cats

My cat, Roman, was born in 2004; my family adopted him when I was five. When we first met him, he licked our faces and wanted to be held like an infant in our arms, gazing at us with his gigantic kitten eyes. We took him home and realized he was not the loving, sweet kitten we previously thought he was; he had tricked us into adopting him so he could spend a few weeks behind our couch, hissing at us if we tried to retrieve him. He attacked our other cats viciously and tried to steal food from their plates. He’d overeat until his thin body bulged sideways and then he’d vomit on the carpet. He was mean, selfish, and afraid of everything that moved. And I loved him more than I’d ever loved any animal before.

Roman and I became so close that he slept on my bed every night for seventeen years until he passed away from liver cancer in April 2021. When I was a kid, I taught him to sleep underneath the fluffy comforter on my bed, which I did when I was afraid at night, which was most nights or maybe every night. I fed him a piece of whatever I was eating and discovered he really liked corn, black olives, and cantaloupe. I kept my nightstand bare except for a thin pillow for Roman to use as a private bed when he didn’t want to cuddle. I used alphabet bubble stickers to write out his name on the nightstand. In high school, he’d sit on my laptop bag and nap on the desk while I studied AP US history. In college, I started buying him specialty cat soup packets that smelled awful, but I kept buying them because he’d go crazy over them. They were called Lil' Soups, which was very funny to me. “A Lil' soup for a lil' boy!” I’d say as I squeezed the bag with my fingers to get all the chunks out into his bowl.

I was as obsessed with Roman as he was with me. I went to a church retreat for a week in 2015 and hated being away from my boy and my family. While I was wandering around Bowling Green University eating peanut M&Ms and feeling lonely, Roman was wandering around our house meowing loudly, looking for me. He was probably more lonely than I was. Whenever I was gone for more than four hours, he’d walk around the house in search of me. His meow was crackly like television static and high pitched, everyone who visited us commented on his strange-sounding voice. He liked sleeping on my pillow, curled around my head like hair.

The last few months he was alive, Roman had a recurring ear infection that fluctuated in severity, but ultimately resulted in his ear crumpling like a tissue. We forced him to wear a plastic, blue cone so he’d stop scratched the skin off his ear. There were a few times we thought his ear was completely healed and slipped the cone off his tiny head only for his ear to get worse. In 2019 we took his cone off before we took a trip to Texas for Thanksgiving, only to find his ear bloody and swollen when we came back. I kept looking at him and weeping, sorry I’d left him alone and sorry he was in pain. I held his body to my chest and cried while he looked at me incredulously. My sister and mom kept laughing at how hard I was crying over this cat and, in hindsight, yes it was a little funny. They pinned him to the carpet and cleaned his wound while I sobbed, unable to be comforted.

The boy was a handful his entire life, eating fast and vomiting in the worst places for me to clean up, sleeping in the center of the bed, making me to curl around him because I’d never move him, meowing loudly in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, stepping on my body in the most painful places to get to his favorite spot on my bed. He liked to sleep on my sister’s bed even though she always shooed him away, irritated by and allergic to the fur he left behind. All of the little ways he bothered me only made me love him more. He was idiosyncratic, unusual, and very funny. Once he knocked a plate out of my hand, sending a slice of pizza face down onto my sheets. He drooled when I scratched him in the right spots, and most of his body was a right spot. He shook his head and splattered drool on my bedsheets, which was equally disgusting and hilarious. We’d take him outside to the backyard and he’d happily roll around in dirt, protesting when it was time to bring him back inside. I loved that disgusting, God-awful, annoying cat.

Before he died, I would get sick with worry that no cat or animal would ever love me as much as Roman did. I’d look at his closed eyes, his curled paws, his fat cheeks, his roast-beef colored nose and want him to live forever, to be with me forever. I’d get teary-eyed wondering how we’d survive without each other.

When Roman was euthanized in late April, he rested his head in my hand, falling asleep in my warm palm while I wept and laughed. I wanted to move my hand, but he was pinning me to the spot next to him, sleepy with whatever drugs the vet injected him with. I thought, how funny, that even while he dies, he inconveniences me.

