Mendolonium

Tomorrow will mark one week since D’artagnan died.

The standard advice when a pet dies is to wait awhile before getting a “replacement pet”.  We could wait our entire lifetimes, but we D’artagnan could never be replaced.  We have a second cat, our sweet Cossette.  However, loving she is, she is very much a simple cat.  D’artagnan was something else.

D’artagnan was born on Easter Sunday in 1998 to a single mother who given her friendly demeanor had clearly once been someone’s cat, but had long since struck out on her own.  She was living in the backyard of Jeff’s grandfather and gave birth to three kittens.  Jeff and I (OK, mostly I) were looking to get a cat for our first home together (a dumpy little guest house rental near campus) and it seemed providential to adopt one of the fluffy little kittens Jeff’s grandmother mentioned to us over Mother’s Day brunch.  D’artagnan, covered in fleas and full of spunk, thought it less than ideal and immediately responded by refusing to eat and wedging himself in the pedestal of our bathroom sink.  With a bit of time, Friskies cat food, and a fleece blanket we convinced him that we wanted only to love him and within a week he was sleeping curled up in one of Jeff’s baseball caps in between us every night.  It was obvious from early on that “D” was exceptionally smart and we amused ourselves and him by easily “training” him to come and to sit with hand signals. We could play actual games with him like hide and seek and tag.  When we would arrive home he would greet us at the door to demand belly rubs. D’artagnan was also exceptionally beautiful and while searching through cat books we learned that he was a bastard version of a Maine Coon;  not only did he clearly look like one but he even had the characteristic “chirping” voice rather than a typical cat meow.  We had a lot of fun in that little house together.   When he was not yet a year old I found him making an obstacle course for himself in which he would run across the bedroom, jump on the bed, and smack the pull chain to the ceiling fan so that it would “ping” against the metal, leap off the other side of the bed, run back to the opposite side of the room, around a chair, and then do it all over again.  When we tried to wean him off of wet food and onto dry food I mixed the two together with the intention of slowly increasing the proportion of dry to wet food over time.  D’artagnan would have none of it and would methodically separate out each morsel of dry food into a neat little pile separate from the wet.  When I once knocked over a dish of his food onto the floor I picked up the floor sullied food and threw it into the sink (to dispose of later) only to find D’artagnan shortly thereafter jumping up to the kitchen sink, retrieving each piece of food, jumping down, and placing it back in his food bowl.  D’artagnan’s greatest passion in life – his mission really – was to escape to the outside.  He got out of open doors and windows, the milk delivery door, and could even unlatch the back door of our house if it wasn’t locked.  When he was young we would “walk” him on a leash.  As he got older and it became clear that he wasn’t interested in running away we eventually granted him the freedom to roam our backyard.  Once it became clear that he was dying we let him outside at every opportunity and he seemed most at peace while curled up under a camellia.

D had a special relationship with Thomas.  He was the reason that Thomas’ first word was “kitty” and he would let Thomas touch him in ways he would have never allowed an adult.  Thomas delighted in D’artagnan; he was the only one of our animals that Thomas would attempt to have a conversation with – as if he expected that he might answer.  Last Thursday it became clear that D’artagnan was miserable and that he would never, ever get any better.  We took him to the vet and I stroked his amazing fur as he was given the drugs to sedate him and then to stop his heart.  I looked into his eyes and spoke softly to him.  I believe that I was the last thing he ever saw and the last sound he ever heard.  It was quite peaceful and utterly heartbreaking.  We took him home and Thomas gave him “one last pet” before we burried him in his beloved backyard.  I feel relief that he is no longer suffering but so very sad that his life was cut short.  I keep expecting to see him sitting in the kitchen while I cook, darting out the front door as I strugle to bring the stoller in, or requesting a spot on the couch next to us.  Thomas keeps telling me that, “I want ‘Tagnan back”.  All I can do is tell him, “Me too.  Me too.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 11:51 pm and is filed under The Family Mendolo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.