#ratralsis cats

[ratralsis]

Sometimes my cat Max will decide when he gets on my lap while I'm at the computer that he wants to rest his chin on the table in front of me. I used to wonder if he was watching my monitor, so I decided a few months ago to try taking photos.

No. He's not watching anything.

Well, not usually.

[ratralsis]

ezraye replied to your photo “On the right is the bed I bought for my cats a few years ago. They...”

Maybe the actual cat bed isn’t high enough off the floor

It’s entirely possible! They do often sleep or sit on things that are off of the floor, even if it’s just by a little bit. There’s also an old multi-level scratching post/tower that they sleep on a lot, though they do very rarely use the bed:

And they also really like cardboard, so I humor them by keeping some around, or even just keeping boxes of cat food at floor level for them:

Note that she is not even fully on the boxes. She seems fine with that. She COULD be. She’s done it before. She just isn’t RIGHT NOW.

The simple fact of it is, they spend more time living in this house than I do, so I try hard to let them do what they want so long as it isn’t actively damaging anything important. Basically, if it doesn’t hurt me, and it makes them happy, I’ll allow it and even encourage it.

[ratralsis]

On the right is the bed I bought for my cats a few years ago. They sleep in it every once in a while, but it’s so rare that I’m surprised when they do.

On the left is a pair of suitcases that I originally bought more than eleven years ago and used the first time I went to Japan as an exchange student. They’ve been completely ruined for any actual use by my cats sleeping on them (and scratching on them) over the years, and I now keep them around only because of how often the cats use them as a bed. I cannot imagine that they are actually comfortable at all, but not a day goes by I don’t see one or the other of the cats on them.

I took this picture immediately before writing this post. That cat is still on the stack o’ suitcases as I write this.

[ratralsis]

This is how my 16 year old cat, Max, starts nearly every morning. He was in bed in the bathroom, near the heater, and when I got to the sink he knew I was going to brush his teeth. He likes the taste of the toothpaste and is very demanding that I hurry up.

I like videos like these because I know in years to come that it will be nice to watch it again and remember how he sounded.

[ratralsis]

He likes to get in my lap when I'm at the computer and rest his chin on the table (I use a cheap black plastic folding table for a desk, and a different cheap white plastic folding table for my work desk). He doesn't close his eyes, either. Just narrows them and watches the monitor. If I grab a small window and move it really fast, he does follow it with his eyes.

I'm sure he doesn't get a lot out of this, but he probably thinks of it as being kind of like us both looking out the window together or something. As he relaxes, he eventually moves his head down and closes his eyes and then starts to snore and twitch and wakes himself up and gets confused for a moment.

That's just what happens with cats his age: sixteen and a half, or 82 in cat years. I let him get away with a lot with the reasoning being that he's currently dying of hyperthyroidism (I give him twice-daily pills for it) so I figure it's better to let him enjoy his last years. He's also my only cat, so it's not like it takes anything away from another one.

[ratralsis]

Clocks winding down

A lot of people know this quote from Terry Pratchett's book "Reaper Man." It's the 11th novel in the Discworld series.

“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”

But I prefer this one, from the 14th novel, "Lords and Ladies."

“Then she wound up the clock. Witches didn’t have much use for clocks, but she kept it for the tick… well, mainly for the tick. It made a place seem lived in. It had belonged to her mother, who’d wound it up every day. It hadn’t come as a surprise to her when her mother died, firstly because Esme Weatherwax was a witch and witches have an insight into the future and secondly because she was already pretty experienced in medicine and knew the signs. So she’d had a chance to prepare herself, and hadn’t cried at all until the day afterward, when the clock stopped right in the middle of the funeral lunch. She’d dropped a tray of ham rolls and then had to go and sit by herself in the privy for a while, so that no one would see.”

It's fair to say that Pratchett was fond of remaking a point he'd made in an earlier novel if he thought he could do it better the next time around. A podcast I found recently, The Death of Podcasts, covers a Discworld book per episode and has a section where they count up cliches like "X happens to other people" and Pratchett's overuse of the adverb "gingerly." Pratchett wasn't a perfect writer, but he still wrote some of the best stuff around.

