I’m writing this on a chilly, late winter morning in my sister Elaine’s place in Centreville, Virginia, where I’m spending the weekend after attending a conference in Chicago. If I were to be asked which corner of the earth I would call my second home, this would be it, a quiet, three-story apartment whose back porch overlooks a brook and a row of trees whose leaves turn a riotous red in the fall.
My Lithuanian-American brother-in-law Eddie — a software engineer and a fellow geek at heart — lets me have the run of the place, so I’m free to explore the 1,000 channels on his HDTV and whatever’s on Netflix, and my sister feeds me all the hotdogs, Alaskan crab, and chicken noodle soup I want. This to me is what a real vacation (or a “staycation,” as they call these domestic binges these days) is all about — an indulgence in peaceful pleasure, a respite from stress. Sadly, Beng’s not with me on this trip, having to take care of the old folks at home — her parents, my mother, and another member of the family whose own passing years I’d refused to acknowledge.
Today my peace is broken, my heart in pieces; I’ve just been on the phone to Beng, and she told me what I’d been dreading to hear these past two weeks — that our marmalade tomcat Chippy, my pride and joy, the subject of many a digressive column-piece, the scourge of absolutely nothing — is going to have to be put to sleep. And it will happen soon, while I’m still here, perhaps the better for both him and me, because I’d be too soft, too cowardly and too selfish to do what my reason tells me should be right and kind.
(And here’s the strangest and most terrible of coincidences — after I wrote that last sentence, just minutes ago, I got an e-mail from Beng to tell me Chippy was gone, had gone within the hour even before they could bring him to the vet. My fingers are wet with tears as they type these letters, but the best and the only thing I can do now, for both Chippy and me, is to finish what I began.)
With Demi in tow, I got Chippy in 1999 from a pet shop in Cubao as a birthday gift for Beng, having promised her something “golden” but too cheap to get her the real thing. It was clear from the start, however, that Chippy was my cat, my buddy, grumpy me who had never had a pet nor, it seemed, the affection to spare on some furry beast.
He was like the boy we never had, Demi’s little brother — the kitten who bounded up the stairs and wailed away at our bedroom door until we let him in, who leapt up to the bed and insinuated himself between Beng and me, and stayed and snuggled there until one of us woke up and caught on to his furry presence.
No amount of telling myself that I expected this to happen lessens the pain. I’d seen the signs — the stupor, the loss of appetite, the shrinkage of what had been a frisky orange ball of fat, muscle, and hair. I tried playing with him weeks ago and wept when he wouldn’t respond, realizing that he had, at that point, outlived me. Chippy had just turned 13 last week — about 70 years in human terms, which is older than I am, and an age I myself will probably be lucky to reach. To him, we presented ourselves as “Mr. & Mrs. Boss.” Given the seniority he achieved, we should’ve called him “Mr. Chippy.”
On the eve of my departure for Chicago, I wrote Beng a note — I felt too choked to tell it to her directly — asking her to do what had to be done, if it had to be done, while I was away, because I could probably never bring myself to do it. Tell me gently when it happens, I told Beng, and today she did. Before I snuck off to the airport for my pre-dawn check-in, I knelt and bid Chippy goodbye; he was lying on his blanket in the patio he shared with Sophie. “Please be well “ was all I could say, knowing he wouldn’t.
Before my father died 15 years ago, I wrote — in fiction — about what it was to lose a father, thinking that it would prepare me for the inevitable, but when my father did go, I still bawled like a boy, as I should have. Almost two years ago to this day, on March 9, 2009, I wrote about Chippy in this column, worried sick about his slowing down: “He used to bound up the stairs and into our bed as a kitten,” I wrote. “These days he seems quite happy to lounge in the sunlight and to squat, though unproductively, on poor Sophie, our other Persian, and the day will surely come, not too long from now, when he’ll simply stop moving wherever the mood or the pain strikes him, and he’ll lie there like a rug until I nudge him awake; he’ll open a drunken eye and stir, might even yawn mightily enough to recall the perky young lion he once was, until one afternoon he simply won’t.”
And now, this awful day, he simply didn’t. Beng said in her e-mail that she and our ward Lilet cried as they wrapped him in a malong; following Demi’s wishes, we’ll have him cremated, and he’ll be in an urn when I get home Wednesday.
Why so much fuss over a cat? I’m aware that the world is full of people and causes far worthier of our grief and our expenses, and that the hard-nosed realist I otherwise purport to be should simply say “Quit the silly sentimentality and deal with it. It’s only a cat, for heaven’s sake.” Honestly, I don’t know why, and right now I don’t care. I do care for faceless humanity in general, but, beyond family, I just as honestly never felt for most persons as much as I did for this creature, who would rub his cheek against my shins whenever I passed by, expecting his neck or his belly to be scratched in turn. (Of course, “most persons” wouldn’t do these things.)
What is it we grieve for when we lose our pets? Perhaps the passing of our own time, of affection freely given and fully rewarded, and of that rarest of relationships in this age of Facebook friendship — a pure, uncomplicated love nourished by touch and gesture instead of speech.
Beng, Demi, and I shared 13 of the happiest years of our lives with Chippy, and that was such a blessing. As far as I may be from him today in Centreville, Virginia, I have never felt so close. Goodbye, Mr. Chippy. We will miss you so.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.