Groucho

Groucho
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

Ah. I'm so sad about Groucho. Even knowing that he was an old cat whose time had come doesn't make it any easier to have him gone. He was in my life for so long that there's a definite hole where he used to fit. I find myself in tears throughout the day, wondering if we did the right thing at the right time when it came to his care in the end.

After we had him put to sleep, David and I came back from the vet and began to clean up the detritus of Groucho's chemotherapy, all the bottles of pills, the IV bags and needles, the cans of special foods, the syringes we were using to force feed him after he stopped eating, the thermometer we used to take his temperature, the towels we used in the cat carrier and for his bed. I couldn't face those things anymore, those things that defined only the very end of his time with us, not the bulk of the time we had with him.

It's so easy to let a worried, worrying end moment define everything even though it doesn't really. Instead, I try to remember the beginning: Groucho's having come to us through a friend of mine, Lesley, who worked in a pet store that had been set on fire by arsonists. The firemen saved Groucho (and, because he was grey, named him "Smokey") but they couldn't keep him. Lesley asked if I'd take him, and of course I did. I renamed him Groucho because as a kitten, he had big sparse spots above his eyes that looked like Groucho Marx's eyebrows. As he got older, he did get grouchier, and the name continued to fit even after his eyebrows grew in.

I try to remember the funny habit he had as a kitten of carrying pennies around in his mouth. I was a waitress then and had a lot of change laying around in piles and he loved to collect the pennies by carrying them from place to place in his mouth. He eventually outgrew the habit, but how strange!

I try to remember the way he had of waking Dave up, by patting his face, or by clawing the blanket off. (He didn't try it with me because I'd either roll over and ignore him or push him off and go back to sleep.) I try to remember him taking his usual place on Dave's lap as Dave sat at the computer.

He had a long life, and, I hope, a happy one. But I still miss him.

We came home from the vet and we cleaned up, throwing away everything that reminded us of those last weeks, and it helps not to have to look at those things, but I still don't feel much like leaving the house these days.