I needed to take some time to write out my thoughts when my cat Tina died in June. I'd had her in my life for over eighteen years, and it's not something I expect to ever fully be over. But there's work to be done, and I can't be having with spending time mourning a cat when the rest of the world insists on continuing.

At the end of every month, I had to order more cat food online, because Tina had kidney problems and needed a special diet to keep her going. Her kidneys are probably what killed her, based on the description I got from the vet who checked on her the morning before her death who told me that they could be felt through her skin and seemed like raisins. I always made sure to order enough so that I could have two months' worth when the new cans arrived. That way, if I couldn't order more one month for any reason, it would be alright.

The food came in boxes of 48, meaning I had to buy 24 days' worth at a time. When Tina died, I had 73 days' worth of food for her left. Two months and change.

Max could eat that food, too. So he did, at half the rate, because Tina wasn't there to help him. This meant that I had 146 days where Max was eating Tina's food. And that means that Tina's food ran out on October 29.

Now Max is probably happier with the food he gets. Now he gets to eat only his own special food, instead of the mix of his and Tina's that he'd been getting for the last fifteen months, since he went on his special food after his surgery last August. I talked to my vet about it before I started feeding him Tina's special kidney diet, don't worry. I talk to my vet about a lot of things. I spend a lot of money there, so they're generally very patient with me.

But as for me? I feel like the clock has wound down. The ripple has died away. It's one more way that Tina is gone from my life, even if I could cling to that little reminder of her for four and a half months after she was physically gone. And I did cry a little bit when that clock stopped ticking.

I still get little notifications on my phone reminding me of photos I took of her over the years, but because most of them are based on "Look back one year ago today" or something similar, I know that those, too, will taper off eventually. Life moves on. Memories fade. In much the same way that I don't talk about the cats I had before I adopted Tina, I'll someday stop talking about her, too.

Max just turned 15 years old last month. He's in good health. His teeth have some tartar on them, but they aren't decayed, and his gums are fine. He's a little chubby, but his vet tells me that it's better than being underweight at his age. He climbs and runs in circles to chase a laser pointer dot. The fact that he is anywhere from 76 to 83 in cat years, depending on which chart you check, clearly doesn't bother him any.

But the fact remains that he is very old. Tina made it to eighteen years and five months. She was at least 89 in cat years. I'll be surprised if Max makes it that long, but obviously I'd be grateful if he did. I have no interest in adopting another cat while Max is alive, and I think I'll need some time to get used to life without him before I go adopting another once he isn't.

This was a long weekend, partly because I didn't have anywhere to go and partly because of the time change making it one hour longer than every other weekend of the year. I've been thinking about this a lot, is my point, as I work on my novel and play video games.

[ratralsis]

This is probably the last I'll be posting about Tina, at least, for now. So if you're tired of reading about my old dead cat, then, hey, no worries, bud. I get it.

I wanted to see if I had any way to get to even older photos of Tina than the ones I posted yesterday. Obviously, I didn't take any photos of her before those. I couldn't have. They were the first photos I took of her. That's sort of how those superlatives work. Nothing can be earlier than the earliest. But I hoped that, maybe, my mom did.

My mom, you might recall from how I mentioned that I didn't take a day off of work when she died, is dead. She died in November of 2021. It took me until August of 2023 to realize I no longer missed her, but that is a story for another day. What's important is that my mom used to take tons of digital photos, and she was fanatical about backing them all up. After she died, I bought a bunch of flash drives and I copied all of the photos and documents I could from her computers (plural) and her phone (singular) and her various camera memory cards (plural again) onto them all. Well, by that I mean that I bought flash drives that were large enough that each could fit all of them. I kept one for myself. Then I transferred all of the photos onto two others, one for my dad and one for my sister, though I took out some of the photos that were ones I'd sent to her myself. My dad and sister didn't need those. I sent those to my mom so she could have them, not share them around. Then I took a bunch of old photo albums that my mom had kept and I scanned them, and I put all of those photos onto each flash drive, too, including the ones that didn't have any other photos on them, and I gave the ones that only had the photo album photos on them to my mom's surviving relatives.

