This Christmas

This is the first year since 2004 in which we have a full-sized Christmas tree.

In fact, this is the tallest tree we’ve ever owned, at 6.5 feet in height. It’s pre-lit, can change from colored to white lights with the touch of a button, and we got it on sale, to boot.

It’s a beautiful tree.

It makes me very sad.

The reason we hadn’t had a full sized tree since 2004 was because we always worried the cat would get into trouble with it. He’d eat it, or climb it, or some such thing. The cat was only eight months old when we adopted him (he was rescued from the streets and fostered before we got him) so very much still behaving like a mischievous kitten.

We adopted him in January of 2005. He was the center of our home and the love of my heart for seventeen years.

By last July, though, we knew his time was coming to an end. He was suffering. It was selfish to keep him alive any longer, for my own sake.

We made the hardest decision any pet-lover can ever have to make, and we said goodbye to him on July 20, 2022.

This was more than just a companion animal; he was my therapy cat in many ways and a real physical comfort to me when I’d panic. He was also loyally by my side through the period of time in which I had 15 medical procedures, including six eye surgeries (and during the time I was blind for a time before them). When I had to sleep in a chair for three months at one point, he slept on my feet on the ottoman every single night. He never left me without comfort and unconditional love.

Taking a nap on my husband's hand in 2019...

 

In the end, on top of his many medical problems he was also deaf, and showing signs of dementia. He’d forget where I was, and cry out for me until I came up to him and found him in the next room even though the apartment was only one bedroom and very small. It was heartbreaking.

He was so sick at the end, there was no question in anyone’s mind, including the vet’s, that we were making the right decision. It didn’t make it any easier.

I know I don’t have to explain to anyone who has ever loved and lost an animal just how big a hole in your heart they can leave.

I’ve been mourning for my sister’s loss (almost a year ago now, it’s impossible to believe) and in the almost five months since we lost Little Old Man Cat I’ve been especially sad.

Loving people is a complicated thing; because people are complicated beings. Animals love in a much purer way—a way that makes losing them seem incomprehensible, because it seems like something so pure and gentle and loving should indeed live forever.

Before he lost his hearing, Little Old Man Cat had his favorite music he loved to listen to. He loved Josh Groban’s work and also Celtic Thunder, but perhaps his favorite album of all time was Tom Chaplin’s Twelve Tales of Christmas. We’d listen to it year around, just because he’d always be so deeply contented when it was playing.

He’d always settle down into my lap and snuggle up near the speaker on my iPad and go to sleep listening to the music.

There’s a song on that album that has come to mean so much more to me in the past year: We Remember You This Christmas. It’s about missing the ones we’ve lost along the way, and telling them that we will remember them at Christmas.

Little Old Man Cat had a tiny Christmas stocking all his own; we’d put a catnip mouse toy in it every Christmas morning and give it to him. He’d sniff at it, get the mouse out, bat the mouse around, and generally have a wonderful time.

I was thinking about the stocking the other day and it turns out I wasn’t alone; my husband asked me if I knew where it had gotten to. I knew just where it was. I just wasn’t sure if I should hang it on the tree or not; for my sake, or for his. We agreed in the end that we should hang it up, and so it twinkles a little in the pretty lights, and it reminds us how lucky we were to have a cat who lived eighteen years, almost entirely by our sides.

Thank you, Little Old Man, for being who you were. There will never be another like you, and no one else could take your place in my heart.

Maybe we’ll meet again someday. Maybe you’ll meet me at the foot of the bridge when it’s my time.

If only I could be so lucky, I’d be grateful.

~bru