On Christmas morning Eric called me crying because a freak accident in the middle of the night had killed one of his three kittens.

The kittens were born in early November on the floor of Eric’s closet. Their mother was a stray cat that Eric and his roommate took into their college apartment when she was halfway through her pregnancy. They discussed taking her to a shelter, but Eric couldn’t handle abandoning her there, so he kept her in his section of the apartment, letting the tabby cat sleep on his chest and press her nose to his cheeks.

The kitten who died was the runt, the one I convinced Eric to name Courtney. Thinking of Eric finding her little, limp body behind the desk in his room tears my heart in two. He wept over her more, I think, than I wept over Roman, but Eric says it’s because of the brutality of her death, how unexpected it was. And it was so unexpected. Two days before Christmas, I was up at his apartment where Courtney scratched my hand, front and back, making me bleed. As I write this, I am healing.

Eric wrapped her body in one of his t-shirts and buried her in the park with her favorite toys, and a piece of paper with a letter addressed to her, which includes a poem I wrote. In his letter he tells Courtney about her short, happy life and how much we loved her, what she was like, who her brothers are, he asks for forgiveness for not protecting her. The letter was so sweet, and Eric tells Courtney to look for Roman, that they will be friends in the afterlife. I like the idea that she and Roman are together, Eric likes it too even though he says he doesn’t believe in heaven—Secretly I think he must believe in it a little, to write to Courtney about it, but maybe it isn’t belief, but rather hope. The poem I wrote reads:

I am

A shred of white light

A smear of warm fur

And a dot of a pink nose

Do not hold me close to you,

Please,

Only lay beside me, quiet and warm

I’ve only met the kittens three times, but I cried about Courtney. How could I not? Thinking of her unfair, lonely death, thinking of Eric in shambles and feeling guilty for something he couldn’t have known to prevent, thinking of her little face and how her eyes were too big for her head, how she was like Roman as in: afraid of everything and constantly teething and kind of mean but undeniably lovely. Even writing this makes my body heavy with a humid and foggy sadness.

Eric and I decided to keep one of her brothers as well as her mom. We were both on the phone crying about having to take him to a shelter, when I exclaimed “Can we keep him? Can we PLEASE just keep him?” We decided to split vet bills and we both calmed down, allowing ourselves to ease into our attachment to him.

My dad chose the name for the kitten while we were brainstorming Cat Names Related to Pizza Toppings: Anchovy. Mimic and Anchovy will be our cats. Anchovy has some health problems and injuries he incurred from the night of Christmas Eve. Eric drove 140 miles in his beat-up Pontiac to take him to and from the animal hospital in Lansing. The vet and nurses loved Anchovy, cooing over his name and carrying him around in their arms when he wasn’t being treated. Eric leaned against the wall so the tiny kitten could sleep on his shoulder while they waited.

The vet was a reassuring and kind woman who told Eric the Italian word for anchovy is la alice. She said it’s a perfect name for him, for his swirled silver fur, for his breed— which we didn’t know before—: MACKAREL TABBY. Eric told me this, and I immediately googled the words “mackerel tabby,” my screen flooded with pictures of cats who looked just like my Roman.

I am so thankful to be with somebody as tender-hearted as Eric. I can’t think of anyone who would cry so hard over a kitten, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t immediately take a pregnant stray to the shelter. I love Eric even more because he kept Mimic, because he cried when Anchovy was in pain, because he freaked out when Anchovy didn’t poop for twelve hours.

When we were standing in his apartment living room, holding two of the kittens in our arms like newborn babies, my mom exclaimed, “You look like you’re holding twins!” We both laughed. I imagine having actual children would be similar to this.

I cannot wait to marry Eric and live with him, Mimic, and our Anchovy. I imagine us sleeping in the same bed with our two tabby cats nestled between us. And though I know it is selfish, in my heart I hope that Anchovy will love me most.