I think, in total, there were about seven flash drives? I forget. One for me with everything, ones for my dad and sister with everything except photos I'd sent to my mom myself, and ones for my mom's relatives.

Hidden among the folders on the flash drive that I have, and hopefully only on that one, though I'm not sure, was a folder labeled "Ratralsis's Kitten," though, obviously, it was my real name, not Ratralsis. If you've followed me long enough, you know my real name, and if you haven't, then fuck you, I'm not gonna write it here. I'm not even sorry!

It had photos from February and March of 2006, and, given that I adopted Tina on February 14, 2006, that meant these were the first photos taken of her after she was adopted. It's possible that her previous owners took photos of her before they gave her away, but I doubt it, and if they did then I will never know.

This is the very first photo of Tina, from February 15, 2006, the day after she became my cat and got the name "Tina" from me.

And here are a couple others from that same day. I really and truly could fit her in the palm of my hand. That wasn't a joke. She had a big personality even then, as you can see from that lucky photo that shows all of her perfect little pointy teeth as she makes her opinions to me known. She also already had those beautiful green eyes, though they weren't fully green yet. The green was still working its way out from her pupils. And she had giant ears, which she never fully grew into.

The cat I had before Tina used to climb onto the bed with me at night and lick my ear. She'd either lick my earlobe or the top of my ear. It seemed random. She'd do it for so long that she'd rub the skin off, and I'd wake up with scabs from where she'd made me bleed. I didn't like it, but I didn't know how to make her stop, so I just tolerated it. That was the price of having a cat who loved me, I supposed.

I have no regrets about that. My only regret regarding that cat was how I watched her die over the course of a month, and I believe I've already written about that.

The first night that I had Tina, she didn't have a name. I sat with her that evening and wondered what I should call her. I asked her what she thought of a bunch of different names. "Tina" was one of them, and as soon as I said it, I knew it was hers.

"What about Tina?" I had asked her, exasperated.

"Okay," she'd told me, in her cat way. "Tina's my name, then."

"No, no," I had said. I had wanted to backpedal away from that name. "Tina's a stripper name. We can't call you that." I remember having that thought very specifically.

"My name's Tina now," she had told me, this six-week old kitten, and it was the truth. Her name was Tina from then on.

When I went to bed, she slowly walked her way up to the side of my head and licked my ear in the same spot that the previous cat had. She'd died a couple of months before I adopted Tina. She died within days of Tina being born.

I cried when Tina did that. It reminded me too much of the previous cat, whom I loved terribly. I haven't found any good photos of her in my mom's collection yet. If I do, I may share them.

I found some bad ones. I found ones of her when she was old and tired and her fur was matted. She had longer hair than Tina did. Here's the best one I could find, which shows her face, and you can see some of her matted hair, because she needed to see a groomer and never got to, and her green eyes. I guess I have a thing for cats with green eyes. Max has green eyes, too, though his have more yellow than Tina's.

But when Tina licked my ear that night in the exact same way as the previous cat, I cried, because I knew in that moment that she'd won, and she was going to be my cat forever, and I was going to love her for every minute that I could, and I would be there for her when she died, however far off that would be.

I was right. I was there, eighteen years and just shy of four months later.

Tina never liked being held. She would growl and complain if I held her for too long, and I would tap her on the nose if she tried to attack me. It was the only bit of training I ever successfully gave her: she learned to never claw or bite me when I picked her up and held her. Even if I held her on her back, like a baby. She would growl. She would even hiss, sometimes. And she would certainly yell. But she never attacked me, because she knew I would never actually hurt her, and that I'd put her down before long. I always did. I tried very hard not to abuse the poor girl.

The first year of her life, one of her favorite things was to attack her own tail. I would pick her up, flip her onto her back, and her tail would flip up and between her legs to cover her belly. Then she would see her own tail and attack it. I was fine with that. I encouraged it. I loved seeing her grab and bite her own tail. I would sometimes grab her tail and move it around, and she'd have so much fun attacking her tail.

The first time I brought her to the vet for a checkup, when she was less than a year old, the vet expressed concern about Tina's tail. She wanted to know why Tina's tail looked like the fur on the end had been trimmed. I said I didn't know. I did, though. I knew why.

