This look is the one I remember. I always say that I didn’t choose Nessie, she chose me. I was at a no-kill shelter in the San Fernando Valley with a woman, doing something that I foolishly hoped might help a relationship that was failing. It didn’t, and that story’s not worth taking up any space whatsoever here.
But this wasn’t the cat I was looking at. There was this big, lean short-haired cat that liked bounding from one high place to another, and head-butted me affectionately as I scrutinized him. There was a marvelous playful kitten, rolling and paw-swiping and rubbing up against everyone and everything in sight. It would not go un-adopted for long, because who doesn’t immediately love a kitten?
This cat didn’t call attention to herself. We only found her when the girl I was with asked which one had been at the shelter for the longest time. That’s a good question to ask. And that’s when we met.
The shelter owners had named her “Lacey”. She had come in, already fully-grown, with a sister, over two years before, which meant she was probably in the vicinity of four years old, but nobody knew for certain. When the girl insisted I give Lacey a look, I complied, sat on the floor, and placed her in my lap.
With immediate familiarity, she burrowed her paws in, made herself comfortable, then looked back over her shoulder at me, with that look in her eyes, and gave a friendly meow. That’s when that marvelous kitten came by, purring and rubbing up against my leg.
“Lacey” reached out a paw and swatted the kitten on the head. The decision had been made.
Her file prominently included the words “very quiet”. But the moment the shelter workers delivered her to my apartment, she stepped out of the carrier and went marching through every room and every corner, making a chatter of meows. If I were to write it as a human speaking in a script, it would be a long, hilarious monologue commenting on many aspects of the room, bringing in several eccentric tangents, making note of things that would have to change, but with the overall goal of letting anyone in earshot know that she had arrived home, and what took so damned long anyway.
She was never “very quiet” again. She had the broadest vocabulary of any cat I’d ever met – something a guy like me might appreciate. She could make howling alarms to beg with, enthusiastic chitchat when she discovered I was awake and she could start her day, vibrating murmurs when she saw that my lap was available to climb into, hostile growls to warn other animals against attempts to make friends. Most cats have these, but hers had many variations, and she was never shy about using them.
The name was a long negotiation. Eventually we settled on “N’est ce pas”, the French common phrase for “Isn’t that so?” It seemed to suit one of her common expressions. Nessie became the familiar of the name, and the name most people knew and used.
She was marked down as a “Tabby”, but it’s a common misconception that this is a breed. It’s not – merely a description of fur striping. What I determined was that she was a California Spangled, a custom breed created in a 70’s and 80’s by an eccentric Hollywood screenwriter who crossed eleven different breeds in an attempt to create a domestic cat with fur patterns and a slinky gait that would be reminiscent of endangered jungle cats. The bottom picture on this page is almost a dead ringer for Nessie, except for the belly, which is darker than hers was.
California Spangleds in their early generations were purchased in catalogs, sometimes for as much as $2,500. Nessie, who looked like a pure offspring (inbred even? Who knows.) had any number of health problems – a kinky hip that affected her walk, soft and easily-infected teeth, and terrible digestive problems that left her underweight and, eventually, unable to always reach the litter box when needed.
The rare and ramshackle product of a writer with a mad vision. I’ve come to think that the reason she was at that shelter for over two years was not that she was unlovable. I know she was not. It’s that she was waiting for me.
My father has always preferred dogs, but we became a cat family after an over-enthusiastic canine pet nearly throttled me to death as a toddler by winding me up in a chain swing. It suited me fine – I think that’s my mother’s side in me. So I’ve known and lost many cats growing up, and every one had their peculiarities. But I never knew any as comprehensively strange as Nessie.
She was gifted at training me. I still don’t know how I learned that she wanted her water cleaned and refreshed several times in a day, or that she especially liked it to include ice cubes on a warm day. But somehow I learned. She would often stick her front paws in her water dish – I don’t know if that was a cleaning alternative or she just liked stirring it. She was terrible at using the litter box – never seemed to have the knack for aiming right or cleaning her paws. Litter would track all over the house. She always wanted to cuddle immediately after – at my old Hollywood bachelor pad she would try and leap directly from the box onto my bed if that’s where I was.
If I slept on my back, she would perch on my chest, her head looming over my face, watching – who knows for how long? – until the first moment my eyes opened in the morning. Then she would start making her morning requests for attention.
She loved laps. Absolutely insisted on them. Any guest who came over and sat on my couch would get to know her persistence. She was patient, and didn’t forget her goal like some cats might if you dangled something in front of them. No matter which way you contorted your body, if she had to lay on your chest, your thigh – if she had to squeeze into a space between you and a desk, she would do it, and she’d use claws to achieve purchase. She didn’t have the normal cat’s passion for jumping, she much preferred pulling herself to her destination. Maybe that hip – maybe just a peculiarity. As she got older, and had less bodily control, we learned to keep towels or pillows to protect our laps – because we couldn’t fully say no to her. We knew how important the lap was to her.
Nessie liked sleeping on the bed. When the girl was staying with me for the summer, Nessie moved to the couch. The afternoon that I returned from dropping the girl at the airport so she could go back to school, Nessie – seeing me enter alone – immediately jumped onto the bed, chattering happily, and curled up on a pillow. It was just her and I, which was always her preferred company. And eventually, the girl didn’t return at all, and Nessie never seemed to lament it. She was possessive of me – disapproved of some girls, even.
