nights with us and started yelling to be let outside at 5a.m.— withdrawing from Human company, taking refuge in the morning cool of the front porch. That phase lasted only a week or two; then she retreated downstairs and curled up in messy chaos of Stella’s bedroom (abandoned, now, as The ‘Cro had left for Waterloo). She stayed nearby—unlike Minion before her, she never fled into the ravine where we feared we might lose her forever—but the cat who loved everyone, who sought out laps familiar or strange, who conversed nonstop with all and sundry, was vanishing before our eyes. The being who replaced her just wanted to be left alone.
Her weight dropped off a cliff. We gave her fluids sub-Q—once a week, then twice—and that worked until it didn’t. She grew increasingly anorexic. The food-obsessed cat who’d always striven for chonkhood melted down to fur and bones. I quailed at the thought of picking her up for fear that I might hurt her, break her even. I marveled that anything so skeletal would be able to hop up and down from her chair in the basement—travel up and down the stairs, even—with so little muscle mass to move it.
Fatman, on this very blog, said a magic word—Mirtazapine!—and I asked our vet and she said Yeah, we can put her on that. (And why the fuck didn’t you mention that when she was first diagnosed? I raged—but not out loud, because she’s been such a good vet all these many years.) So we gave her mirtazapine, and we gave her antacids, and antinausea and antivomiting drugs to help keep it all down (alongside the thyroid and blood pressure meds we’d been giving her for three years). And I deluded myself into feeling the faintest hope whenever this zombie thing licked a few grams of food on her way to the water dish (she drank constantly now), instead of taking a sniff and recoiling.
The BUG was not fooled. Meggles wasn’t even interested in half’n’half any more. Caitlin had known her longer than I had, loved her more deeply. Somehow that manifested in a greater willingness to kill the little creature. I resisted; when we took our laptops downstairs to work at Nutmeg’s side, she would still talk to us. She could still hop up and down, she could still get around. She was still in there. And after all, she’d only been on the mirtazapine for three days. Maybe it hadn’t kicked in yet. Maybe she could still pack on some weight, maybe her quality of life might yet improve, maybe—
Maybe she could recover from this disease that no cat has ever recovered from. Right.
There’s this hospice/palliative veterinary outfit that comes to your home so your pet doesn’t have to die in some loud white place that reeks of disinfectant. The lady that drove up in her portable deathmobile was very sweet, shared some bromide about it being better to do this a day too early than a day too late. I don’t think my wife and I see eye to eye on this. To Caitlin, a day too early is a day of suffering and torment avoided: a mercy. To me, it’s a day in which a being who can still purr, and talk, and respond to scritches won’t be able to do any of those things because it has stopped existing. I’ve never been able to balance that equation: how much pain and suffering does one have to allow before deciding, for another being, that death is the better alternative? How awful does life have to get before nonexistence is more humane? And how the fuck are we supposed to know how much of it another being is feeling, when they can’t tell us?
Caitlin is wiser than I in this. She is stronger. She’s lost loved ones to slow agonizing deaths like this, and those beings could talk. They could tell her what they were going through. Such painful insights were never forced on me. Yes, virtually my whole family has died; I even grieved some of them. But my stomach never clenched at the loss of a human life the way Caitlin’s has. The only time I’ve felt such loss in a way that really hurts is when it comes to these small companions.
Maybe that makes me emotionally stunted in some way. Maybe I’m the purest kind of misanthrope (it’s hard not to be, these days). Or maybe it’s just the mundane, boring fact that the loss we feel never scales to some empirical metric of the value of lives lost; it scales, instead, to how large those lives figured in our own. There are humans that loom very large in my life; I’ve just been extremely fortunate that none of them have died yet. May my luck continue to hold (just last week, in fact, I wrote an anniversary poem to The BUG asking her not to die before I do. I’m kind of a romantic that way.)
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There’s not much else to say. Nutmeg was no great genius, no survivor of great hardship. She didn’t spend half her life living rough. We don’t know what happened the first year of her life—her previous family surrendered her for unknown reasons—but given what a fearless and friendly chatterbox she was right out of the gate, it’s unlikely she was abused.
She was just a wonderful, big-hearted cat who loved laps and food and who never did a mean thing to anyone.
I used to have to grab the remote control for our sound bar the moment the alarm went off, lest Nutmeg pin me down and keep me from getting it in time to turn on the news. Now, I have all the time in the world. No small thing yells demandingly at the big thing holding the milk carton; the morning treat ritual is a perfunctory and impoverished affair among the survivors. The Magic Bungalow has grown colder over the past few months, its nonhuman population reduced to three cats and three fish (and one itinerant bearded dragon, depending on whether The ‘Cro happens to be back from university). It has never been so empty in all the time I’ve lived here. It used to be some kind of magic architectural being in its own right, with a heart in every room; now, half of those hearts have been torn out. Sometimes, the place seems almost haunted.
