The Queen is Dead

Harlequin, the most beautiful of all cats.

The sweetest, kindest, softest, most beautiful being who has ever loved me is gone. She’s now just a tiny heap of ash, a few photos, and a swirl of memories. It still doesn’t seem real.

Everything happened so fast that if I weren’t putting keystrokes to keyboard right now, the death of my beloved cat Harlequin might fade into a blip in this maelstrom of a life I seem to be living.

Harlequin, Missy, MissMiss, Big Kow, Bug and whatever other names Holly and I dreamed up for her – why is it that our pets have so many names? – died at 10 in the morning on Tuesday, May 16. She was 16 years old.

She had been wasting away from an intestinal disease that made her hungry, yet unable to absorb nutrients. She had become incontinent, emaciated, sluggish and woozy. Old age and her slow-motion starvation saw her drop, over the course of a few years, from about 10 pounds down to less than 4 ½. Her final decline this year was dramatic and sad.

Finally, it was time.

I trusted Holly to know. After we split, Missy stayed at the house with her. She was simply too old and too frail to join me on my vagabond life. It was a burden I placed on Holly, with many regrets, but she loves Harlequin, too, and shouldered it as well as humanely possible.

Cats can hide a lot, and can hold on bravely, to the bitter end, without showing signs that Death has been chasing them. Missy, who grew up feral and who was a champion hunter, led the warrior queen’s life to her final day. Her final purpose was to defend her yard, her domain, from other cats. Too old and sick to actually do it, her will was all that remained.

It was something of a miracle that I got to share her last hours.

I woke up the previous morning at my friend Chris’ house in Minnesota, with the intention of driving the 7 hours south to Kansas City, where I had a pop-up dinner planned for that Thursday. Just before I left, Holly emailed me with the news. This was it. She wasn’t sure how long Harlequin could hold out, and didn’t want her to literally starve to death from her disease.

I hesitated at first. I do not process death as well as I should, especially considering I deal it routinely as a hunter and an angler. I have been guilty of shirking the dying so that I might remember them in their strength, not their diminishment. I am not proud of this.

So I quickly decided that if I could get to California, I would. I booked a flight out of Kansas City for that evening that would have gotten me to Sacramento by 10:30 p.m., then began the long drive to the airport.

A few hours in, traffic stopped cold. A tractor-trailer had rolled over and burned, and the wreckage was still there two hours later as I finally drove by. But in those two hours, I missed my chance at the Kansas City flight.

Part of me was semi-relieved: I’d done my best. But only part of me. The cowardly part. Sitting there in my car, I decided to check a second time at flights from nearby Des Moines; I had looked earlier, but the whole day had been booked solid. This time, there was exactly one seat available, on an 8:15 p.m. flight. Someone must have cancelled! I quickly called Southwest and booked it.

This began a long, dreadful odyssey of waiting in airports, gnashing my teeth at delayed planes – I would have lost it completely had I gone this far only to be stuck in Denver – and then, finally, reaching Sacramento.

Holly was kind enough to pick me up, well after midnight, and we went home.

All three kitties greeted us, the young Gatitas Xochi and Mapache, and the venerable Harlequin. I’ve never been so happy to see the old girl in my life, and I started crying as I picked her up because I knew now these would be our final hours.

Exactly eight years before I picked her up that night, Harlequin was off on her Grand Adventure.

One day in early April 2015, I took Missy to the vet for a routine check up. On the way out, I put her cat carrier on the hood of my pickup, and she popped her head out of it! Holy shit, the vet tech had failed to secure the cage! In a flash, Harlequin ran off. I could neither catch her nor find her.

So Holly and I started looking every day. We put up signs offering $300 for anyone who could catch her. Day after day we looked, put up signs, fielded calls about look-similars, checked out the shelters and scanned roadkill.

One horrible day, I got a call from a passerby who said he saw my cat dead on the main road by the house. My heart sank. I drove out to where he said she was, and there she was. I walked up on the body: Same coat, same tuxedo, same white paws. I picked her up, but something was wrong. Too heavy. No way a lost cat would gain weight. Turns out the dead cat was a boy, and was likely Harlequin’s brother or cousin.

