Image by Milada Vigerova from Pixabay
Grief breaches our defenses in the strangest of ways.
Suddenly, my father’s death hits me, all at once, like a stinging slap across my face.
It’s been more than six years since he passed away. I’ve grieved, moved on, grieved again. I never know what’s going to cause a full-on round of missing him dreadfully (though I’ll probably always cry in the card section of CVS around Father’s Day).
Sometimes it’s a sharp pain; other times, a dull ache, like the aftermath of a punch to the gut.
This time, it’s my cat’s name that brings it on.
I’m standing at my kitchen counter, dividing canned food onto two plates. I deftly cut a pill in half with a kitchen knife and mash the proper dose in a mortar with a pestle, mixing in warm water to dissolve them.
One of our cats needs daily medication, which requires careful attention. Yet the meal routine is far more manageable than when our dearly departed Emily, little old lady-cat of 18, took more prescriptions than my husband and me combined.
“Are you ready, Buster?” I ask the rotund gray tabby with the spotted belly who’s shadowing my every move. He likes to supervise, make sure I’m properly preparing the evening meal, while his sister Bella hangs back, quietly and patiently.
Buster Kitten, I think, and promptly burst into tears.
The Arrival
Buster and Bella appeared on our doorstep when we lived in North Carolina more than 10 years ago. They were wee kittens, who had apparently been dumped nearby and then wandered our little neighborhood for a couple of days before eventually climbing, weary and famished, onto our front porch.
“These look like cat people,” we always imagine Buster telling Bella as they plopped down on the doormat beside the morning paper. “I’ve been watching them.”
He took care of her back then (as the probable runt of their litter, it is unlikely she would have survived without him), and they’re bonded to this day.
It was a crisp fall morning, and I had already left for work when my husband opened the door to retrieve the paper. We joke about it to this day.
“Knock Knock!”
“Who’s there?”
(Wait for it…)
“KITTENS!!!”
Long story short, he got some food for the insistent adventurers and promptly locked himself out on the porch. He was still in his pajamas, with no phone and no spare key hidden under a flowerpot.
Fortunately, the garage was unlocked, so he spent the day in his workshop with the kittens.
I arrived home many hours later, completely clueless about the day’s occurrences. My husband emerged from the garage, and my first thought was “What on earth is he WEARING?”
Not wanting to spend the day in his pajamas, he’d found the only clothes available to him outside the house – clothes that had, a couple of weeks earlier, been the attire of a Blackbeard dummy we’d built and put in our front yard for the benefit of the Halloween trick-or-treaters.
When he filled me in on the situation, my first response was “Nope, I don’t want to see them. If I don’t see them, I can’t fall in love.” We already had three cats, all indoors, and five didn’t seem manageable at all.
But, I can’t stay away from kittens, so a few minutes later, I was sitting in the garage with two tiny felines crawling all over me, mewling and trying to nurse on my fingers.
The nights were getting chilly in November, so we set the kittens up in our spare bedroom until we could get them to the vet for a check-up. Meanwhile, we half-heartedly tried to find a home for them.
Always a softie when it comes to animals, I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, crying at the thought of the siblings being separated.
I also started to bargain with myself – “If I win this game of Solitaire, we can keep the kittens. If I nail this presentation at work, we can keep the kittens.”
Finally, we admitted they’d been ours all along. They knew it, of course - they were just waiting for us to get used to the idea, as they used all their kitten charms to convince us.
Slapstick
“A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.” — Agnes Repplier
Buster was an outright rascal from the very beginning. During their time in the garage that first day, my husband had built a sort of pen for the kittens, to keep them from wreaking havoc while he was tinkering at his workshop.
In case you didn't know, kittens get into everything.
Buster wasn’t having it. My husband had scarcely turned his back before he heard a tiny “mew” behind him and saw an indignant kitten staring up at him. He’d managed to scale an 8-foot leather screen to escape this unacceptable captivity.
My dad first met Buster and Bella a couple of weeks later when my family came to visit Thanksgiving. We’d just moved into our first house, a few miles away from the rental property where the kittens had found us.
We still hadn’t unpacked, but I brined and roasted a turkey anyway, serving a full Thanksgiving spread on a folding table. My dad cracked up over Buster, who ran and skidded across the shiny hardwood floors, sliding several feet before somersaulting, spinning around, and doing it all over again.
“Buster KITTEN,” he chortled. “Like Buster KEATON!”
Yes, the antics of our crazy little kitten-boy had reminded us of slapstick comedy, and the name seemed appropriate. My dad immediately picked up on it and enjoyed pointing it out to other people who didn’t quite get it.
It cracked him up every time he said Buster’s name.
Loss
Today, of the Notorious Five Kitty Gang, only Buster and Bella remain. And my husband and I have but one parent left between the two of us.
Buster, technically a “senior’ cat at 12 years old, has grown more reserved, but he still has plenty of cattitude. We like to say the devil’s in the tail, and his is always held high. Bella was born a bob-tail, so we figure Buster got most of the devil. His nickname since the early days has been Gatito Diablo.
My dad never liked cats when I was growing up. We were dog people, through and through — and big dogs at that. It wasn’t until the cat my sister and I adopted in college temporarily moved in with my parents that he suddenly became smitten.
That cat was never allowed to leave, and lived to the ripe old age of 21, in the lap of luxury.
I wish he could see Buster now. I imagine he’d still have a chuckle over the name, but instead of enjoying the antics of a kitten, he’d find a comfy chair in a sunbeam, where an elderly man and an elderly cat could have a quiet afternoon nap together.