Early last year, my brother's cats Otie and Claire came to live with us. That brought the list of "living things in my house that do not have a job" to 3 cats, 2 Vizslas, and a baby. I was not overjoyed at the prospect, but Otie had previously lived with us when my brother was displaced from his condo due to a fire...and Claire only weighed 5 pounds. How much trouble could she be?
Answer: a boatload. Within weeks Claire had eaten something without us knowing it and she began acting very sick. So, I rushed her to MedVet on a Friday night and sat there as they told me it would be thousands of dollars to have emergency surgery. I went out to the parking lot (in the dark, in the rain, on Claire's birthday...could this get sadder?) and called Patrick...and immediately started sobbing "I can't live with myself if we kill this cat!!!" (It wasn't so much the cat as the guilt...I have a conscience the size of South America that won't even let me live down things like not going back out to the car to get the reusable grocery bags I've forgotten). Patrick begrudgingly agreed; mostly I suspect so HE wouldn't have to live with ME thinking that I killed this cat. I sat up in our guest room the rest of the night, waiting for the surgeon to call with an update. And at 4 am, he called and I thought he said that she had eaten a baby bottle nipple. But surely I must have been dreaming or delirious. It WAS 4 am, after all.
And yet, when Patrick went to pick her up, he returned with not only Claire, but also the bottle nipple that had so expensively been surgically extracted from her. And from then on out, we realized that we had the cat equivalent to a crack addict on our hands.
Claire had to be caged whenever a bottle was out. But just when we would think we had everything safely stored, she would outsmart us. We discovered that with time and effort she could get the caps off the bottles. And chew through the hard plastic sippy cup tops. And open the closed upper kitchen cabinets. And sneak in while I was emptying the sterilizer. And jump into the playpen and snatch cups out of our son's hands as I watched.
And so this chess match continued. One mistake, and she would be all over it...and we would be rushing to MedVet for another appointment. And it wasn't just bottle nipples...it was our food, the dogs' food, anything that might have been edible, remotely edible, or ever touched by someone who has eaten food seemed too alluring for Claire to leave alone. She ate our son's bibs. She tore open too many bags of bread / crackers / chips to count. She spilled a gallon of milk all over me and a brand new pair of shoes. She ripped apart a box of Kraft mac & cheese and spread the powdered cheese all over my cabinet. She knocked an empty (borrowed) crockpot off the counter and broke the crock. She stole food off of our forks as they traveled in between the plate and our mouths. She submerged her entire head into a glass of milk. She stole Patrick's sandwiches out of his lunch bag. She took the lid off the trashcan we store the cat food in and ate herself sick. I am not exaggerating about it being parallel to living with a drug addict. You just wish that they would try to help themselves for once.
Claire was seemingly unable to do that, and this week she overdosed. We still don't know what she had recently eaten, or if perhaps it was just the accumulation of random things in her belly over time; but regardless, she became very sick and we made the difficult decision to stop her suffering and put her to sleep. I kinda feel like maybe that's what she wanted all along.
For all her many, many faults, Claire was our crack addict and she was a part of this family. As much as she frustrated the heck out of us, I admired her gumption and Patrick enjoyed seeing her bug me on a daily basis. In some ways life going forward will be easier and in some ways it will seem empty. But any way you look at it, life will definitely not be the same without Claire...
So sorry :(
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