Pardon My French

I knew that his death was coming, but that still doesn’t really make things any easier for me.

My mom called me this afternoon to tell me that she and my dad finally had to put down Junior, our family’s pet cat of 14 years. He had an invasive, aggressive and inoperable tumor in his mouth that made life difficult for him. My parents monitored him closely so as to give him the longest life that he deserved. He died peacefully without pain and mom said he behaved as if he knew it was his time to go.

Junior, wearing the tie collar I bought him

When I was last home for a visit, this past November, I noticed that the little guy was missing one of his front canine teeth and had some swelling along his gum line. Later, when my dad took him to the vet, the doctor’s informed him of Junior’s tumor, a fairly common condition in older cats, and gave him a month to live.

During that time, he ate the best of moist cat food, tuna and pate. When he could no longer close his mouth and had difficulty eating, that’s when my parents made the decision to take him in.

Mom and dad are taking him up north to bury him at the family cottage. A friend of my dad’s made him a coffin from wood and each of us wrote a few words of love that he is being buried with. This is my contribution:

To Junior Boy

Childhood meant I had all the time in the world to cultivate meaningful bonds with my pets. The white cats I grew up came when I called their names, slept at my feet at night and left dead chipmunk “presents” on the front porch.

You were never my kitty cat, though.

I was 12 when we brought you home and it was clear from the first few days that we weren’t ever going to be best friends. When I tried to hold you in my arms, you violently squirmed away and slashed my skin with your claws.

When I shared my warm bed with you, you woke me from a sound sleep by piercing the tender parts of my arm with your baby teeth.

I tried to charm you with treats, toys and cans of tuna. It took years before I accepted the fact that you couldn’t be bought and I gave up trying.

Some may say that you belonged to no one in particular, wandering from one neighbor’s yard to the next, and cycling through a rotation of sleeping in front of vents, empty beds and warm laps.

You were my dog’s best friend, my mom’s little boy and you kept my dad company when he would read in his blue recliner.

You were a loyal pet and a key part of our family for 14 years. I’ll miss you, but I’m so happy that you’re no longer suffering. Rest in peace, little man.

Last week the vet put my cat Kiwi on Fluoxetine, or a generic form of Prozac.

They don’t make tiny versions of the drugs for animals. This is the same stuff that people take, only it’s in a much smaller dosage: the vet broke up her pills into smaller pieces.

A few days ago, a Facebook friend from high school joked: “just couldn’t take all the pressure of laying around, eating out of a bowl, and shitting in a box?”

She is a pretty high maintenance little cat, but it is a bit more complicated than that.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that Kiwi had an accident on our love seat. Fearing a urinary tract infection, I took her to the vet right away.

Other than a pretty nasty case of fleas (which she picked up from my friend Jeannette’s cat) the vet found that Kiwi had cat crystals, which are essentially kidney stones in cats. These crystals block her up and hurt her when she tries to pee so she goes where she’s most comfortable: on our furniture.

Believed to be caused by her food–which has high levels of protein in it–I was recommended a more appropriate and rather expensive brand of food. Because she had a negative association with her box, I also had to buy her a new litter box and a new type of litter.

(Also expensive was the 9 months of Frontline, flea powder for carpet and the urine removal cleaner.)

Because I don’t want my little baby to be uncomfortable, I don’t want her to ruin our furniture and I don’t want to stress Phil, I knew I had to do all I could to make this stop immediately.

After two weeks, the accidents started happening again. I took her back in and the lab techs found that she had a whole lot of bacteria in her urine: she was prone to making these crystals.

Two visits later, for a total of three vet visits, the doctor ruled out a whole lot of conditions, leaving Feline Idiopathic Cystitis as the remaining cause for her problem. Kiwi gets stressed out, it irritates her bladder and she makes these crystals.

She’s already pretty skiddish and has been that way since she’s been little–she was taken from her mom too early. It took some process of elimination, but we were able to determine exactly what was causing her so much unrest: the cat who lives across from us, a huge, male tuxedo cat named Achilles is making her anxious. He sits outside atop his carpet covered cat tree, howling, sometimes for hours at a time.

