Buddy del Cabo, 1997(?)-2007

I was never a cat person. Growing up I more or less tolerated my sister's cat, but I never quite got the point. Andrea and I used to talk vaguely about getting a pet, but I didn't really pay that much attention when she started talking about a particular cat who kept looking at her out the window of the animal shelter near her office.

A few days after we got back from our honeymoon in 2001, Andrea announced that she'd filled out paperwork to adopt a cat. I made some grunts about how we'd just gotten back from a wedding that came at the end of an exhausting year of planning, and couldn't we please wait a month or so to get our bearings before thinking about a pet. Like a fool, I assumed I'd put the subject to rest.

One month later to the day Andrea announced that we were going to the animal shelter near her office to look at the cat.

I went along reluctantly, though I agreed he was nice enough. On Labor Day 2001, we brought him home. It was a project that involved an hourlong stakeout of our apartment building; according to our lease, no pets were allowed, and our super had picked that precise moment to paint the fence in front of the building, so with a yowling, confused feline in a carrier, we parked a few doors away and watched out the rear view mirror waiting for the super to leave for lunch.

By that evening I was a confirmed cat person.

We'd discussed naming our first pet Cabo, after taking our honeymoon in San Jose del Cabo, but the cat we adopted seemed to respond to the name he'd had in the shelter -- Buddy. And so we gave him the name Buddy del Cabo.

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We brought Buddy home on September 3, 2001. Eight days later, Andrea left for work late because she was still trying to help the cat acclimate to his new lifestyle, which meant that by the time she got on the subway (elevated out in our neighborhood) she was able to see the smoke from both towers.

As word came in that the bridges and tunnels were closed, for a short period we wondered if we'd be stranded in Manhattan that evening (we both worked in the city in those days). The main reason we wanted to get back home to Queens was because we didn't want the cat to be stuck home alone that night, when he was just getting to know his new family.

All of those concerns were probably more for our benefit than his, but Andrea and I did walk home together that afternoon (the bridges were only closed to cars, not pedestrians, and thousands of us filed across the Queensboro Bridge). There was real comfort in having a creature at home who was oblivious to all our fears that day. My September 11 story is partly about my new cat.

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This post doesn't have much to do with Fiona, except where it does. We had Buddy for five and a half years, and while he'd slowed down and really packed on the weight in the past few months, we expected to have him for five and a half more (we were guessing he was about 4-5 years old when we adopted him, so he was probably about 10 years old in 2007).

A week ago Thursday, Buddy was his usual self, following us around the apartment, crawling up on our laps for pets, waiting ever less patiently for Fiona's bedtime because he knew that bedtime = dinner for the cat.

On Friday morning I woke up to find a little cat vomit in our hall. Buddy had a pretty solid stomach, so this was unusual, but cats throw up often enough it didn't worry me.

He didn't touch his breakfast on Friday. I took him to the vet, and we adjusted some of his medications (he'd been chewing at his fur again), but nobody was unduly concerned.

When I brought him back from the vet, he still wasn't touching his food, and he was continuing to vomit – although now, it was only saliva.

Friday night he was reluctant to come to bed with us. We brought him into the bed anyway. He threw up and slunk down the hall. Not normal behavior at all.

Saturday I called the vet again and he suggested bringing Buddy in for an IV to try to make sure he still got food and to give him an appetite stimulant. We brought him into the hospital with the intent of picking him up on Monday.

Saturday night the vet called to say he still wasn't eating and that he was going to run an X-ray.

On Sunday we discovered the Buddy had a stomach tumor. We went to see him in the hospital and he was only breathing because he was in an oxygen tank. When we opened the door to pet him, his breathing became increasingly labored. He didn't even lift his head in recognition or excitement when he saw us.

We brought my sister along so that Fiona could say her good-byes and then go wait in the waiting room while we stayed with Buddy through the rest.

From purring like normal on Thursday night to vomit on Friday morning to euthanasia on Sunday morning took about 60 hours. If there's a silver lining, it's that his time noticeably suffering was short. But we were denied any time to prepare for the inevitable -- the period of weeks or even months of taking a pet to and from the doctor and wondering if we were prolonging things for his benefit or ours -- which has made the shock of it all harder to bear.

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Buddy never entirely forgave us for bringing Fiona home. Though we did everything the manuals told us to do to prepare the cat for a new arrival, upon seeing the sleeping infant in the car seat sitting on the floor when we returned home from the hospital Buddy froze and started shivering.

That first night Fiona was home, in addition to grappling with the terror or new parenthood -- the fear that you have no idea what you're doing, and all the baby will do is cry – we also had to deal with a cat so anxious he threw up every time he heard those cries. I remember that first night as an ongoing relay where I would hand the wailing infant to her mother to nurse and then go pull out the cleaning supplies to mop up after the cat, while trying to give him a little comfort, and then returning to Fiona to take her around for a walk when it was my turn to hold the little screamer.

Things did get better once Buddy realized he wasn't being replaced in the house. And I don't think Fiona ever noticed the cat's feelings toward her. The very first word she ever said was "Buddy" as he walked past her in the kitchen the night before her first birthday. As she became more mobile, she started wanting to touch the cat, and so we taught her how to stroke his head gently, repeating "nice, nice." Some mornings we could hear Fiona in her crib, stroking a stuffed animal and repeating "nice, nice..."

And then Fiona reached toddlerhood.

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For the first two years after Fiona was born, we were able to keep cat toys and child toys separate from each other, primarily because Fiona was limited to only certain areas of the house. As she grew, we opened up more of the house to her, and eventually she started picking up some of Buddy's toys to examine.