Tina went into heat once, and only once. I panicked when it happened. It happened earlier than we expected. I was so upset. I worried that it made me a bad owner. If you spay a cat before she goes into heat, it lowers the risk of health problems, like certain cancers. I spent the rest of her life knowing that if she ever developed cancer, it was because I'd failed her when she was only a few months old.

She never had cancer, as far as I know.

It's memories like those that I want to hang onto most of all. Memories from when I first had her, from when she was young, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and she was surrounded by other cats. I forget exactly how many other cats lived with her back then. I think five or so. When I took her from that house with me to the city I live in now, she went from being one of five or six cats to being the only cat. She was the only cat for about a year.

She had one close friend while she was with my parents. A big male cat, who was neutered by the time she was born, of course, but who she desperately wanted to mate with the one time she went into heat. I caught him awkwardly trying to mount her a couple of times and eventually locked her in my room. Obviously, it wouldn't have resulted in a pregnancy, but I genuinely disliked that cat and didn't particularly like the idea of him fucking Tina whether he had working balls or not.

As far as I know, Tina died an 89-year-old virgin, which is probably the best that a cat like her can hope for, I guess.

But Tina lived as the only cat in my small apartment for a year, and then I adopted Max, and she hated that. I did a bad job of introducing him to her. I should have, it turned out, spent at least a day or two with them in separate sides of the apartment, gradually getting used to each other's scent. I didn't do that. I couldn't do that! The apartment was fucking SMALL, alright? What was I supposed to do, lock Max in the bathroom?

Tina hissed and growled and lost her damn mind when she saw him for the first time. She never got used to him. She always saw him as an intruder. She hated him for the entire time we lived there.

Then we moved to a new apartment, not much bigger but certainly much nicer, in a nicer part of town where there weren't roaches that I had to take care of myself or floorboards that were sinking into the apartment below and revealing nails under the kitchen cabinets or people literally being shot and killed in the building across from mine in drug deals gone bad. It wasn't a great place!

When Tina and Max were both moved to a new place together at the same time, Tina could no longer see Max as an intruder into her home. That last apartment had been hers and hers alone. Max was just some asshole who showed up. But now she was just some asshole who showed up, too! Suddenly, they were on equal footing.

She still didn't like him, but she had to stop growling at him and being angry with him at all times. She calmed down. Max was happy about that, too, I think. Suddenly, he could try to play with Tina and not be immediately attacked as soon as she came into the room.

They never once shared a sleeping spot. All those cute photos of cats cuddling together and sleeping wrapped around each other? Tina and Max never, ever did that, even once. The closest they came was when they both slept on different parts of me at the same time, which was still really wonderful.

But I wondered if I'd done her a disservice in adopting Max. I wondered if I'd done Max a disservice in adopting him, too. But given how many thousands of dollars I've spent keeping Max alive as long as I have through his various troubles, such as his multiple surgeries for everything from the removal of a large lipoma (kind of like a tumor made of fat cells) and a urinary blockage (mucus plug in his bladder that made it impossible for him to urinate and would have killed him in under 24 hours), I doubt he'd have found someone else who'd have kept him alive as long as I have. Whether that's a favor or not is up to you to decide, I suppose. And maybe God, if God cares about that kind of thing. I'm not entirely sure God does.

In any case.

Those are the memories of Tina that I wanted to share tonight. I've now shared photos from the first week I had her and the last, and told more stories than I had any business telling.

But I had Tina longer than I had Tumblr. Longer than I ran @megatownac, or even played Animal Crossing on the 3DS. Remember, the 3DS launched in American in March 2011. I was actually living in Virginia at that time, and Tina was living with my parents. She was five years old.

When I was getting my Bachelor's degree, I lived on campus, because campus was a 90-minute drive from where I was living. I could go home on weekends, or at least every other weekend, and I would, of course. I'd do laundry and shop for groceries and things like that, then come back to my dorm (or apartment, my last year and a half) with a hamper of clean clothes and bags of food to last me until the next time I could go home.

