Malvolio, ~1999 - April 25, 2005
Purple Collar. Smelly Butt. Furry Pig. Greyling. Starvycat.
He began to lose a lot of weight a while ago, so the vet cut a growth off his ear and then decided he had diabetes. And he grew more and more miserable and emaciated, always hungry, but never gaining weight.
We had him put down last night. They thought it might have been cancer.
But I'll remember him for pooping on my bed the first night we brought the cats home from the Women's Humane Society, when they were little kittens you could hold in one hand.
And constantly getting stuck on the roof above our backdoor and meowing incessantly until we brought out the "kitten elevator" [any chair that hapless humans would have to lift above their heads while the cat jumped off the roof onto the chair, to be slowly lowered to the ground].
And trotting up the driveway as the car pulls in, stopping to look behind him every few steps to make sure the car is still coming.
And though not the brightest, being the sweetest, most malleable, best-tempered cat.
<3
Curiosity
may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.
Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.
Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die--
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.
Dogs say cats change too much, are irresponsible,
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.
-- Alastair Reid (b. 1926), Scottish poet
That vet was dumb. If a cat starts to lose weight, you don't cut MORE off it. Geez.