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<\/a>First it was Bean, way back in March. Never really talked about Bean here on the \u2018crawl. Buns were really more The BUG\u2019s thing and they tended to live down in the basement anyway, so we didn\u2019t interact as much as we did with the cats. But Bean was cool. She was small and feisty and didn\u2019t 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 \u201cfuck you\u201d thumps with her hind legs before disappearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>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\u2014 whap-whap<\/em>\u2014just punch<\/em> the syringe right out of my hand with those spring-loaded forepaws of hers. (I\u2019d never really thought of where the term \u201crabbit punch\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She died in March. Something shut down in her GI tract, and all the drugs and Critical Care we stuffed into couldn\u2019t start it up again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then it was BOG<\/a>, in June: beloved companion for over a decade, victim of an unsuspected brain tumor. I told you about BOG just last post; there\u2019s nothing more I can say about him here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then<\/em> it was Potato, a geriatric rabbit we\u2019d 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\u2014and 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\u2019s neck\u2014but 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was also the time when the Li\u2019l Spud tried to hump BOG (humping\u2019s a dominance behavior in rabbits), which made us cringe a little for BOG even when he did manage to get out from under.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve known had to be force-fed when sick, Potato sucked back the stuff like it was crack. He couldn\u2019t get enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019d lived for over nine years, they reminded us. That\u2019s old, for a rabbit. We should celebrate his long life, not mourn his inevitable death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We did both. Potato died on August 2nd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now\u2014just yesterday\u2014Nutmeg. Meggles, aka The \u2018Gles. The Junior Emissary from Moo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This summer, it just doesn\u2019t fucking stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n I underestimated Nutmeg, at first. Didn\u2019t give her the credit she deserved. I admit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>: 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\u2019s antagonistic shadow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s empty before you sit down in the Bungalow, because once The \u2018Gles climbs into your lap she ain\u2019t leaving. Long before we\u2019d 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 \u201cSupervisor Kitty\u201d). She loved half\u2019n\u2019half. Her furry little brain put together the twin inputs smell-of-coffee<\/em> and biggest can-opener walks into kitchen<\/em> and integrated them into the output Follow Big Can Opener and Yell Until Served. <\/em>And she always got served. She drank more of that stuff than I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every night, as we settled into bed for our evening\u2019s 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three years ago her eyeball exploded. We thought we\u2019d lost her then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019d be on blood pressure meds for the rest of her life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She walked it well enough, until the kidney disease. She hovered around that threshold for a couple of years: Stage 1 symptoms<\/em> showing up in the blood work from one check-up and then No, wait, back to normal<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.\u2014 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\u2019s bedroom (abandoned, now, as The \u2018Cro had left for Waterloo). She stayed nearby\u2014unlike Minion before her, she never fled into the ravine where we feared we might lose her forever\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her weight dropped off a cliff. We gave her fluids sub-Q\u2014once a week, then twice\u2014and that worked until it didn\u2019t. She grew increasingly anorexic. The food-obsessed cat who\u2019d 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\u2014travel up and down the stairs, even\u2014with so little muscle mass to move it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fatman, on this very blog, said a magic word\u2014Mirtazapine!<\/em>\u2014and I asked our vet and she said Yeah, we can put her on that. <\/em>(And why the fuck didn\u2019t you mention that when she was first diagnosed?<\/em> I raged\u2014but not out loud, because she\u2019s 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The BUG was not fooled. Meggles wasn\u2019t even interested in half\u2019n\u2019half 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\u2019s side, she would still talk to us. She could still hop up and down, she could still get around. She was still in there<\/em>. And after all, she\u2019d only been on the mirtazapine for three days. Maybe it hadn\u2019t kicked in yet. Maybe she could still pack on some weight, maybe her quality of life might yet improve, maybe\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe she could recover from this disease that no cat has ever recovered from. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s this hospice\/palliative veterinary outfit that comes to your home so your pet doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s a day in which a being who can still purr, and talk, and respond to scritches won\u2019t be able to do any of those things because it has stopped existing. I\u2019ve 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\u2019t tell us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Caitlin is wiser than I in this. She is stronger. She\u2019s lost loved ones to slow agonizing deaths like this, and those beings could<\/em> 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\u2019s has. The only time I\u2019ve felt such loss in a way that really hurts is when it comes to these small companions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe that makes me emotionally stunted in some way. Maybe I\u2019m the purest kind of misanthrope (it’s hard not to be, these days). Or maybe it\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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\u2019m kind of a romantic that way.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s not much else to say. Nutmeg was no great genius, no survivor of great hardship. She didn\u2019t spend half her life living rough. We don\u2019t know what happened the first year of her life\u2014her previous family surrendered her for unknown reasons\u2014but given what a fearless and friendly chatterbox she was right out of the gate, it\u2019s unlikely she was abused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was just a wonderful, big-hearted cat who loved laps and food and who never did a mean thing to anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n