Tina would always act very cold to me when I came home to visit her for at least one day. If I came on a Friday, she'd wait until Saturday night to be friendly to me again. If I came on a Saturday, she'd sometimes wait until I was about to leave on Sunday before she'd approach me to let me pet her again.

From September of 2008 until March of 2009, during which she turned three years old, I lived in Japan as an exchange student. My life-changing trip to Japan happened after I adopted Tina. That's how long ago it was that I adopted her. I finished my Associate's Degree, started and finished my Bachelor's degree, got a job that I kept for five years, lived in two different apartments, bought a house, and made it through a global pandemic.

Eighteen years. People born the same day Tina was are old enough to vote now. I thought about that a lot when she turned 18. If she'd been my actual baby instead of my fur baby, she'd have been an adult. Instead, she was an extremely old and frail woman dying of kidney and thyroid problems. One whom I could pick up in one hand and carry around and make fun of.

"There's my horrible, stinky old woman!" I said to her, two days before she died, as she emerged from under my recliner to demand that I give her dry food as a treat. I picked her up and raised her high. She hung there and stared at me, her tiny paws dangling and idly swinging at my face. I held her close and smelled her. She smelled bad. I pet her, and then I put her down, and I gave her the dry food she wanted.

I don't plan on writing about her any more. This is enough, I think.

I'll always miss her, but writing about her like this has honestly helped. There were a lot of happy memories I went through in these posts. In the end, that's what we have in our lives. Memories. I'm glad my memories of Tina were good ones, overall. I hope I gave her as good a life as she could have gotten. I really do hope so.

[ratralsis]

I keep looking for Tina. She slept under the recliner in my living room a lot, especially in the warmer months, and it was her favorite spot for the last month or so. So when I'd roll up my exercise mat after my morning workouts, or when I'd go to do my physical therapy exericses in the evening, she'd often come out from under the recliner and see me. In the morning, it was because she wanted food. In the evenings, it was because she wanted me to pet her.

When I worked out this morning, I kept looking to the recliner, even checking under it once, to see if she was there. She won't ever be there again.

At lunch, I packed her remaining thyroid medication into my backpack and walked to her regular vet, which is only a ten-minute walk from my house. The technician who greeted me said she was sorry for my loss.

"Heard about that, huh?" I asked.

"Lap of Love always calls us," she explained.

"Well," I said, and I placed my backpack on the floor in front of the desk. I retrieved four bottles of pills. Two were completely full, with 60 pills each of 5.0mg and 2.5mg of Felimazole, and the other two were partially empty. "Tina doesn't need these anymore."

"These are to be donated?" she asked me.

"Or disposed of," I said. I wanted to act casually, but I could hear in my voice that I was starting to choke up and cry again. "I don't care either way. But seeing them on my counter this morning damn near broke me. Max doesn't need them, and if he ever does, I'll buy more."

She told me again that she was so sorry for my loss, and told me to have a nice day as I turned to leave.

"Thank you," I said. "You, too."

Max looked for her, too, under the recliner. He sniffed the carpet around where she usually slept, paused, then walked away. It's a day-old smell of a cat whose smells are all at least a day old, now.

The box were Tina liked to stand when I played with Max is still there. Only Tina ever used that box. Max never did. Never does. Should I get rid of it? I suppose I should, eventually.

I slept for six uninterrupted hours last night, from around 10:30 PM until 4:30 AM, when Max woke me by laying down under my arm like he very rarely does. He doesn't like sharing the bed with Tina, you see. But he doesn't have to now. Now he finally has me all to himself, and he's taking advantage of that fact today.

It was the longest amount of time I've ever slept in one go in this house, since I moved here in March of 2018 with the two cats. Study after study has shown that co-sleeping, either with pets or even a spouse, is terrible for your sleep. If all you want is better quality sleep, you're better off sleeping in separate beds and separate rooms.

But I'd trade every good night of sleep I'll ever get from here on out if it meant Tina could have stayed healthy forever and kept waking me up by clawing my face, demanding I pet her at 1:30 AM or that I roll off of my side and onto my back so she could curl up under my arm again. I can't say I ever got used to her doing that, but I did at least stop reacting by trying to hit her or grab her.

