Little Thing

Clark, April 17 2108

    Providence Vet sent me a sympathy card, with wildflower seeds to plant in Clark's memory.  Flowers are a fitting memorial. Clark loved to hang out in the garden, and would crouch by the back door, waiting patiently for me to notice and let him out.  He used his squeaky meow sparingly, mainly to tell me it was dinner time; a loud, urgent meow, accompanied by a light paw swipe to the arm, was his Cat for saying "that hurts!" 

Clark in hopsital

As when a flea comb encountered a fresh wound while brushing out his coat.  But he forgave me my trespasses.  If it had been a hard day I'd mention that to him — are there really people who don't talk to their cats? — and he seemed to understand, would try to lick my face.  As a woman at Providence said to me when I dropped by to acknowledge the card, he was a very sweet cat. She was fighting back tears.

    Now, the things Clark used to do meld with household noises.  The creak of the front door, Clark asking for food.  Before, when it got dark, I would go into the backyard and call him sternly.  As in you naughty cat, time to stop playing and get ready for bed.  Since, I've tried calling him a couple of times, inside, where neighbors can't hear. He didn't come back in.

Gale and Clark

    The closest human to Clark besides me was my sister Gale.  When I left town she would come over from San Francisco to do the cat chores. Clark would climb onto her lab, Gale would tell him he was the finest cat in Alameda, and they would settle down together for a nap.  She agonized over him last November when he had a bad infection around his eyes, calling him "Le Pauvre."  An initial course of antibiotics produced scant improvement, and Gale demanded I return to the vet immediately to ask for better medicine.  The next time she came over we went to the vet together.  Gale broke into tears and pleaded with the receptionist to not let Clark die.

Clark with eye infection

    Gale, it should be added, is a schizophrenic.  She's been institutionalized much of her adult life, and taking care of Clark shows how much her world has expanded in recent years.  As do her tears, her concern for a vulnerable little creature.  She seemed emotionally muted before, but now she gives me lessons in caring about others.  Of course she was upset when Clark went to Pet Emergency, and I dreaded telling her he hadn't made it.  But she cared for me too, and said that it wasn't the end of the world.  There will be another cat.

    She's right.  Made a plan, as humans are wont to do: volunteer at the animal shelter; learn better Cat; be open to that spark of connection with my next feline companion.  Because when a major cat enters your life, you don't exactly pick them out, it's more like that you become entwined in a story.  Clark's arrival was certainly dramatic.

… … … … …

    2004 took a terrible turn for Jean.  Her good friend Sandra lived with her husband John in a two-story wood-beamed rustic house in upscale Mill Valley.  Every month Jean would visit her, and the two chums would go around to nurseries and select plantings for Sandra's garden.  Jean looked up to her, to them.  Both Sandra and John had doctorates in psychology, John was blessed with a photographic memory, and Jean valued Sandra's insights into life and love.  And for what it's worth, both were considered beautiful by American standards of physical appearance. But John took Prozac to manage his depression, and over time it stopped working.  In March he took his own life.

    Things got worse.  John had been the main breadwinner for the couple, the suicide exclusion clause on his life insurance had not expired, and Sandra could not afford the mortgage payments.  She told Jean she would kill herself before she would move. Jean tried to come up with ways to save her friend's house/life, ranging from finding good jobs she could apply for, to thinking of clever inventions they could patent, to asking for help from famous rich people.  None of the jobs panned out, the other schemes didn't even get off the ground.  Sandra told Jean that she was going to check out, that trying to stop her would accomplish nothing but to destroy their friendship.  I took the call from Sandra's sister and passed Jean the handset.  Her face went dark.

    Did she torment herself by wondering if she should have intervened?  Yes and no. For years she thought about it, talked about it, started a novel about it.  But she soon found other opportunities to save creatures, ones who wanted to live.  Once we were riding our tandem home from the ferry, and she heard feline sounds in a field of tall grasses. To my consternation, she insisted on getting off, finding the cat, and trekking to houses around the neighborhood to try to find where it belonged.

    That was in the summer, kitten season.  We had an outdoor cat we'd named Houdini because she'd escaped from the trap we set to capture her and get her fixed.  Houdini had a litter, and started bringing kittens around to our deck to eat. Jean had her own depression issues, and was spending a lot of time in the bedroom. But when she saw the kittens her eyes lit up, and she decided that two of them must now be indoor cats.  When she took them to the vet, some confusion on the forms led the vet to conclude one of them was named Lewis, Jean's last name.  Rather than argue, she decided to give the other a compatible name.  Enter Clark.

       … … … … …

    Jean loved to spend mornings doing computer work in bed, and then leap up catlike to dress and slip into her day.  She valued good snuggling in a cat, extra points for not curling up on the keyboard.  Clark got with the program.  He was the coziest bed cat, naughty only in small ways, like getting entangled in fabric when he would paw us just to be sociable.  Jean would purr "No claws mister," gently freeing him in a way that Clark took as grooming.

