I might have mentioned this before, but I would not identify as a “cat person.” Despite that, I’ve lived with quite a few cats in my day. Of them, none will ever come close to Rickie aka Beautiful aka Rickipod (or just Pod) aka Rickapotamus aka Kotuchna (my Polish grandmother, Babcia, always had a particular fondness for Rickie, and this was her name for her. I can still hear Babcia picking Rickie up to cuddle her, saying, “Oh, Kotuchna!”) Tomorrow is 4 years since I let Rickie go. Sometimes, I think I miss having a cat, but when I think about it, what I really miss is just… her.
I’m sure I’ve told some of her story before because I know I talked about her when I talked about all of the “last ones” I have brought home over the years. In the case of Rickie, everyone that overlooked her missed out on a great cat, especially if you, like me, feel like you could take or leave most cats that you meet. She arrived at my mom’s house at ~8 weeks old with my neighbor’s mom from Binghamton, NY with a paper bag of stuff that said, “RICKIE: West Chester or bust,” on it. She walked in completely unafraid and unintimidated by our one medium and one large dog. She was queen bee, and she wasn’t going to take their shit, even if she was tiny enough that she could sleep in their water bowl.
In the fall of 2006, when I met Justin, I recall him nervously telling me at one point that he didn’t really like cats, because he knew I had Rickie at home. I told him it was fine: I didn’t really like cats either, but he would probably like mine. Turns out he didn’t just like Rickie: he loved her, and they were quite good friends over the years. He’s told me that he used to just come home from work sometimes and snuggle with her for half an hour or more. She was a good cuddler, and her favorite was to lay on one of our chests while we were reading, with her head pressed under our chins so that we’d have to tilt our head back and hold our books up at strange angles. She’d stay there, content, for hours.
At some point, she developed urinary stones and went on a prescription diet. I wasn’t going to pay for the Rx food for my mom’s cat too, so Rickie moved into my bedroom pretty exclusively for years. (I don’t think my mom’s cat, Brynna, minded since Rickie always bullied her anyway when they were free in the house together.) Once she moved into my room, she slept by my feet every night. After Justin and I moved in together, she would sleep at the foot of our bed, and he’d accidentally kick her off most nights, forgetting that she was there. Once we adopted Flint, Justin’s brother, Kyle, coincidentally moved into our apartment with us for a few months the day after Flint’s arrival. Since the dog crate was in our bedroom, Rickie chose to sleep in Kyle’s room instead. She inspired Kyle to adopt his own cat, Grace, as soon as he settled into his own apartment.
Rickie was with me for over 18 years, the longest time I’ve so far shared my life with a given animal. I believe she was also the last family pet who’s time overlapped with my dad. Other than her urinary stone, she was generally in great health for most of her life. In her last couple of years, she had kidney disease, but I didn’t see it affecting her or even see her really acting or looking like a particularly old cat until her last 6-12 months. Her “good-bye” was especially hard for me because, as you already know, we lost Flint on December 30, 2017. Within a week or two of his death, Rickie really started to go downhill too.
Her appetite decreased significantly, she needed fluids supplemented under her skin, she seemed unsteady and a bit disoriented, I constantly had to clean cat litter from her feet (she had been tracking it all over the upstairs of our home for months already), I found a firm mass between her shoulder blades. In the few days before she passed, she got stuck in the blankets on our bed and urinated there while trying to get herself out in the early hours of the morning. I found her sleeping one day in her litterbox and another day underneath the daybed in our office (which ON that bed was usually a go-to spot for her naps). In hindsight, I should have let her go then, on the Monday I found her in the litterbox.
I couldn’t do it though because my heart was still broken from Flint. I just wanted a few more months to heal from his loss and a few more months with my best girl, so I brought her to work on Tuesday and hospitalized her on IV fluids and GI protectants and phosphorous binders. She was constipated, and I tried to relieve that with an enema. She didn’t get any better though.
My poor cat was just miserable. I don’t think she even really knew or cared where she was by that point. She sat in that hospital cage in treatment for two days just holding her head low or staring blankly. On Thursday, I was going to bring her home that night, just for one more night at home. Then she had a seizure that I caught while examining another patient. We gave her some valium to stop it, and I called Justin to say that she wasn’t coming home afterall, that she couldn’t. I couldn’t ask her for any more.
Justin left work as soon as he got my call and came to say, “Good-bye,” to our perfect cat for not cat people because she was always really more of a dog trapped in a cat’s body. I euthanized her on the exam table in our 4th exam room, finished my morning appointments and went home early. When I got there, I cleaned and put away all of Rickie’s things because I knew I otherwise wouldn’t do it for a while. I later realized that I missed cleaning some litter paw prints off of the office floor. They stayed there for years, until they faded away on their own because I couldn’t bring myself to do it after I found them.
Some day, I expect I will have another cat. I did already, briefly. I won’t go looking for it though. The right cat will find me at some point. Barnacle already did, and he had a wonderful ten months with us before his time came. He was a good boy, a good cat in his own right, but nothing like Rickie and not at all what I thought I would want to bring into my life. I’m open to that next cat, if and when the cat is meant to be.
“What greater gift than the love of a cat.” ~ Charles Dickens
