I brought him home in a taped-up box. I wasn’t planning on taking the old cat. I had visited many times before and this was supposed to be just another play date. Something clicked somewhere, like he told me to do it.
His meowing kept my heart rate up on the drive. I kept telling him we were almost home. The lights couldn’t change fast enough, the traffic was too slow. He shuffled around in his box through every corner.
When I let him loose in my apartment, he hid in the closet for three days. Anna tried desperately, gently to coax him out. He wouldn’t budge.
Then finally on the third night, he cautiously climbed on the bed, lay on her chest, and purred. I thought she might burst with happiness.
He was too old for shenanigans. His happiness was found solely in laps and catnip. He would sit by our sliding glass door and peer out to the world. Our apartment was too small. It wasn’t until two years later we were able to give him a backyard.
When we had dinner he would sit, dignified in the third chair and politely keep us company while we ate. I reckon he thought of himself more as a gentleman than a cat.
He would sit in the grass and chase little flying bugs with his beautiful blue eyes. As he aged, he slowly lost weight. Kidney problems, they told us. They said it would kill him eventually.
One day, towards the end of it, he came outside to watch me rebuild the fence. He found a warm, relatively comfortable spot on the lumber and watched until he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. I sat next to him so he wouldn’t wake. The building could wait.
I built that fence during the Covid lockdowns. He got us through that lonely, frightening time, one lap sit, one quiet night curled under the covers at a time. When we caught it he was an especially good nurse, doing rounds and checking in on us. Even as his health worsened.
He started having issues going to the bathroom. But he never complained. He only purred when he felt better. He would rub his head against mine and brush against my cheek with his whiskers. They’d twitch and tingle against my stubble.
We increased our visits to the vet, and his medication. To no avail. We kept carrying him to the litter box. Eventually, he stopped walking altogether.
We knew it was time when he stopped purring. Anna sat with him as he shakily tried to make it out of the bedroom. He barely crawled a foot. He lowered down on the floor and buried his nose in the carpet. She hung her head and looked at me. Tears worked down her freckles. She told me to call the vet.
She came into the house, respectful and experienced. Charlie lay on a pad next to Anna. As the vet injected him, he kept his head on Anna’s lap and watched her until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore. Anna petted his head while his breathing stopped. Her shoulders silently shook.
The vet asked if I wanted to hold him. I told her then, “No, he’s not here anymore.” She covered his head and I watched from the door as she took my buddy away.
Anna spread his ashes in the dirt last year along some starts of our state’s flower: Forget-me-nots. They didn’t bloom at first.
They started over-filling the garden box, of course they would. We uprooted some of them and planted them behind the house, near the tree he liked to sit under.
I just knew they wouldn’t survive.
They bloomed last week, beautiful blue.
Storied By Josh 