Dewey's Nine Lives (26 page)

And then Lynda read
Dewey
. Jennifer gave it to her for Christmas, and (surprise!) Cookie even gave her enough space to read it. As she read the last few chapters, she became more and more upset until, she would write in her letter to me, she “became no less than hysterical.” Every sign of old age Dewey exhibited in his last year was happening to Cookie!

Like Dewey, Cookie developed hyperthyroidism. And like Dewey, she wasn’t very responsible about taking her pills. Lynda would think she had successfully pushed them down her throat, then find them scattered behind the furniture. She developed mats in her hair that were almost impossible to untangle, the result of the barbs on her tongue wearing down and preventing her from cleaning properly. And like Dewey, Cookie had taken a sudden interest in cold cuts, probably because they were loaded with salt. Lynda bought her a half pound of sliced turkey at a time. When she tired of turkey, Lynda switched to chicken, no matter how much turkey was left in the bag. Then Cookie stopped eating cold cuts. She didn’t want that old bird. So Lynda tried a whole, fresh-cooked rotisserie chicken. Cookie liked that. So Lynda shared a rotisserie chicken with Cookie every week.

Jennifer thought her mother was spoiling the cat, but Lynda didn’t agree.
Dewey
had broken her heart. She had cried every night while reading the last chapters on Dewey’s old age and death, thinking not only about my precious library cat but about her precious Cookie. She had seen the future, and she knew the end was near. Cookie was slowing down. She was walking with difficulty. She was struggling with her diet. After nineteen years of Cookie’s extraordinary love, there was nothing Lynda wouldn’t do for her cat.

That February, Cookie developed kidney and bladder problems. The vet took X-rays and endoscopies, a whole battery of tests. He put her on a strong course of medication, sparing no expense because Lynda would have it no other way, but there was no improvement in Cookie’s condition. In April, the vet stopped her treatment. He took her off her hyperthyroid medicine as well, since it was causing rashes on her ears and belly.

“She doesn’t need the irritation,” the doctor said.

He was telling Lynda to let her go, to give her peace, but Lynda couldn’t fully accept that Cookie was dying. The little cat still followed at her heels everywhere she went, eager to love and be loved. She still waited for her on the ottoman by the front door every evening when she arrived home from work. Every morning when she left for work, Cookie looked at her with big pleading eyes, like a young child, as if to say,
How can you leave me, Mommy?

In July 2009, they celebrated Cookie’s nineteenth birthday. Lynda told her she looked forward to celebrating her twentieth the next year, but even she no longer believed it. Cookie had never been big, weighing just ten pounds even as a healthy adult. Now she weighed less than five. She had taken to spending most of her days under the kitchen table. Lynda moved her food and water to the kitchen, and her litter to the adjoining room. She had lost bladder control, but even in her frail state, Cookie would pull herself to the nearest object, a shopping bag, a pair of shoes, even Jennifer’s handbag to relieve herself. Cookie would never, no matter how sick, make a mess on the floor.

Lynda’s mother was convinced Cookie was staying alive only because she couldn’t bear to leave her friend alone. Lynda’s heart told her that might be true, that the little cat loved her that much, but she wanted to believe Cookie still enjoyed her life, that her existence wasn’t a struggle. She stroked her. She petted her. She fixed her broccoli rabe and rotisserie chicken and talked to her in gentle, loving tones. When Cookie could no longer walk the stairs, Lynda carried her to bed and placed her on the pillow that had been her special place for so long. Every night for nineteen years, Cookie had slept on that pillow. On the third night of carrying her to bed, Lynda realized that as soon as she fell asleep, Cookie was struggling down the steps to the kitchen floor. On the fourth night, she left Cookie under the table.

“Rest here, my little friend,” Lynda told her. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

Cookie never came back to the bed. A few days later, while Lynda was at work, Jennifer called crying. She had found Cookie on the kitchen floor, in a puddle of her own waste. By the time Lynda arrived home, Cookie was clean, but the energy was gone from her body, the depth and intensity totally absent from her eyes. She lifted her head to look at Lynda, her lifelong companion. Perhaps she even smiled, briefly and weakly, before dropping her head to the floor.

Lynda cradled her in her arms and, as tenderly as she could, eased her into the car. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, as her mind raced and her hands trembled on the steering wheel. “We’re going to get some medicine and you’re going to be okay.” She kept talking, reassuring her, even as her voice was breaking and the tears streamed down her face. She knew it was the end, and she prayed it would be painless and natural. She prayed that, whatever happened, she would be there for her Cookie. Her last obligation, the least she could offer for a lifetime of dedication, was to make these moments as comfortable as possible for her precious girl.

And she did. She made it safely to the vet, although she could barely see through her tears, and she held Cookie in her hands, lightly and lovingly, until her final breath. She held her until the little cat glanced up one last time as if to say,
I love you, I’m sorry,
before she folded under and Lynda felt, with her soul as much as her fingertips, the very last beat of her heart.

I have never been loved by another human being,
Lynda wrote in her letter to me,
not even by my daughter or my parents, the way I have been loved by my Cookie.

