Fluffy

Some cats come into a life more straightforwardly than others. The way Fluffy came into ours was downright traumatic.

Fluffy lived with my wife's mother's neighbors. Within four days of each other one summer, they passed away, leaving behind a dog and an unwanted cat. Hayley's mom came over to feed him every day, but no relative wanted him, and Hayley's mom herself is allergic. As time went on, Fluffy grew lonelier and lonelier in the empty house, and Hayley began to insist that we should take him.

The thing was, though, that this all took place some time ago, before we were married. Fluffy was in Madison, Ohio, Hayley was in Lawrence, Kansas, and I was in Vernon, Connecticut. There was no good way to get Fluffy to Kansas, and there was no place for Fluffy in my apartment. But if we didn't take him, he would continue to live alone.

A plan was hatched. My parents were willing to take him in short-term, provided we took him off their hands once we got married. Hayley's mom drove down from Madison, and handed Fluffy off to my mother, who took him back to hers. Once I came to know Fluffy, I suspect this whole process was intimidating and torturous to him. Fluffy settled in on the second floor of my parents' house, out of the way of my parents' cat, Sam (who was not a fan of Fluffy or any other animal). Mostly he hid under my sister's bed (she was away at college) for what turned out to be ten months.

I saw him when I came home for Christmas. He was easily startled, and very on edge; he would hiss and growl and swipe at anyone who came too close.

When we got married, we drove a carful of stuff and Fluffy from Cincinnati to Connecticut. He meowed plaintively for thirteen hours straight, and then got dumped into a totally new new place-- one that already had a cat in it. We'd earlier flown Hayley's cat Tequila from Kansas to Connecticut, and friends had watched her while we were gone.

Tequila was a territorial old lady who didn't take any shit. (While our neighbors were watching her, she took over part of their apartment.) We had a plan that we'd keep the cats separated at first, with him in the bedroom with us to calm him down, but it was not to be. Fluffy freaked out. Our back room was piled high with boxes, and Fluffy ran deep into it, to a point where there was no way for us to get him out. He didn't come out for three days. I don't know how he did it, but he didn't eat or poop or pee. He hissed ferociously at anyone who came close. We let him be for a while.

Once he came out, he still didn't have a great time. Tequila was a bit of a bully. He did warm up, though, both to us and to Tequila. On occasion he would joyfully bound up to Tequila like he wanted to play, and she would just give him a withering glare and walk away.

It was a rough twelve months for him.

Tequila passed away after about six months in Connecticut, and Fluffy came to enjoy life as king of the castle. We discovered he had an insatiable passion for tuna, and also a great love of yarn. We could run in circles around the apartment with a piece of yarn behind us, and he would pursue us as long as we were able. He never tired.

Fluffy was a cat who liked things to remain constant. He also liked to sit under things. That first winter in Connecticut, under our Christmas tree became his safe space. So much so that when we took the tree away, he promptly vomited.

For a couple years, we tried taking him home with us when we drove back for Christmas. On one such trip, he got into a fight with my sister's cat (also home for Christmas) and in revenge, peed on one of her boots. Things got worse when we woke up in the middle of the night to hear him yowling. There was yarn down his throat and it wouldn't come back up; he'd been playing with one of Hayley's crochet projects and accidentally swallowed some of her yarn. Once it starts going down, there's nothing a cat can really do about it. We cut it off and basically could only hope everything would be fine. We later worked out that he'd swallowed three feet of yarn. He was fine in the end, but it was a traumatic trip.

Hayley was clearly his favorite, but Fluffy was my bro too. When Hayley spent her summers doing research in South Africa, I found myself talking aloud to Fluffy to have someone to talk to. "Okay Fluffy, I'm off to the store now." I knew I'd gone doo-lally, though, when I started having conversation with Fluffy when he wasn't there. "Okay Fluffy, we're at the grocery store. I need to remember to get pickles."

After the difficulty of having two cats (Tequila peed all over the place, though that was probably more kidney issues than territorial ones), we were happy to stick to one for a while, but eventually we cat-sat, and Fluffy got along super-well with Mr. Whiskers; he clearly wanted to play with someone. So Oracle entered into our lives, and even though Fluffy was as shy as ever at first, he opened up eventually. They had a couple good years together.

Unfortunately, the last year or so, Fluffy's life has been deteriorating. He developed a limp, and it turned out that his joints were seizing up. He could no longer jump up on the couch or bed, no longer wanted to chase yarn or play with Oracle. Upon coming down to Florida, things began to get even worse. To keep things easy for him, we confined him to one room (our bedroom) with everything he wanted in it, including his fancy heated cat bed.

But two weeks ago now, I realized he'd gone from wobbling on his way to the litter box to not being able to stand up at all, and he was just pooping and peeing in place in his bed.

Even before that, we'd been thinking about it, but once he reached that point, we knew we had to let him go. He'd been on various medicines over the past couple years, and none of them had really worked for the long term. But it's tough, it's really tough to decide to do something like that. I've lost various pets before (two cats from when I was a kid, and then Tequila), but none of them that I was as close to as Fluffy, and certainly none of them where I was part of the decision. Hayley was out of town that weekend, and I was grading in Starbucks as we texted about it, and I felt myself tearing up. I'd avoided seriously thinking about when Hayley had raised the issue before, dodging the issue, but now there was no dodging it.

We put Fluffy to sleep last Friday. It wasn't easy to watch him go, but we stayed with him. We transported him to and from the vet in his heated cat bed. This was the day after we saw our baby's anatomy ultrasound; the day before we buried him under two orange trees we planted in the front yard.

Ups and downs, life and death, endings and beginnings. Some cats come into your lives straightforwardly, but no cat leaves straightforwardly.