I took care of her alone for years. Sometimes she’d join me at the family homestead in Huntington Beach, where she tolerated the other pets, and didn’t mind the other people so much, but seemed ill-at-ease. It was a hard thing to know that, when I had to give up my apartment, it meant asking Nessie to cope with this crowded house permanently.
She never quite warmed to there being other cats, but she learned to live alongside them and create sufficient boundaries. Because of her digestive problems and my need to protect my meager possessions from the territoriality of other cats, she couldn’t sleep in my room anymore, but for a long time she would keep nighttime vigil right outside the door.
Normal dry cat food was very difficult for her, especially after she lost two rows of teeth plus one of her canines. We bought high-quality canned food with which to treat her in the morning. A backfiring aspect of her vocabulary was the frantic, excited cry she’d make when that food or some other treat was on its way. We called it the “food alarm”, and this klaxon would summon every animal in the house – all of whom wanted their own share and were willing to push around this under-sized, under-nourished cat to get it. Whoever awoke first in our household got used to making several plates of the special food, scattering them around the kitchen, and then standing guard over Nessie’s so she could have her share unmolested. Still, she sometimes ate with such urgency that she would simply ralph it all up again hours later.
A couple of years ago she stopped tending to her fur with a cat’s customary devotion. All our pets spend a lot of time in our backyard, which meant a never-ending flea war, and soon she seemed resigned to clumpy, infested fur. We tried to bathe her, brush her – after awhile, anytime she was in my lap, I would softly search through her fur for loose tufts and try to tug them loose without hurting her. She accepted this, grudgingly, as the cost of lap time.
I couldn’t be a perfect owner every day. I would get irritated with her. I would forget the cat food. Once I neglected to clean the area under her water dish for so long that I found larvae growing. I’ve thought a lot in the last 24 hours about how we’re never quite good enough for the ones we love; and the grace it is that they understand and forgive us that. Whenever Nessie gave me that look, I simply saw adoration and a very personal, very conscious devotion. For all my mistakes, she wanted me to be her human.
Yesterday morning I woke up and went downstairs for some morning yoga. As I prepared, I heard a cat noise coming from somewhere, a quiet, repeated whimper. It sounded weak and pained. It sounded like Nessie – but nothing like any sound she had ever made.
I saw her laying under a table by the couch. At first I thought she was dreaming, but when I reached out to pet her, she tried to lift herself and turn but stumbled. She couldn’t hold herself up. Her eye and nose were thick with uncleaned discharge, and she refused any water or treats I put in front of her.
For days she had seemed conspicuously underweight, but otherwise kept to her normal routines. But when I saw her in that spot, it became overwhelmingly likely to me that the end was coming very soon – that this was not a passing sickness, but her time. As I’ve said – I’ve watched a lot of cats come and go in this family. They seem to have an instinct for when it’s coming, and you often find them seeking some quiet, out-of-the-way corner to pass that last span.
It’s been nearly 10 years since the day I adopted her, which meant that her life clock had gone from “probably about 4” to “probably at least 14”. This is an average span for a female housecat, and for a cat with all Nessie’s health challenges, was probably generous. I can’t deny that I’d been thinking about it for awhile, wondering when and how it might come.
We moved the table aside, placed her on a towel and then I lifted her onto my lap. Something in the way she breathed told me she would be purring if she could. Maybe that’s just my own hope. Hours went by, we watched movies together. She never closed her eyes to nap. No cat lays for hours with their eyes open except for very unusual circumstances – unless something’s happening that they don’t want to miss.
In the early afternoon she lurched, tried to pull herself off the towel. A last try for a litterbox trip. Instead I took her down onto the floor, onto a clean towel, first on my lap, and then, as she tried to move herself again, flat onto the floor.
I lay there on the floor, staring right into her eyes as she lay on her side, head arched. How is it that she seemed so purely alive in those moments? Was it the vividness of my attention to every detail as I fiercely held to my mission that she not go through this alone? Was it that, with no movement left in her splayed legs, her limp tail, I could see all the life she had concentrated in her mouth, gulping for unsteady breath; in her eyes, becoming almost fully-black with iris as her world darkened? Was she hurting? Was she seeing a lighted tunnel? Did she know I was there? What did she want?
She made a few soft cries. She pushed her chest out, as if to stretch, or to try and drag herself towards me. And then quiet. And then stillness.
And then tears.
For the next hour, as I spread the news to family and friends, some part of me tried to look for a sign that I was wrong, that I hadn’t witnessed the moment of death. That even though her head lolled as I awkwardly lifted her from the floor to the couch, that even though there was no twitch in her whiskers or paws as I brushed them, that any motion in her fur could be a subliminal breath. It might not be the breeze in the room. It might not be a muscle settling for the last time. It might be life. It might be a sign. It might be too soon to declare.
But as the sun set, my Mother was cutting up a sheet, and we wrapped her, and placed her in her favorite outdoor laying spot in a planter, and I dug a hole in the garden near a few small statues of cherubs that memorialized other beloved animal members of our family.
All I could say before we covered her was “I wasn’t sure when I met you that I was ready to own a cat.”
It was a long day. It was her last day. I think it was the one she would have asked for if she could. Maybe that’s a hope that gives me comfort. If so, I’ll take it. What we mourn is not only who we lost, but the passing of the unduplicable love that was between us into memories. What I am grateful for is that all it takes is a glimpse at that picture to bring it back in full color.