Those of us who remain have no known medical issues, beyond a certain chonkiness on Blubbery Panda’s part. The surviving cats are three and ten and thirteen; Doofus will probably outlive me, if he doesn’t get shmucked by a car. This will be a relief to those of you who come here for the crunchy skiffy speculation, only to be walloped with a barrage of Pet Death. The skiffy stuff may still be a while in coming (I have deadlines to meet, and trips to plan: any of you gonna be in Bulgaria next month? Spain in November?), but the summer is nearly over.
So, hopefully, is the body count.
What i think;
You guys all look happy and fulfilled in the photos you post online.. i’m not sure if you need a reminder of how fucking rare that is? My man, you hit the jackpot a long, long time ago and been caching it in ever since. Statistically some real wild shit right there. Never, ever forget that.
Additionally, you have what appears to be a decent household (looks so cosy!), with more than decent an exterior.. that’s getting harder and harder to come by (just look outside Canada/US and get back to me if you think you’re average).
Lastly, you have not only found your true calling (scaring the natives with “porno drivel”, loved that one..), but have additionally found quite a few of us morans actually paying for the outcome of said calling.
I feel you, i really do. But!
/Eric Idle
Aaaalways look on the briiight side of life 🙂
Next post needs focus on something positive or funny. Must be something that regresses you back to 15yrs old, right? Go whacky on the writing and spread some smiles yeah?
My sincere best.
(virtual support hugs cost. I have a catalogue if you’re interested though. Paypal only)
Yeah, believe me. I know it. People do not come here for the death porn. It’s just, there’s been a lot of dying here lately, and the little guys deserve some kind of commemoration.
But absolutely, time for a change in tone.
All the best.
This is who you are. This is why we love you and follow you. I do not know about the others, but I appreciate your reaching out. I hope it’s a while until I have to apply these impressions into my own life.
They do and they’re getting it i think, wording helps 🙂
Incidentally, met a few guys in my life that were -blessedly- a bit ‘off’ the trodden track. But not a one had a wabbit nested in his inner pocket, no sir, lol.
Cool pic that one ^^
Oh man, I’m so sorry.
And I have to skip these posts halfway, I often think I’d rather sacrifice a million humans than losing a so-called-pet. But you don’t owe us a change of tone. Write and do whatever helps you.
Take care.
I’m really sorry.
“I’ve never been able to balance that equation: how much pain and suffering does one have to allow before deciding, for another being, that death is the better alternative?”
I’ve been there five times in the past two years. I would very much like to have an answer to that question that wouldn’t break my soul whatever I choose.
Sorry for your losses, Wattses. I’m on Team BUG’s side of this issue, as I’ve watched others milk the last gasps of life out of their almost-undead companions. The coulda-woulda-shouldas haunted my steps for a year and a half after putting down our last feline, until I brought a kitten back into the house, to make it a home, again. Peace to your family, PW.
I don’t know if you need to hear this from a stranger on the internet, but reading these eulogies, I’ve always gotten the feeling you’ve always given them all you’ve got. Don’t feel bad that you did what you had to do, and cherish the memories that you have.
Sorry for your loss Peter.
I won’t say that the “barrage of Pet Death” is enjoyable to read, but I’m not thinking “Hey Watts STFU about your pets and get back to the books” either. The number of regular commentators is small enough that I think of this as a community of sorts, small enough that you’re writing to us, not just broadcasting. And in turn a response might actually mean something to you, not just be the 5342nd person to type “my condolences”. 100 or 200 years ago writers had circles of correspondents which who they wrote about anything and everything, this is the 21st C version.
I’m sorry for your losses. Compared to the brief final moment, you gave them a good and complete life full of care.
The entry was moving, full of scare insights about grief and clinging to the lives of our dearest friends. It will resonate with anyone who isn’t virtually psychopathic and possesses some empathy (I tend to think that most of us who frequent the blog and delve into your books can feel that, but hey, I could be wrong).
Summer is already over. Keep it up.
Regarding your last paragraph, please share more details when the time comes. I live in Spain and it will be an absolute banger attend one of your presentations/book signings.
Wishing you a restful weekend ahead.
Sorry for your losses. It must be excruciating.
Sorry for your losses, Peter Watts..
Fucking 2023, fucking August..
On August 15, he himself lost his best furry friend, a young Bengal cat named Simon.Heart attack(
It hurts unbearably. So it turns out that animals become much closer than humans..
Cat Simon on the moon. In memory of my cat Simon..
The term “rabbit punch” actually stems from something else entirely, but I don’t think it’s either the time or the place to indulge my inner language trivia nerd on that particular subject. My condolences.
When you open your heart – less metaphorically, a chunk of your neural capacity – to anything more ephemeral than yourself, then the universe will eventually reach in and snatch it away, and leave a bleeding void.
Yet you have opened your heart. Time and time again.
And that is how you show whatever may be watching that your like should not be underestimated.
You ever thought about writing for a living? Think you might be not half-bad at it. All I’m going to say is that when a similar time comes for me, I’ll be thinking about these posts as a way to cope. Thanks for that–sincerley.
I’m sorry for your loss. Really shitty to lose so many in such short time. Take care.