Robbie - R.I.P.

For the second time in a decade or so, we buried a cat on the hill on the back side of our house.  Robert Malcolm was unique.  He drank by dipping his paw into water and licking it off, ate by scooping his food out of the dish and nibbling it off the garage floor.  He would go down the slide of the play-set in the back yard.  He endured patiently my grand-daughter's petting, pulling, and poking.  He assumed if you sat on the patio that was an invitation for him to climb on your lap.

Of course, he had bladder issues for his first year, turned the play-set area into his own gigantic cat box as an adult, and left any number of bloody carcasses in the garage.  Still, of our three cats, he was the only friendly one.  Jane, the female, prefers solitude.  Baron, the other male, moves for food and not much else.  Robbie liked people.

It started one morning last November, when I tried to go out the door from our kitchen to the garage and something was in the way.  It was Robbie, lying on the doormat, obviously in pain.  A trip to the vet and he was diagnosed with a blocked urinary tract, apparently a common ailment for cats.  Immediately, we were confronted with life-and-death decisions that involve cost of care.  The vet's office is not a good place to be making those decisions for a cat.  I cannot imagine how it would be at a hospital with a parent or child or spouse.  In any case, Robbie had surgery and spent a couple of nights with the vet.  I suspect the final tally was close to the combined total for everything we had spent on cats over the years up to that point.  Robbie came home with mild bladder control issues, but after a couple of weeks appeared to be better.  He would not eat the special food proscribed, but did take all the antibiotics.  So, we hoped for the best.  

But the first of January, symptoms returned.  Almost exactly a year after a sinus infection kept me home from work, I had another one.  As I reclined in the sun looking out my bedroom window, I saw Robbie huddled on the lawn, still wet with dew.  He was too miserable to move.  As the sun warmed the lawn, he stretched out and spent most of the day there, motionless.  Our options were to let him go or make another costly trip to the vet with no real hope of long-term recovery.  So, we decided to let him go.  He spent the next day laying on a doormat in the garage.  My wife said he moaned occasionally through the day and once looked at her piteously.  At that, she said a simple prayer asking his Maker to shorten Robbie's suffering.  When I came home from work not long after, his breathing was slow and shallow.  It was almost over.  We had an evening engagement that we had to attend, so we took our youngest girls and left our two older daughters at home to keep an eye on Robbie.  Less than an hour after we left, a short text message told us Robbie was gone.

It was a sad drive home and a sadder home-coming.  There were tears and tissues, hugs and an uncharacteristically quiet bed time.  Children have not yet learned to restrain their affections, to guard their hearts against loss, so the death of a 'simple animal' pained our girls more keenly than it did me.  Later, as I dug Robbie's final resting place in the clay on our hill, I wondered whether my reserve had caused me to miss something important.  I will miss that pesky cat.