The Passing of a Legend

 Long time readers may have heard from time to time of our cat Anathan.  Named after the theater at Franciscan University, he starred as the kitten in "You Can't Take It With You" back in the spring of 2000, where he distinguished himself one night by escaping into the audience, where he peed on the theater carpet.

He came to live with me off campus as a young cat during the 2000-2001 academic year, during which I was a senior. And he's been with us ever since. He flew to California to live with us in our young-married apartment. Then he flew to Texas where we bought our first house. He watched over (though not, perhaps, with great approval) the arrival of numerous children.

This baby is now 13

Last year, we celebrated his 21st birthday. We knew he was born some time in February 2000, so we assigned him a Valentine's Day birthday, since it seemed so contrary to his personality.

The old man has not been well all year.  I took him to the vet back in the spring, where they said they'd never treated a 21 year old cat before. They asked if he still showed an appetite, concerned by his increasingly skeletal physique. Given that he had recently tried to pull the deli meat out of a sandwich while I was eating it, I had to say that his appetite was just fine.

But over the last year his health has not been great. He had become so stiff in his joints that he had trouble keeping himself clean, usually a bad sign in a cat. And during the last week, he went into a steep decline. He couldn't even engage in his favorite activity: jumping onto the dining room table to try to steal people's food right off their plates if they looked away for a moment.

This weekend he suddenly stopped eating and clearly could no longer move well.  Still his independent streak was there. He insisted on going outside this afternoon, and settled himself in the sun in the front yard.  I was cleaning his litter box in the back yard and left him there, thinking that a cat who couldn't walk twenty feet without resting wouldn't go far.  Five minutes later I looked across the street to find him across the street getting a dish of water from the neighbor. I hurried over, and the neighbor told me that he'd been attempted to sun himself on the asphalt in the middle of the road, and so the neighbor had moved him to the sidewalk. (What the neighbor must have thought on picking up this skeletal animal, I can't imagine, but I explained he was only a few months short of 22 years old. The neighbor said he had just had to put down a 15 year old cat and was duly impressed.)

By the evening, he was whimpering as he tried to settle his stiff joints into sitting, something he had never done before. I had hoped that he would be given the chance to die naturally at home, but it was becoming clear that to drag things out longer when he was not eating and was in pain would not be kind to an animal with no understanding of the meaning of pain. I called the vet, who agreed it was time, and told me that cats can linger for weeks without eating.

So I took the old man to the pet urgent care and held him in my arms as he was put down.

Rest in peace, old man. You were a legend and always lived by your own rules.