I could tell, even from her brief letter, that Lynda wasn’t lonely. Her life was filled with happiness and love. I wanted to include a story like this—an ordinary story—because a majority of the letters I received where from ordinary people like Lynda. Why her, you ask? Because of that one beautiful sentence, which celebrated a kitten’s extraordinary love without a whisper of despair:

“I know that sounds strange,” Lynda told me, although after my life with Dewey, it didn’t sound strange at all. “It almost sounds sad, I know. But it is absolutely the truth. As much as my daughter loves me, as much as my parents love me, as much as other people have loved me, I have never felt . . . I have never felt what that cat felt for me.”

And that love was returned. I’m not saying Lynda loved her cat more than the other people in this book, because love can manifest in myriad ways, but she was the only one who said, “Thank you, Vicki, for doing this
for Cookie
. She was such a good cat. She deserves to have her story told.” She was the only one, in other words, who explicitly put her cat before herself, and I admire her for that.

“She was just your typical tabby,” Lynda admitted. “She was gray and white, the tiger markings, your little garden-variety kitty. I can’t say that she did any extraordinary things. I can’t say she was a hero. I can’t say she saved somebody from disaster.”

Not even Lynda. Cookie, after all, didn’t save Lynda Caira from illness . . . or occasional loneliness. This isn’t a story of redemption. It isn’t a story of need. Lynda Caira has been and will probably always be happy. This is simply a story about being chosen, about being loved so fiercely that it changes your life.

Dewey. Cookie. All the other cats that touch our hearts and change our lives. How can we ever thank them enough? How can we ever explain?

After Cookie’s death, Lynda wrote a remembrance of her precious cat. It closed with this: “There is nothing more to say—life will go on, although I will miss her each and every day! Jennifer will get married, I will have precious grandchildren, I will love and lose more pets. But one thing is certain: there will never be another pet who will be my best friend; there will never be another animal who could bring the joy that Cookie brought to my life.”

Amen.

SEVEN

I
’ve known Kristie Graham her whole life. I was beside her at her communion. I attended her high school graduation. I did the floral arrangements at her wedding. I even changed her diapers. When she was younger, of course, when she was just a sweet baby girl. When I started college in Minnesota in my thirties, after a bad marriage to an alcoholic that left my life and finances shattered, Kristie’s mother, Trudy, was one of my first new friends. While I attended class, she’d often babysit for my daughter, Jodi. When I wasn’t working, we’d sit for hours and drink coffee while our children played. That’s what Kristie remembers, anyway, that her mother and I drank gallons of coffee. She was only four or five years old at the time, so her memories are pretty scattershot. She remembers that my washing machine didn’t spin, so I stirred my laundry with a big wooden spoon (maybe once, for about a week). She remembers that my rusted car never seemed to run (only occasionally); that I bawled my eyes out when Elvis died (not true; it was her mom who cried); and that I was, in her words, “a very hardworking, hard, hardworking woman.” (I’ll agree with that one. I had to be!)

I simply remember a wonderful girl. Trudy’s oldest daughter, Kellie, was Jodi’s age. She was a beautiful, outgoing kid. Kristie, three years younger, was just as beautiful and outgoing, but she never felt she could compare to her sister—even though Kristie was the one who would eventually become homecoming queen. So at the age of three, she went the other way. Kristie became the snot-nosed kid of our little coffee club. Literally. That girl always had something encrusted beneath her nose. If you put her in a clean white dress to have her picture taken at Sears, she walked out of the car covered in dark smudges. It didn’t matter how clean the car was. She found a way to ruin the dress. And I’m not making this up. The picture happened. Even Kristie admits (with some pride, I think) that back then, she was always covered with “runny booger dirt.” I guess that’s why I called her Pigpen. I loved that kid.
Pigpen
was my term of endearment.

But the thing I remember most about Pigpen Kristie wasn’t her dirty face and soiled dresses. It was the way we had fun. She and Kellie were the laughing-est, goofing-est, playing-est kids I’ve ever met. I remember Kristie and a few others convincing (or possibly forcing) Susan, the daughter of another friend, to slide down the laundry chute. Thank goodness there was a pile of laundry at the bottom, because it was a twelve-foot drop. I remember being the “house mom” for big slumber parties of eleven or twelve preteen girls, and always having to come in at 2:00 in the morning to tell them to pipe the heck down. I remember being snowed in during a ferocious blizzard and coaxing Kristie, Kellie, and Jodi to dance and lip-sync to 1970s soft rock songs. Then Trudy and I put on costumes and “sang” a few 1950s girl-group hits. We laughed for years about the Weekend of the Blizzard when, as always, we girls made the best of a tough situation.

I also remember Kristie’s cat, Marshmallow. He was a huge, fluffy, off-white fellow who, really and truly, resembled a marshmallow. Not that I saw him much. I usually only glimpsed his tail as he was running away. I liked him, but I’m not sure Marshmallow would have been special to me if it weren’t for one thing: He was special to Kristie. If ever a child loved a cat, it was Kristie Graham. She loved her Marshmallow. The girl talked about him all the time.

So when I thought about stories for this book, I thought of Marshmallow. I thought of how much Kristie loved him, how much he was a part of her life, how important it all seemed to her, and how much he loved her in return. Kristie and Marshmallow’s relationship was the closest thing I’d ever known to what Dewey and I shared. That is part of Dewey’s legacy, of course: the opportunity to tell stories about other special cats and special girls. The opportunity to show the world that those kind of wonderful relationships are happening everywhere, all the time, and that it’s okay—in fact, it’s perfectly
normal
—for a cat to be your very best friend.