When he came into our lives, I didn’t think he would survive — he had been separated from his mother and couldn’t have been any more than four or five weeks old. For the first week we had to feed him KMR from a dropper every few hours, and then we had to wean him onto dry food mixed with KMR and heated until it was nasty-smelling warm mush. Somehow he figured out the litter box without too much help. We didn’t know if Lola had the same disease that killed Esmé and if she would give it to this kitten, but after a while we decided it didn’t really matter, and nothing ever came of it.
Lola wasn’t very thrilled, though. It took her a while to stop growling, and the best she could ever manage was to ignore him. As Maynard went through his Insane Kitten Posse stage, he would try to pounce on her, but she would snarl or hiss and he would go find something else to vanquish. From the time he was tiny, he loved to sit on my shoulder. If you were lucky enough to get him to sit with you for a minute, he would inevitably insist on fighting with your hand.
Maynard thought he was a tough guy until the day when Harry showed up in his world, another tiny abandoned kitten in need of a home. From the minute Harry appeared, he took control, and once he was big enough to leave the spare room and explore the house, he was the Alpha Cat and Maynard had to learn to live with it. When Harry arrived, Lola decided she’d had enough and died. For the rest of his life, Maynard was second banana, but it never seemed to bother him too much.
Maynard liked routine: regular feeding times, the same food, a drink from the bathroom sink every time you walked in that room, and Story Time. Once Charlotte came along, and once she was old enough to have us read to her at bedtime every night, part of the ritual included Maynard getting into my lap in the rocking chair and getting a cuddle while I read aloud. But Maynard never sat in anyone’s lap, he stood. Or paced, if room permitted. Standard procedure for Affection Exchange consisted of pacing back and forth in front of you while you stroked him, carefully avoiding touching his hindquarters (nothing annoyed him more than to have you pet him near the base of his tail).
Once he and Harry started going outdoors, Maynard preferred to try to slip out the door late at night, just as Harry was coming in for the evening. Sometimes I would chase him back in, but if the weather was not too cold or wet he got to spend the entire night outside, which he actually didn’t like. He never liked going outside as much as Harry; Harry will go out even if it is pouring rain or freezing cold, Maynard preferred warm summer evenings and wanted nothing to do with that horrid white stuff. As it became evident this winter that Maynard was getting close to the end, I wished for him to last until spring so he could enjoy some days outside, and he did get to enjoy that warm weekend we recently had.
Though he had been growing thinner and thinner, I realized last week that the end was near when he could no longer climb or jump because the muscles in his hind legs had withered away so badly. I took him to the vet last week expecting that they would want to euthanize him then and there, but he came home while we waited to hear about lab results confirming what the doctor thought she’d found: cancer in his intestines. When she called the next day, it was to say that the cancer was even more widespread. Bridget and I decided we didn’t want to have him suffer greatly, so she made the appointment to put him down.
I am genuinely grateful to have had these last few days with him. We spent part of the weekend in Maine, but otherwise he spent almost all of the time next to me wherever I was in the house. I had to lift him up onto whatever he wanted to get up on, and he was a weightless shadow, but he still was affectionate and engaged with me. This morning he got one last lick of coffee from my mug and one last parade on my desk before it was time to make the drive to the vet.
Our vet is a wonderful man, and he always liked Maynard. He got right down to business with us today, though, and my darling Bumble slipped away quickly. Having the extra time with him helped me keep it together for the whole event today, but I was very glad to have everything be quiet and quick and professional just the same. Driving home, I think I felt more relieved to have it all over than sad. As Bridget observed, it was more like losing a grandparent — someone who has lived their full life and has reached their natural end, so that there isn’t so much a sense of great loss as the realization that death is part of life and comes to us all in turn.
Goodbye, little grey pussycat. You will be missed.
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