Last week, we said goodbye to KitTen. Sadly, it was way too early for him to die.
When I worked at Interlochen during the summers, I knew a medical assistant who fostered animals before they were put up for adoption by the local humane society. She got a Siamese-looking kitten after I had already left camp and posted a photo of him on FB. I reached out immediately.
Growing up with Siamese cats, I really do love them. I love their personalities, especially how vocal they are. I adopted KitKat back when we lived in Dayton, but in a strange turn of events, a girl who was cat-sitting him before we left for Germany wouldn't give him back. Since then, we've had mostly tabbies (with the GRAND exception of Hootie), so I was excited to start an adventure with another Siamese.
We were living in PA at the time, so Mark and Allison brought him out to us. Because he was going to be MY cat, I was determined to give him THE most perfect name, but in the end, we called him "baby cat" and "KitTen" so often while I was trying to decide that that's exactly whom he became.
KitTen was really Siamese. His white paws and white face let us know that he had something else in him along with his almost non-existent legs and fluffy fur. But as I said from the beginning, he was so aesthetically pleasing, like Mackinac Island Fudge ice cream. I loved to pet him and to look at him.
He was a smart cat. He learned very quickly to answer to his name especially when it meant some deli turkey or tuna was on the other end of him coming.
He loved all of the other animals too, especially Mochi (much to her chagrin).
And he was a love bug. He was one of those cats that is so aggressive when being petted that it's almost too much. And his favorite cuddle place and time was on me (literally on my chest) on the couch.
But something was wrong with him. About five years in, we couldn't get him to stop peeing around the house. We would find pee everywhere, even on all of our rugs, and we did everything we could to stop him. Setting up cardboard around the baseboards, multiple cat boxes around the house, spraying mint spray on the floors. He was relentless.
And Hootie didn't like him anymore either. They had been brothers for years, cleaning each others heads and sleeping together, but when Hootie came back from Alabama, he didn't want to be around him. Nor did Mochi.
And then he had a seizure or some kind of neurologic event. I had locked him in the laundry room to attempt to retrain him to use his box. I walked in one morning, and he wasn't moving. He couldn't walk at all. I thought maybe he was depressed, but when we rushed him to the animal hospital, they knew something was wrong....but they didn't know what. After our regular vet was open for the day, we took him over there, and I asked them to just give him IV fluids to see if that would help. He ended up standing again, but they recommended we take him to an animal neurologist if we really wanted to figure out what was going on.
No.
So for the past year, he has been locked in our bedroom with his cat box and food in our bathroom. It's been a miserable existence for him and for us. No more nighttime cuddling, no socializing with his other animal friends. At first, he seemed okay, hanging out in his cat castle "tube", but eventually he couldn't jump up to it, or even down from it. And then I noticed he wasn't jumping onto our bed. And then he was shaky just walking to his food. And the pee and poop everywhere, sometimes just two feet from his box. He couldn't even clean himself because he would lose his balance reaching back to lick his legs and back.
And then he started circling. He didn't walk straight anymore; he walked in circles.
I didn't really realize how far he had fallen until John posted a video of him when he was healthy. He was a shell of the cat he had once been.
We've put down several animals in our lifetime, and the easiest ones are the ones who have lived a long life and who are suffering. Jake and Cherry who both lived to 17 and who were being destroyed by cancer are good examples. The most difficult animals to put down are the ones who aren't so old and who could continue to live a good life if something wasn't wrong with them (Hootie and Chief and Scout are the most tragic examples). But KitTen sits in the middle. Yes, he still had more life to live, but mentally he wasn't all there. He became so difficult to take care of that it's honestly a bit of a relief now that he is gone. Yes, I cried as his soft furry head laid down with the sedative, but it felt like we had said goodbye to him long ago when he began to deteriorate.
I don't think I have more photos in my photo album than I have of KitTen because he was always so beautiful and lustrous and aesthetically pleasing and needy, and that's how I want to remember him.
We'll see you on the other side of Rainbow Bridge, my Russian-speaking cat <3
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