On Memorial Day, 37 days later, we got a call from two ladies in the trailer park right behind the vet. They’d found her. And this time it was really her. It was a slow news day, so the Sacramento Bee actually wrote up a little story about it.

This was Harlequin’s Grand Adventure. I liken it to Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. Missy went There and Back Again, only that once, and when she returned, she was a changed cat. Softer. Cuddlier. A pet. Not that she still didn’t have the bearing of a queen.

Missy shortly after returning to us in 2015, thinking that I ought to pay more attention to her.

And I never once, for one second, took her for granted after that.

So now, at the end, it all flooded over me. All those nights with Missy snuggled up to me in bed, purring softly, I had thought then that maybe that would be our last night – morbid, yes, but this is how my mind works sometimes. Now it was literally true.

But she shone. Shortly after I turned the lights out, Harlequin jumped up on the couch where I was sleeping and tucked right in, just like the old days. Her purr was ragged and she was so painfully skinny it was hard to lay my hand on her without hurting her tired old bones, but there she was. Happy. And so was I.

Missy stayed with me most of the night, taking breaks only to eat and, well, to shit on the floor, incontinent to the end.

At daybreak, I got up and held her close. She was so frail, so skinny, but she remembered me and purred and purred. I let her outside, where she jumped into her tuffet on the lounge we have on the back porch. This has been her spot for many years.

Holding her close one last time.

It would be where she died. Holly and I sat with her for several hours, petting her, hugging her, alternately telling each other stories of her life and bawling our eyes out, and generally never letting her out of our sight.

And then the vet came. She was a quiet, caring woman, who gave us all as much time as we needed. But eventually, the moment came. She administered an anesthetic first, and Holly and I pet Missy and looked into her eyes as they faded, then we sobbed over Missy’s sleeping body. This would be the last time all of us would be together in this world.

I kissed her over and over until I couldn’t anymore, and then let the vet do her job. Missy died softly, sleeping.

Holding hands before we let the vet begin.

I could regale you with stories of Harlequin’s hunting prowess, such as nabbing a banded dove or the string of rats she murdered over the course of more than a decade and a half. Or even the ignominious moment where she snatched a hummingbird out of mid-air and ate it whole. (For the record, Missy was primarily a rodent and lizard killer, not a bird assassin.)

But her memory is like that of most pets: intimate, sweet, quiet. The loves, and lives, of a cat and her human are made up of intensely private moments. Moments that don’t translate to words or sentences or paragraphs. Missy’s purr was unique. It was the last thing I heard as she drifted away.

Her jet black tuxedo, white nose stripe, her “catler” mustache and pretty mittens are indelibly etched in my mind’s eye. So is the fact that that her jet black shone reddish in bright sun. Or that Missy would let you walk right past her in the dark, smirking, as you desperately tried to get her inside on a sweltering summer night.

Thinking about yummy rats…

That something so beautiful and unearthly should have chosen me seemed miraculous and wondrous when it happened back in 2007, and, even in this afterglow of weeping, still seems so today.

I think about where I was, who I was, when we met: A political reporter. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook didn’t exist. I wore suits to work. I hunted, but only sporadically. I cooked, but not with purpose. Harlequin was there at the beginning of the person whose prose you are reading today.

In a sad way, it’s fitting that her end has coincided with the end of the normalcy I had created over the past 16 years. Missy represents, arguably, the most important time of my life. A time that has ended, and I don’t know what comes next.

But I do know that her memory, and her ashes, will remain with me until I die. Pets are in many ways more important to us than people in that they love us for who we are. No need to hide, wear masks, strike a false bravado or tone for them. They love us, and we love them, unconditionally.

They require us to tend to the needs of someone not us, which is important for all children to learn, and, it seems, for many adults to remember. Would I have gone through such hell and high water to attend the deathbed of a human? Probably, but it would depend on who. After that moment of cowardice passed, it was never really a question with Harlequin.

That I got to be there at the end means everything to me. I got to look into my baby’s eyes, to hear that purr, to touch her fur, one last time.

And now I’m crying. Again. But it’s OK, Missy, you’re worth it.

That face!