Animo

[fivecats]

Ani
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I have not always been a cat lover.

Growing up, I always had dogs around me. Our wired haired terrier, Ginger, was brought into the family when I was too young to remember so it seemed to me that she was always there. After Ginger died when I was an early teenager, my mother had a succession of Shelties, through a friend and local breeder.

I not only considered myself A Dog Person, but I had also accepted my fathers prejudice against cats as gospel: "Kittens are nice, but they turn into cats."

During our first conversation together, I apparently mentioned this uninformed prejudice to Bonn. Later, she told me her first thought was, "Well, that's the first thing that has to change."

More?

She told me that I just hadn't met the right cat yet -- that all it took was The Right Cat to open my heart to cats.

I scoffed at the idea, as I am wont to do to ideas I considered baseless. Yet, back in our rented house in Maryland, we were adopted by a mother cat and her three babies and one straggler. It was the straggler who captured my heart. Gray, with a spiral of white on her back hip, she was named Skittish, for her reluctance to come close to her human food providers. Eventually, through patience, I became the only person who she would allow to come close to her. When I was able to actually pick her tiny self up, it was a major victory.

And, when a neighbor threatened to "dispose" of the kittens for spoiling her perfect suburban back yard, I spent weeks going to the area shelters looking for her, and all of her half-brothers.

When we moved to North Carolina, my heart was sufficiently opened to the possibility of having cats in our lives. Eventually, we adopted one (Isis) before moving to The Old Farmhouse where Bonn befriended a goose at a small pond down the road. After several months of visiting the goose and bringing bread for the goose, Bonn found a small, long-haired gray ragdoll, starving and desperate for food. A day or so later, we had a second cat. And when that cat had kittens -- on Easter weekend -- we had five more cats.

Those five kittens became the five cats of my online name. And of those five, one cat grabbed my heart right away.

She was feisty, hell-bent on exploring her environment long before her eyes were even open. I had to build a 'wall' of album covers to keep her contained. When she didn't like the enclosed situation she found herself in, she'd look up with unseeing eyes and hyperventilate a hiss, her tiny, sharp teeth exposed to frighten me away.

I named her Ani after Ani Difranco. I thought my the name captured the free spirit and f*ck youness off Ms. Difranco. And while there was no question that Ani was 'my' cat, there was also no question that Ani could have cared less.

I gave voices to all of our cats. Most of them were/are softer voices that might register mild indignation at best. Ani, on the other hand, has a favorite phrase: "Fvck you, you fvcking fvck."

Bonn would laugh at me -- me, the guy who just wanted a nice, quite lap cat and ended up with a "Did I say you could touch me, you fvcking fvck? No, I did not. So fvck off" cat. She would roll her eyes whenever I would scoop her up and hug and kiss on her, wondering what in fvck's name she ever did to deserve such torture, but I was going to make certain that she knew she was loved, bad attitude and all.

A few years after we moved into the Suburban Enclave, Ani started coming up to me in the middle of the night. She'd lay down next to me and let me rub her chest and stomach. It was fine, as long as it was just the two of us and no one else could see -- not Bonn, not her brothers or sister. For the first time in my life I didn't mind waking up in the middle of the night.

I can tell when she's not feeling well or when she's feeling hassled by the other cats in the pride -- she'll come up to me for some attention. When she's tired, she comes up to me either in my computer room or at the dining room table where I do most of my editing, and pesters me until I finally get it into my head that she wants me to go to bed with her.

Saturday we took her to the vet. She's had an open wound on the back of one of her front legs for several weeks now. Two different vets have given us unhelpful, extremely expensive information. This new vet (who came recommended by a friend from werk) and took a look, shook his head. He felt the lump under her arm and a few small ones around her neck. He took surface cell samples on some glass slides and came back with an unclear diagnosis. It was clearly one of two types of cancer: one that was mildly aggressive, one that was very aggressive. He'd need to do a biopsy to tell which type it was.

He was a great vet -- he didn't try to sugar-coat anything, nor did he want to give us any false hopes. The best outcome would involve removing the leg at the shoulder and chemotherapy. The worst outcome would need an x-ray to see if it had spread to the lungs.

With Saturday a blur, Bonn woke up early on Sunday and took Ani outside for the first time in weeks. We'd been afraid of allowing her out with the wound open and she'd been growing more and more depressed at being locked up inside. She's been such an athletic, outdoor cat, not to mention smart and perceptive. Seeing her finally outside again made things clearer for Bonn. When she woke me up, we talked about the situation and agreed that as smart and as spirited as Ani is, amputation and chemo would only be miserable for her. Worse, it might break her spirit, something I don't think I could forgive myself for.

I spoke with the vet again today. He understood our decision and agreed to help with some pain management meds. As it turns out, the med he prescribed may even stall the development of the cancer.

So, I can hear the clock ticking, very loudly in my ears now. None of us knows the day nor the time, but in Ani's case, it could be weeks or months.

tick...tick...tick...

And, in true Ani fashion, she has no tolerance for me being sad or maudlin when I've tried talking to her. If I can't be my upbeat, goofy, stupid self, she has very, very little use for me.

Although, she does still appreciate my warm lap and hands every now and then.



Tell someone special to you how important they are to you. The time we have together is so brief, so hard to grasp. It's like trying to hold on to smoke...

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