gargoyle in my bedroom

At approximately 3:11 this morning my body jerked awake from the sound of a croaking, moaning menace; it chortled and trilled and purred, then howled from its gut like a banshee from Celtic lore – the weight of its sound knocking it near off his feet. Beneath my sleep mask I rolled my eyes and tore myself up to face this new, gruesome reality that I now must address every fifteen to forty minutes.

Between the hours of midnight at 7:00 am my cat has turned into a hollow-eyed, howling gargoyle.

For all his lovable years he’s been an orange fluff of affectionate, playful, and sometimes brazen ball of Nathan Lane energy; a treasure of an emotional support kitty and local celebrity to folks numbering in the can-count-on-two-hands numbers. I would’ve likened him to one of our Labrador retrievers: affectionate, clingy, all bark with no bite.

Lately, and it seems as though the cooler weather has something to do with this new transformation, my dude has slowed down significantly. Down from his once behemoth 22# I see his front legs tremble from his dwindled weight of now 13.8#, his back legs will buckle sometimes, he sleeps near constantly during the day.

The real trouble lies now in his roaming of our hallways at night, cruising the darkness, singing a new song of his people that goes to the tune of moonstruck battiness. It’s like a warbling, very un-meow-like screaming.

Mr. Big, the new gargoyle in question, did go to his normal veterinarian yesterday and they poked and pulled at the poor fella. For the first time in a decade he actually hissed at her, which she attributed to him being “painful.” While we wait on his bloodwork she gave him a pricey shot of something having to do with his antibodies working to make him not feel his pain, or maybe feel his pain but there will be less of it? Something in those helpful lines. He howled the whole way home, and wet his carrier.

The amount of pain and grief we happily sign up for when we adopt our furry companions is so vast we’re not privy to it; from a distance even a tidal wave just looks like more ocean. Mr. Big has given me close to fifteen years of joy and now I have to start imagining that such is life, he might not be long for this world.

We went through this with our last kitty: in her final years she demanded all faucets remain on at all hours so that she may drink from them lest we hear her wrath, then it turned into us hearing her wrath all the time regardless of the faucets. It was the same howling, the same bleating sound confused cats make.

To us humans it’s heartbreaking, then infuriating, then we swoop in to pick them up and put them back in bed for at least a thirty-minute snooze before the next caterwauling episode begins anew.

I don’t look at death the same way I used to: I either welcomed it readily or didn’t think about it at all in that youthful, I’m immortal way; now it feels as manageable and as real as paying a bill. It’s just another step in all of our days and some may come sooner than we’d like, some not soon enough. It stands to reason that I hope there’s no pain or suffering, and there’s someone we love and a medical professional working to make sure we’re comfortable for that next voyage.

For Mr. Big, then, I’ll continue to make sure he doesn’t suffer as much as I can, buy him every kind of treat and fancy can of food there is, and when he’s being his demonic-gargoyle self I’ll still pick him up and pet him to calm him down, hugging him to sleep. Whether he likes it or not.