He's been gone for a little more than a month and a half now -- a victim of old age and a bad heart. I've put away his collar and his litter box and his food dishes. His ubiquitous long soft silky hair is found on my clothes and everything else I own much less than it used to be. And I don't see the shadow of him out of the corner of my eye on the floor like I did right after he passed. But, oddly enough, I seem to miss him more than ever these days.
Hard to say why. Maybe it's because of this very lack of objects that symbolize him being with me, I feel the hole more than I did right after he passed. But it probably has something to do with nature of the relationship that I had with the boy over those ten years that we lived together.
Lots of folks told me after he died that I was a good dad to the boy over those years, but the truth is that I was just trying to pay him back for all that he did for me during our life together. I picked him up off of the street not far from our Somerville apartment where we were to spend the next decade. He was a mess -- infections in both ears and one big matt of fur -- the victim of neglect that would have probably made him a very miserable guy if it had gone on much longer. After some asking around, I found that the people who had him didn't want him and so I took him in, or so I thought. Of course, if you've had a cat in your life, you know that if you think that you're running the show you're only fooling yourself. We butted heads for a while (no, he wasn't going to be an outdoor cat anymore), but we finally came to an accommodation (yes, he pretty much ran the apartment) and, from then on, things smoothed out.
In fact, things did a lot better than "smoothed out." During this period of my life, I was working a particularly difficult and isolating job. I saw my friends about once a week, but I didn't have a significant other or much in the way of biological family to lean on and so Smudge became the one relationship that I could always rely on day after day. And he never failed me. Not once.
Every night when I came home he would meet me at the top of the stairs with an excited look in his huge yellow eyes (this may have had something to do the fact that he was about to be fed) and then we'd go through our small nightly ritual. I'd give him his supper and then sit down on the couch to take off my shoes while I turned on the television to watch the news. After he'd finished demolishing whatever I had given him, he'd then jump up on the couch (and me) so that I could scratch him and tell him how beautiful he was. After about five minutes of this, he'd decide that what I had done was sufficient and he'd get down and position himself on the couch under the lamp and up against my side and go to sleep with a hugely satisfied look on his face for at least as long as I was on the couch.
We did this night after night and it became a highlight of my day for years. These were years in which there were few highlights to be had. I was taking care of him, but he was taking care of me as well. And so, the relationship just got deeper as time went on. The wonderful thing about this type of relationship with a cat or a dog is that you can count on it. Every day if you're good to them they're going to love you. They're not going to decide one day that someone has better cat food and you can be left. They're not going to have some sort of internal crisis and decide that they can't live with you anymore. You love them and they love you. It's profoundly simple and very, very rare.
Over these past few months Smudge quickly got very old. I almost lost him to a massive infection 18 months ago and from then on we both seemed to know that, at the age of 18 or so, the two of us didn't have much time left. So I made as many accommodations as I could to make his physical life easier. But even as his physical infirmities got in the way, the emotional bonds between still held and he continued to give me as much as he ever did as a younger and spryer cat.
So life if different now. Work can still be a pain, but I now live in a different place with someone who I love and who loves me. She's now the one who provides me with the sense that who I am matters in the world when I come how at night after a discouraging day. But I still miss Smudgy meeting me at the door every night. I was a good dad to him, but he was the little fuzzy cat who kept me going on a constant basis for a long period of time. Maybe that's what I miss. Or maybe it's the fact that he used to instantly purr when I picked him up or how he would wrap his paw around me when I would hold him or how he would stick out his long pink tongue when he got really happy.
I don't know what it is. I just know that I continue to miss it and him. And the missing isn't getting any better.
(x2) to what Paul said. :-|
Posted by: Dmitri | December 22, 2010 at 10:53 AM
You just made me cry....damn you! and im at work too! Chin up big guy. RIP Smudgy!!
Posted by: Paul Sanderson | June 24, 2010 at 05:48 PM