She hasn’t had any accidents since she went on the medication, but the vet said it will take a few weeks to fully have an effect on her.

In the meantime, we’re doing our best to reduce her stress –we got rid of her fleas and we’re keeping the blinds closed when Achilles is outside– and just hoping that that Prozac helps. Keep your fingers crossed, all.

There’s no such thing as “too much coffee.”

Found this typewriter key necklace today and couldn’t resist. It’s an absolutely perfect symbol of the history of our relationship.

Thanksgiving dinner was never an especially favorite ritual of mine.

We usually spent the holiday with some of my parent’s friends, a group of people who I’ve spent some holidays with as long as I’ve been alive. When it gets right down to it, though, we don’t know anything real about one another: only the most superficial stuff. My parents would discuss with these people what kinds of activities we’ve been up to, what kind of grades we’d received and pass around photos of how we looked on picture day and at the homecoming dance the previous year. We don’t know anything about each other as people.

We’d all sit in our assigned seats around the dinner table and eat our dinner at 1 p.m. Our accolades were shared, compared, quietly judged. Afterward, the children were instructed to go down to the basement for the remainder of the party while our parents drank and talked about the good old days, the times before we all were born. It never strayed from this formula.

I remember one year that the topic of marriage came up during dinner. A man who is a sort of faux-uncle to my sister and me asked the table what age we all thought was the ideal time to get married.

My “cousin” spent a few minutes describing her dream “Tiffany & Co. wedding.” Everyone else didn’t seem to give it a whole lot of thought, and one by one, revealed what age they considered to be the perfect time to get married.

When it came to be my turn, I admitted that I thought the question was silly. “You shouldn’t force the concept of marriage by pinning down an age that you must to be married by,” I said. It shouldn’t be a question of age, because if you truly live your life as its meant to be lived, you’ll never know when you fall in love. Whether you’re 30 or 90, you should get married when you’re ready to–and if you aren’t ever married, it shouldn’t be frowned upon. My sister nodded in agreement. Otherwise, I collected a bunch of blank stares and the subject was quickly changed as though I’d said nothing at all.

Holiday tradition resentment aside, marriage has never been part of my plan.

I didn’t spent my childhood dreaming about what my wedding day would be like. I didn’t play wedding with my Barbie dolls, make crayon drawings of my dream dress or include a bridesmaid dress color palette in my MASH games.

In adolescence, this turned into a full on: “I don’t want to ever get married,” which didn’t seem set well with a lot of people I knew. But, did they have the right to be surprised? Gays weren’t legally allowed to marry–and everywhere I looked I saw unhappy straight couples, my parents included. It seemed that whatever these couples had at one time loved about one another, it had completely disappeared.

People just didn’t seem to take marriage seriously, either. I would hear all the time about celebrities and reality TV stars becoming divorced within a year of their wedding day. Even “real life” people didn’t seem to fully grasp what it meant to be married. When I worked grocery retail just a few years ago, a guy who was 15 years my senior had recently become engaged. I remember him saying “and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll divorce her. Just like I did the last one.”

Why should the idea of and word “marriage” ever mean anything when its lumped into the same category as the above listed relationships?

When Phil first asked how I felt about marriage, he got an earful. He didn’t disagree with me at all, but I do think that my opinions made him sad. Even with divorced parents and similar life experiences, marriage was important as a symbol to him.

Marriage as a word and concept doesn’t mean much to me even now, years later. The only thing that matters, though, is how I feel about my relationship with Phil. Through thick and thin, we’re there for each other. Even if he got into a car accident and became a Paraplegic, I would be there for him, whether or not there’s a ring on my finger.

Phil’s an optimist and he’s opened my eyes to a world of happiness unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. He’s my best friend, my soul mate. We take care of each other.

Every morning I wake up, happy that he’s there. Every evening, I come home from work excited to tell him about my day. My love for him only grows stronger with every passing week and month. He colors my world and I couldn’t live life without him.

I have always felt that marriage is society’s attempt to lump us all into the same category. While there’s just no way to compare what I have to what others have, I’ve decided to stop caring so much about this. All that matters is Phil’s and my happiness.