By the time I returned home from New York City, my wife had mercifully removed the litter box, food dish, and cat fountain—all potential reminders of how empty our upstairs had become in just 24 hours. It’s strange that such reminders should risk causing heartache. After all, Gita, our nearly 20 year-old Abyssinian cat, had come to spend nearly all her time sleeping under a throw on the bed. Her physical presence, while constant, had become so attenuated, so ghost-like, that we no longer expected to find her bathing in sunlight or sitting on the windowsill, gazing superciliously at passing dogs. Weighing only seven-and-a-half pounds in her prime, Gita had recently dwindled to under five, subsisting on packets of chicken bone broth and bits of kibble. But even in her final days, as emaciated as she’d become, she retained that serene beauty one sees in ancient Egyptian statues of her breed: sleek, erect, preternaturally regal.
While I was visiting my daughter in New York, Gita gave those last, unmistakable signals that she was ready to move on from this life. Barbara bravely faced the situation alone, later recounting how, when the veterinarian applied the sedatives, Gita appeared remarkably relaxed and beautiful, stretched out in a plot of sunlight on the bed, a queen to the end.
It’s only after our pets are gone that the most poignant thoughts occur to us. Barbara realized that, until Gita’s death, she’d never been in our house without a cat present—and we’ve lived here for three decades. Phoebe, Chloe, Winston, and Gita all passed their lives under this roof, each cherished as much as any family member. Now, with Gita gone, we go about our daily tasks newly unsettled by the absences she left behind. Barbara catches herself searching for Gita’s morning medicine, only to remember it’s no longer necessary. When I made the bed yesterday, absent-mindedly smoothing out a lump in the duvet, my hands were startled not to feel a tiny, warm body sleeping there—as if my physical self hadn’t yet processed the news that we live in a catless home now.
We still have our wonderful Saint Bernard Marlo, thank goodness. When he isn’t away at “play school” with 30 other pups, his presence keeps the house—the first floor, at least—properly unruly. But dogs and cats bring different energies to our lives, don’t they? Different satisfactions and different disruptions to routines that risk becoming, as we grow older, sadly rigid. Dogs are creatures of routine as much as humans and, to some extent, invite us to structure our habits even more inflexibly around theirs; a result, surely, of millennia of co-evolution. Cats, on the other hand, move through life like quicksilver, enviably disinterested, imperturbably feline, with little of a dog’s predictability or eagerness to please. So struck were we by our little cat’s manner that my daughter and I used to joke that Gita, tiny as she was, ruled over a shadowy crime syndicate, calmly directing its global operations from a sunny spot on our bed. That fantasy sprang, I think, from our experience of her as equal parts imperious and unrelenting, whether in pursuit of her favorite treats, a good scritching, or the best spot between me and Barbara at bedtime. Having long ago conceded the downstairs to Marlo, Gita came to rule the upstairs with a quiet tyranny only cats can impose.
This may all explain why, when I returned from New York shortly after Gita died, I avoided carrying my suitcase upstairs. I dreaded not seeing the telltale lump under the covers, or the food dish and water fountain. My homecoming would have been far worse had those items still been present; I’m grateful that Barbara removed them. Slowly becoming habituated to their absence, I still can’t shake the sense that our upstairs is uncannily orderly now, that the bed is too unwrinkled, the runners in the hallway too free of cat litter. Our tiny Empress of the Upstairs reminded us every day that our house—and, by extension, our lives—weren’t always under our control. Acting on the slightest whim, she could ruin a night’s sleep by running wind sprints down the hall at 2 AM, or reduce to ribbons the arm of a newly upholstered chair, or insist on a full-body brushing when I’d just lint-rolled my pants. As much as I grumbled about her indifference to my commands, Gita reminded me just to go with it.
It is that impish and defiant presence I miss the most. As I near my 65th birthday, when Medicare packets show up daily in the mail and my doctor qualifies every remark with, for a fellow your age… I welcome disruptions to any aspect of life that feels inflexible or—gasp—geriatric. We probably won’t adopt another kitten any time soon; Marlo keeps us occupied with his daily walks and constant need for belly rubs. But as we move into this next phase of life, without a cat in the window, or on the bed, or weaving about my feet, I will (with apologies to Blaise Pascal) carry a small but very deep Gita-shaped hole in my heart.