Copyright © 2018 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Return to lately 2018.

We rarely see right away when something in our lives has changed.

The early signs are all there, in front of us, but we fail to notice these harbingers. So much of our lives are lived amid distractions.

Soon after Mary had her stroke, in the Spring of 2002, and was finally released from the hospital's intensive care unit, nine days later, we were adjusting to our new lives in our home, and everything that had changed now, and one day a small gray cat showed up outside our front door, long and thin, "like a limousine" as I initially described her 16 years ago in my Latelys, and eventually we took her in, named her Lady.

And she ate!

Went through bowl after bowl of canned cat food, whiskers vibrating, while our other cats watched in astonishment and apprehension from a fearful distance away on the wood-planked floor of our kitchen.

And got fat.

Mary was still spending eight hours each day at an outpatient facility in Dallas, one that offered an intensive program of speech, physical, and occupational therapy for stroke patients. Each morning I'd pack her lunch for her, brown paper bag, usually a sandwich, the red and yellow curve of a fruit, and a snack. One day, to that treasure trove I added a crude drawing of a fat Lady (I have sketchy sketching talent), with the caption: Fat, or Pregnant?

That Saturday morning, while we watched the news and weather in our bed, rain was apparently imminent, Lady jumped off the mattress, waddled out of the room into our master closet, and gave an extraordinarily messy red and pink and brown birth to five kittens.

I won't go into a lot of details here about our lives with those kittens, because they're all over my Latelys for the past decade and a half, front-pawing at each other halfway through a paragraph, sunning themselves on the sill of an isolated sentence, lifting their tails and cleaning their crotches in the midst of a metaphor.

Instead, I'll just role call their names: Thor (the only male in the litter), Beauty (Thor's sworn enemy), Athena (who loved to push her paws against us in bed, kneading), Sweet Pea (who is sometimes crazed), and Button (who of all the cats, is the only one who never bit us).

Athena died young. About one year old. By now we have a number of cat graves in our backyard, at different locations, and Athena's grave was the first in what would be a new row of graves, all associated with Lady and her kittens, towards the rear of our property, under the stretching boughs of a pink-blooming crepe myrtle. Given her young age, her hole in the brown dirt did not have to be very large. Digging a grave is hard work. Railroad pick swung over the shoulder, repeatedly, shovel, trowel, pruning shears to cut through the thick, tough tree roots, fingers curling under a large, white dirty rock embedded in the ground, trying again and again to yank it out, like a wisdom tooth.

Years and years later, Lady went next. Mary held her on the white sheet of our bed while she slowly, quietly, said goodbye to Mary, to me, the rooms of our home. We buried her next to her daughter. Piled a pyramid of white rocks on top of the returned earth. You know why.

Our cats love spending time in bed with us, during our coffee mornings and lazy movie-watching afternoons, but as the years have gone by, it's gotten harder and harder for them to jump from our brown carpet up to our white sheets, so we bought one of those cat stairs? It's a small staircase with three steps you can set up against the foot of your bed so older cats can climb it with their upright ears to get to our pettings. Flanking the stairs on either side we positioned two footstools, to handle rush hour. (And also because Beauty will make sure she climbs the stairs first each morning, then position herself at the top, blocking access to the bed, to try to keep Thor from getting on the bed, snarling and hissing when he shows up, so the foot stools are alternate routes. She refers to Thor, when talking to us, as 'Jugface', a rather mean-spirited nickname, and keeps threatening to throw sauerkraut at him. We keep several small cans of sauerkraut in our home because of our love of Reuben sandwiches, one of the best things you can crunch between your teeth.)

About a month ago, we were sipping our coffee, watching the morning news, which as I've said elsewhere is basically death and weather, and at one point a cat's head popped up on the right side at the foot of our bed, dropped down out of sight, popped up again, dropped down again.

I swung the white sheet off my striped pajamas, slid out of bed, walked down the side of the mattress, and there was poor Button, sitting on her tail on one of the footstools, frustrated.

She could no longer jump from the footstool up onto our bed.

I didn't think anything of it at the time. We never do. Picked her up under her warm armpits, air-lifted her downwards-hanging body, innocent eyes, to our bed, our loving pettings.

But Button was dying.

She'd lick beer, and coke and vodka, I placed on the side of my desk in my upstairs study, tapping words in the dark-windowed evening.

She was smarter than her siblings. And more fearless. She'd push past her mother, her sisters and brother, on the bed, to get petted. I admired that assertiveness.

She wasted away very slowly. Head getting bigger than her heaving body, yellow fangs getting bigger than her face. There was absolutely nothing we could do to save her. So we just held her, stroked her, as she passed, as she shimmered on.

It astounds me that we've lived in this house now for 27 years. When I was young that would have seemed like such an immense period of time, almost unpassable, filled with not only months and years but decades, but looking back, it feels like the length of a long, wonderful, kite-filled Summer.

Our house holds so many memories by now, wherever I look, I see where our slanted-backwards CD racks once stood, when CDs were popular, and we'd dance crazily to their songs Friday nights, knees hitting the backs of the black breakfast nook chairs; where there used to be a microwave above the stove; where Chirper would love to play on the white carpet with the shiny gold hearts his paws would pull down year after year from the spiky green boughs of the different-height Christmas trees.

At first, each morning after her death I'd remember Button, and say a little prayer for her while I scooped our coffee. One morning I forgot, and didn't think about her until the afternoon, while watching Judge Judy. And then sometimes days would pass before I'd remember, and say Hi again.

As happens.

Life goes on, until it doesn't. There are always new distractions, and nobody really wants to think about death, any more than anyone wants to think about an upcoming dentist appointment.