    He had one less endearing habit, climbing onto high shelves and knocking stuff down to make room for himself to spread out.  But broken crockery was a small price to pay for what he'd brought us, and Jean said it was just his way of asserting dominance over our other cats.  And he certainly outshone Lewis.  Both brothers were big, but Lewis was somnolent and timid, and so hefty as an adult he could not have climbed up to challenge Clark had he wanted to.  After our feisty tortie Zola wandered off in her old age, and our beatific tuxedo cat Felix died of heart failure, Clark truly was top cat.

       … … … … …

    8 years later, Clark to the rescue again. 

    In April 2011 Jean had brain surgery for a GBM, the worst kind of malignant brain tumor.  The surgeon removed all the tumor cells he could see, the she had radiation and chemotherapy.  At first she hoped to complete her Sandra novel while she convalesced, but discovered her interest in suicide had waned.  Instead, she wanted to write about her struggle to stay alive, and her friends and family were grateful for her emails and blog posts.  In June 2012 she had to tell everyone that the tumor had returned. Then in September, she was rejected from an immunotherapy clinical trial at UCLA because the tumor had crossed the corpus callosum into the left hemisphere.  By October I was writing all her news myself.  On December 7, Jean entered the Zen Hospice on Page Street in San Francisco.

    Hospices allow palliative care only, and Jean agreed not to pursue the one FDA-approved treatment her neuro-oncologist would still prescribe. But she thought of Tibetan herbs as her ace in the hole, while I pinned my hopes on cannabinoids, based on the research showing THC destroys tumor cells in test tubes.  The Zen Hospice was happy to administer alternative medications.

    And it seemed to work great at first.  Jean resumed writing, and received a parade of friends and colleagues at her bedside.  But the tumor was implacable.  By January she could only acknowledge visitors with her eyes, and answer yes or no questions by squeezing their hands.  Jean's close friend Yao, a DVM in South Dakota, pointed out that there was a visitor or two Jean would love to see, for whom language would not pose a barrier.

Jean and Clark holding hands at the hospice

Big Clark with Hospice Visitor

    And the Zen Hospice does allow pets during visiting hours — they do their utmost to accommodate the messy lives of the residents.  Sedate Lewis seemed the best candidate for keeping out of mischief in a institutional setting, and the very next time I popped back to Wood St. to set out food and water, I tried to coax him into a cat carrier.  He would have none of it; since Jean left he had been giving me suspicious looks and keeping his distance.  But Clark, as usual, was up for anything.

    It was weeks before he saw home again.  There were three good reasons why Zen Hospice bent their rules to allow Clark overnights: he raised Jean's spirits; he charmed everyone else; and he was the very model of feline decorum, most of the time.  He would hang out on Jean's sick bed, placing his paw in her hand, the two of them just breathing, letting the moment expand. He would greet visitors obligingly, allowing himself to be held and admired.  He never was even suspected of exploring another resident's rooms, or the

staff areas.  Well, hardly ever.  Once he disappeared for a couple of hours and was found hiding out underneath a reclining chair.  But by that time he was a resident, and there was not even a hint of eviction proceedings.

    Jean passed early in the morning on February 17. That evening, dozens of us crowded into Jean's room for what the Zen Hospice calls their bathing ceremony.  We took turns sprinkling her with flower petals, and trying to say a few words about what she meant to us.  Too many of us for Clark, but he strode out of hiding when the others had left.  Then we went back to Wood St. together to start our next phase.

       … … … … …

    

Clark, adapted to new household rhythms,
December 2015

Clark, New Years Day 2015, seated on the table
when I returned from a bike ride 

    We adapted to each other, in a household that felt as austere as a monastery, but as messy as a bachelor pad.  I'm not a bed-person, 7 hours sleep is quite enough, and then when the alarm goes off I'm up.  Clark didn't approve.  At first he kept his distance from the bedroom, but came to allow me to carry him in at night, and to ignore my abrupt wakenings in the morning and sleep-in.  And I learned some of what he had demonstrated at the hospice: the crucial importance of making time to do nothing but be with another creature.  I'd tug his ears, scratch his tummy, and tell him he was the companion animal par excellence.

    But we did fight an epic battle over his weight.  Lewis died suddenly of heart failure in June, and the vet said Clark was also at risk because he was flirting with feline obesity.  He was a big cat, but at 21 lbs. there was 50% more of him then there should be — his prescription rations were just 3/4 cup dried food per day.  When he wanted more, he would come up behind me and goose me in the armpit, or scamper around my feet when I walked around the house.  But after a year he was down to under 14.

    A success!  Thanks for letting me have that one Clark, helping you helped me through that grim time.  And thanks for everything you did for Jean and Gale. It would be comforting to say "see you on the other side," but can't really believe in that stuff.  But there's still some of this life left to me, and I hope to live it with some of the compassion that seemed to gather around you.