I'm reblogging this comic because Po is now in his final hours, about seven weeks before his seventeenth birthday. I write this waiting for a call back from the vet so we can arrange his last visit. There are lots of things about him I will miss - some things that may impress you (if you're impressed by cat behavior) and many that will bore you. There are several fun stories, but it's the mundane everyday sounds and gestures of being with each other that I will miss.
In college, a friend who got me seriously into the Cure and Twin Peaks (a friend of the first order) presented her cat's litter of polydactyl kittens for the taking. A housemate and I picked out two five-week old kittens with heads and feet that seemed too big for their fluffy bodies. They rode home mewing on my lap in his jeep, and we decided somewhat arbitrarily who would be paired with whom. I named mine Po - after the Teletubby - because it's an awesome name (see above). We became friends very quickly. He became buds with all of my housemates over the following three years, although I made a conscious effort to get to know him and he recognized that. I can't discount the influence of drugs on my attempts to understand him (I mean really understand him, man), but the bond we made was genuine. Although wary (and seemingly jealous) of Rebecca when we first started dating, she won him over and they forged a bond of their own. For us, a childless couple, he became a focal point.
Seventeen years is a good chunk of my life. I was a spectacular mess when I met him, I have changed a lot since, and part of what I am mourning is the end of my young adulthood. I've felt physical signs that I am getting older and I've begun to feel anxiety about my age, but Po was a real and constant part of my life who will soon be gone, is practically already gone.
I don't love very easily; as I grew up I made a lot of effort to distance myself from my emotions, and was proud of how little I felt. A year before I met Po (and with the help of his mother's owner), I broke down a tremendous wall that allowed me to feel again. I felt pain, I felt love, and I felt who I was. Po soon came into my newly opened heart and I have loved him joyfully and unabashedly ever since. Even as I put up more barriers, he’d already slipped in during that window and so remained in my heart. And I have always felt his love for me. It's the loss of this source of love, both giving and receiving, that I am feeling right now. I know that I'm doing the right thing by putting him down, and it is an act of love in itself, and I do not wish him to continue on in progressive misery. But I feel our love leaving me, and I am heartbroken.
Jean Cocteau called his cats the "visible soul" of his home. And although he implies that his love for his cats stem, by extension, from the love of his home, Rebecca and I have always made Po the progenitor. "Home is where the Po is," she’s often said. In his lifetime, he's been moved to five separate apartments. He hasn't embodied the souls of five homes, but he has made each of them, at different times, our one singular "home." I'm glad we're moving at the end of the month because it will good to live with new walls, new people, and a new dog, allowing this whole space to become a memory along with him. But right now, as we sit beside him, listening to his heavy breathing, we don't know how we will make a home without him.
Picture of Po on his favorite blanket, taken about two months ago.
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