Let me be clear: she really did claw my face while I slept. She did it slowly and carefully, too. She'd lift up one front paw and gently scrape her claws on my forehead, or on my nose, or, once, she reached under my chin and scraped upward. That one surprised me.

She'd claw my legs when I sat at my computer trying to work, too. She wanted to be pet, or brushed, so she'd claw me. Sometimes she'd just sit and do nothing, trusting that I'd eventually pet her or brush her anyway. I could always tell when she came into the room, because she'd be licking her lips from having just eaten something or she'd sneeze or cough or otherwise make a disgusting old woman sound. She also walked loudly, so, even with earplugs in, I could usually hear her enter the room at night when I was in bed. She weighed 6 pounds or less for the last three years of her life, but she stomped her feet when she walked. She had an incredibly loud walk. I don't know if it was deliberate. I imagine not.

She was a terrible cat. She always smelled bad. It's one of the reasons I brushed and pet her so much. She stopped cleaning herself regularly years ago, when her joints started to ache. But I kept her clean enough that I really only smelled her if I brought her within an inch of my nose, and, really, at that point, it's my fault and not hers.

She had health problems for most of her life, starting with ear infections when she was only a few years old that left her with permanently sensitive ears. She had very large ears. They itched a lot, but if I scratched them, she'd always shake her head vigorously. In her last couple of years, she'd shake her head so hard that she'd lose her balance.

She'd drool, sometimes, when she slept. She'd lay her head down on me and when she got up there'd be a wet spot there. That, thankfully, stopped as she got older.

She would run and hide from me when I wanted to play or pet her, and only emerge again when she wanted to be pet. It made those moments when I could pet her or old her, or when she climbed onto the bed to sleep next to me, feel that much more special.

Before I even had a bed, back when I slept on a futon in an apartment with just me and her, she'd still walk back and forth over my body at night at least once or twice, purring like a gas-powered lawnmower. She had a horrible purr. It was this loud, wheezing noise, unlike any other cat I've known. I wondered for a long time if she was unhealthy because of it, before I decided that it was probably fine. She made it to 18 years old, so I'd say it was.

She'd wheeze and purr her terrible purr and it would lull me to sleep. I loved the sound of it. It meant she was happy. She was relaxed. She was never a high-strung cat, but she was easily annoyed, and hard to please. When I could make her happy, it was the best feeling in the world. The feeling of her resting her chin on me was the best that there was.

Sometimes, I'd be able to convince both cats to relax on the bed with me at the same time. I would think of those moments as the happiest in my life, even when they were happening. "This is it," I'd think. "Winning at bedtime."

I'm glad I had Tina in my life for as long as I did. 18 years is a long time, a good long time, and I don't have any regrets about it. I wish I could have had more, but I was already so greedy in wanting that much.

I dug through my hard drives and found these, which I believe are the oldest photos of her that I ever took, from January of 2008. She would have just turned two years old. This is pre-smartphone technology, here, folks. This isn't even a fliphone. It's just a slide-open phone with a shitty camera, but of the first twelve photos I ever took with a phone, four are of Tina. I still have this bed, by the way, or at least the frame. The mattress and box spring have been replaced.

Here she is from April 15 of this year, at her oldest and skinniest, sitting on the arm of my sofa for reasons known only to her. It's the best photo I have of her gorgeous eyes. The most beautiful eyes of any cat I've ever seen, even at 89 years old. They were the deepest, most brilliant shade of green, and it simply does not photograph right. Even in this photo, they look more yellow than they did in real life.

That was her, and how I'll always remember her: as my horrible, stinky old woman, who clawed my face and yelled at me when I had a food bowl in my hand because she wanted it on the floor and who purred like a chainsaw in my ear at night, and who had the softest fur and the prettiest eyes and who let me hold her like a baby, even though she'd always growl at me when I did that to her.

She was simply the best.

I'll probably share more photos in coming days, but I cried less today than I did yesterday, and that trend will likely continue, too.

Sorry to bother you twice about my dead cat like this.

Actually, no, I'm not. Fuck you. She was a big part of my life, and I miss her.