Once she touched one of his toys, he no longer wanted any part of it. The main reason we stopped hearing the cat tear up and down the hall in the middle of the night, swatting at toy mice, was age-related, but I also believe he'd run out of toys that he believed were exclusively his.

After the toys, the hair chewing started. We began noticing bald spots on his stomach, and then his legs and back. At night we could even feel him in the bed, chewing at his hair. Buddy always wanted to keep tabs on people -- he wanted to know exactly where everybody was at all times. The toddler denied him that, because she was everywhere all the time, with no discernible sense of direction. Increasingly anxious, he took it out on his fur.

The vet put him on a regimen of Ovaban, which is an anti-anxiety for cats. The hair chewing stopped, and Buddy even started coming over to sit next to Fiona when she was on the couch, or playing in one place on the floor. We stretched his dose out to once a week, and then every ten days. Until last October.

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When I picked up Buddy's food dish the morning after a dose, I noticed he hadn't eaten much the night before. I knew that meant he probably hadn't gotten his pill, but then I figured that he'd been so much better lately that he might not even need the Ovaban any more. I certainly didn't want to force a new pill down his throat, and one side effect of the drug was diabetes, which nobody wanted.
And he might have gotten the pill, since he had eaten some of his food.

A few nights later Fiona was playing in the living room while we cleaned dishes when she suddenly screamed. We ran to see what was happening and she cried that Buddy had bitten her. We could see the mark, and we bandaged her up and put the cat in the bedroom. We wrote it off as a one-time incident, and since we hadn't been in the room, it was certainly possible to picture our two-year-old pulling on a tail or undertaking some similarly ill-advised action.

Two days later as Fiona played in the living room, I noticed the cat starting to shake. I put down the newspaper to watch, and figured that if Fiona got too close, I'd move between her and the cat, keeping an eye on the whole dynamic.

Suddenly Buddy leapt across the room, probably five or six feet from wear he was sitting. He latched on to Fiona's back tightly and dug in.

Fiona screamed. I flung most of the water in the glass I was holding at the cat. Buddy released her and started to run, but I wasn't going to let him get away. I flung him into our bedroom and slammed the door and then ran back to help Andrea attend to Fiona.

Buddy wasn't allowed near Fiona for the next week. I started talking about looking into finding a relative to take the cat off of our hands, and if that didn't work... well, I left that part unstated, but Andrea knew what I was talking about. She persuaded me to call the vet and to see if we could give Buddy one final chance.

The vet recommended putting him on a daily dose for the next week and then slowly expanding it out to five days, but never going more than five days without a dose from then on. And we never did.

A few months later I remarked that just as Buddy never forgave us for bringing Fiona home, I never forgave him for what he did in October. And I certainly never totally trusted him around Fiona after that. But Fiona, fearless child that she is, actually missed the cat during his weeklong time out and was happy when he reemerged. She asked for him. And when he came back into the main household, she was quite happy to pet him just as she had before he'd been sent away.

I'll also point out that the only thing Buddy didn't like about Fiona was that she played. Now, that sounds ridiculous -- playing is just about the only thing that toddlers do -- but if he truly harbored ill will toward her he could have attacked her in her sleep, or at the dinner table, or cuddling with us on the couch. He didn't do any of those things. He just didn't like it when she moved around too much. Which is why he wound up on anti-anxieties.

If I really hadn't forgiven him, I don't think I'd miss him so terribly much.

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So what we've been left with now, in addition to grieving, is the prospect of explaining death to a toddler (and this blog is about Fiona, after all).

We had planned to go out of town last weekend, but when Buddy started vomiting it was clear that plan had to go out the window. Unfortunately, I'd already told Fiona to expect a weekend in the Berkshires. That evening when I picked her up, I kneeled down and explained to her that Buddy was very sick and we needed to stay with him for the weekend.

Fiona was very disappointed. She also continued to believe that even if we didn't go to the Berkshires that night, she could go tomorrow.

When we took Buddy to the hospital, we said good-bye and told Fiona that we'd see him again in a few days. That was what we genuinely believed.

I did, however, begin reading some materials on how to broach the subject of death with a child. The main points seemed obvious enough, but still worth learning: be honest, don't use the "put to sleep" euphemism (lest your toddler start fearing sleep), and don't say things like "God took the cat to be with Him" (lest your toddler start hating the almighty).

On Sunday morning when we got the news that Buddy wasn't going to make it, we sat Fiona down and explained that we had to say good-bye to Buddy and that he was never going to come home again. Fiona said she understood, and she said her good-byes, but throughout the day she told us that we were wrong and that Buddy would come home when he got better. And we explained that Buddy was never going to get better.

Finally, I used the D-word and told Fiona that Buddy had died. I explained how that meant that he wasn't sick any more, and didn't hurt any more, but also that he couldn't do anything with us any more.

That evening, Fiona in very frank terms started announcing "Buddy's dead! He died!" And later: "Buddy was my old cat. I'm going to get a new cat."

We'd been told not to worry if the child didn't seem upset by the news. And it's clear that she still doesn't really grasp what happened, because she still tells people that Buddy's in the hospital. But she also recognizes that we won't see him again, and she recently told me that she remembers Buddy, who lived with us "a while ago."

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The first day working after the cat died was almost unbearable. I work at home, and I hadn't even realized how much I'd come to depend on Buddy for companionship when everybody else was out of the house.

The second day was easier, and I no longer expect to give the cat a quick head scratch before I run out the door on an errand. I still think I see his shadow sometimes as I climb into bed late at night, but I'm sure that will fade soon. We will, as Fiona says, get a new cat someday.

Spring finally arrived in New York over the weekend, and we've had the windows open. It was the cat's favorite time of year, when he could lie on the window sill all day and soak up the aromas from outside. Windows were made for cats. And our windows look a little emptier this time around.