Requiem for a Qat

Aloysius Ebenezer Qat, Esquire came to me in the spring of 1996. Here, he's on top of one of our cat towers:

I was working for a company that sold mid-scale backyard storage buildings (we called them “Yard Barns”). We had been feeding a stray cat that was something of a mascot—Delam (as in delaminating plywood) was his name. Delam was an old tomcat—his favorite things were food, fighting and f*@$ing, in no particular order—and he had the scars and abscesses to prove it.

One day, a young cat followed Delam to our workshop and yard. He was a timid, feral thing—dirty, fearful of humans—but an attractive kitten of some six months’ age. Over time, we calmed him to the point that he would allow pets while he ate the food we provided. He discovered that pets felt good, and we discovered that he had a big, loud purr. He was a poor kitten, without the exotic toys like manufactured toy mice, but it didn’t keep him from playing—during a builders’ meeting, I saw him playing in the yard with a piece of gravel as cats will with toy mice, much as kids of so many generations used shirred rocks and brickbats for sandlot baseball games.

Not wanting him to face the same health problems of his mentor, I captured him and took him to be neutered and inoculated. He was too nice a cat to be dealing with the abscesses and battle scars, and one cat that smelled as bad as Delam did was too many.

Surprisingly, I learned that this cat had a clean bill of health. I fell prey to his endearing purr and fondness for attention and took him home with me.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out his name, given his humble beginnings. Aloysius Ebenezer Qat, Esq. (commonly called Al E. Qat) quickly showed himself to be the best-behaved, nicest, sweetest orange-and-white cat I have ever encountered. His purr was audible at thirty feet in a fairly quiet room. His love of a game of string was such that it proved that all cats are hard-wired for the joy. He was a master at a game our family calls “mouse bop,” in which the cat perches on a level surface three or four feet from the floor and toy mice are tossed vertically near that surface. The cat swats the mice to the floor much as a volleyball player spikes the ball over the net, unless he’s able to get a claw in the toy’s fur and collect it on the tower platform.

Last summer, Al E Qat developed feline diabetes. I almost lost him then. We began a regimen of daily insulin shots followed by a few cat treats (crunchy Pounce, just about any flavor, thank you very much). I could call his name, and he’d come trotting to the cat tower for his shot and treats. Al had always understood rituals—one had been that every time I came home, he would get a session of pets and treats on his tower.

This past Saturday, Al did not get out of bed for his shot. He clearly felt a bit worse than usual. He had had little appetite for treats the day before. We took him to the vet, who diagnosed some dehydration, a heart murmur that was new, took a blood sample, and sent him home. Sunday was a good day for Al. He was eager for his periodic treats, leaning almost off the edge of his tower to show me how much he wanted some.

Monday morning was a different story. He got off the bed at the usual time, but when I called him for his shot and treat ritual, he was not to be seen. I found him hiding under the living room sofa, clearly not feeling well at all.

Jenn’s workplace is closer to our veterinarian than mine, so she took him in for further diagnosis. When the vet called me in the afternoon, she had gotten the blood test results and had time to look at them. Al’s kidneys were failing and the heart murmur was found to be the harbinger of one of the old cat heart diseases. She felt he could come home, so Jenn brought him home when she got off work.

When he got home, Al seemed unwilling or unable to raise his head to really look around himself. His breathing was labored at best. I couldn’t bring myself to keep him at home, clearly in distress and clearly not wanting to go on with such a life. I hated to put him through a third car trip in one day, but the overriding thought was that I absolutely could not make him suffer any longer.

As we—Jenn, one of the vet techs, the vet and I--stood around Al in the exam room, comforting ourselves, each other, and Al, he finally settled down from the stress of the car trip enough to start purring. It was heart-breaking to hear, as it was a quiet version of his biggest loudest purr—one that included some vocalization that sounded almost as a trill inside the purr. We have chosen to believe that he was saying it was okay, that he understood my decision to put him out of his misery and that he knew his job keeping me company had come to an end.

Al is buried in the family cat graveyard at my mother and stepfather’s house. As has been my custom for the last several cats I’ve buried, I put some of his favorite toys in the grave with him. My sister was there, and tossed in a few cat treats. Jenn was there, and helped me fill the hole in the ground, as she too was smitten by Al’s endearing ways, and as we will help each other fill the void in our lives left by his passing.

As with all the cats I’ve buried, I miss him terribly. He had a great thirteen years with me, and I with him.