Elvis T. Cat, December 4, 2003 (more or less) - May 9, 2024

2008

I'm writing this after getting back from dropping Elvis off at Paws Whiskers & Wags.  This may be a bad time for me to write this.  I can't think of another time I would.

He hadn't had a car trip in a very long while.  He hated car trips.  Talking to him in the back while I was driving him over was inevitable--"Almost there, it's okay."  Even though I was talking to myself.

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2015

Springer had gotten sick and had to be helped over, and I wasn't ready for a cat but it's like that old Sarah Scribbles cartoon depicting the way the universe just drops cats on you sometimes.  My friend and coworker at the time, Andrea, came into the Public Defender's Office and told me she knew I probably wasn't ready for another cat but that I really needed to see this kitten that was up for adoption in the lobby of her vet's office.  (This was the same vet who'd helped Springer go over.)  She said this cat was in a big cage in the middle of the lobby (this turned out to be one of those huge deals that was, I don't know, four or five feet tall and big enough to contain a cat tree along with the other necessaries a kitten might need) and her dog had run up to the cage and started barking belligerently at this kitten and the kitten had just stared at her dog like, "What the fuck's the matter with you, man?"

So I humored her and went over there.  Me and this kitten, we met, we became friends.  Yeah, no, he didn't go home with me that day.  There were papers.  But, yeah.

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2014

Elvis's birthday, it has to be approximate as far as I know.  What Dr. Dobies told me was that this lady had found this kitten in a dumpster and she brought him to the vet's, where they found he had a broken pelvis which they operated on, and this is why they called him Elvis.  You know, "Elvis the Pelvis," they called Mr. Presley back when he was doing the shake swivel and thrust on national TV and scandalizing the rubes and bluenoses on either end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

This must have been 2004, I guess?  I still lived in Belmont, because my boss at the time had a policy we had to live in Gaston County.  When that slipped into a rule that was honored in the breach and hardly anyone in the office my age lived in the county, I surreptitiously moved back to Charlotte; that was 2005, and it seems like there was a longer span the Elf lived in Gaston but there we go.  Bush was about to be reelected and boy howdy wow, we thought we knew what a bad president was back then but what did we really know or scarcely even imagine?

Anyway, he spent most of his life over here and all of it, pretty much, as an indoor cat.  The vet's office decided at some point that his birthday was 12/4/2003, at least that's what they have in his records. 

Some years later, a successor vet (same office, different doc) asked me what the "T" was for and I emailed back, "It might be 'The,' 'Tiberius,' 'Ticonderoga,' or 'Tuppence.' He refuses to tell us."  It was always "The": it's an old Looney Tunes gag I stole.

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2016

If he was brave as hell when Andrea's dog barked at him, he was a lot shyer and much more timid in adulthood.  He didn't like male visitors all that much but loved most female visitors.  Except for Mori, Kat's cat, when Kat moved in.

When Kat moved in and brought Mori along, the thing was that Mori didn't like anybody other than Kat and was pretty expressive about that preference.  I'll say in the old girl's defense that she was fanatically devoted to Kat.  But when we tried introducing her to Elvis... well, Elvis was alright with it, he was curious and friendly; Mori wasn't.  At all.

Elvis was non-confrontational, and Mori was very confrontational, which is part of the little anecdote I'm writing here, which some of you have no doubt heard.  She'd hiss and claw, and he'd hide from her.  She terrified him, really.

They eventually established an equilibrium or detente of sorts where Mori inhabited the upstairs and Elvis the downstairs.  But Mori would still come halfway down the stairs that defined the neutral zone and sit on a stair like the only thing keeping her from claiming the entire country for her and Kat was the curse of being smaller on the outside than she was on the inside.

Anyway, one day I'm going up the stairs, and Mori is sitting there in the middle of the stairs on the middle of a stair, and when I step over her to go past she tries to stop me with a hiss and a swipe.  And before I can even process that she's gone after my leg again, I hear this muffled stampede of paws on the hardwood floor downstairs and the next thing I know, my boy--remember, utterly terrified and baffled by Mori--is next to me hissing and swiping, and Mori--perhaps not recognizing the creature she was used to bullying around--is fleeing back up the stairs.

I think about this incident a lot.  Oh, fuck me, I was doing fine writing this and now as I'm retelling the story, my eyes are welling again.  Anyway.  Look, he was scared of Mori and yet he loved me so much for whatever reason that he wasn't going to let her attack me with impunity.  He'd save me from the Evil One, yes he would.  One thing for her to drive him into hiding, another thing for her to go after me.

Elvis was pretty big on the inside, too.

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2017

Writing this post is obligatory for so many reasons, and not the least is that when this blog was a going concern, updated once a day, Golden Age of Blogging and all that, Elvis was sort of the beloved guest star around here.  Elvis pics got huge numbers of views, Elvis posts the same.  Title banners frequently featured the little guy, including a Christmas banner I still love featuring Elvis seemingly wearing a crudely-composed Santa hat inserted with MS Paint.

You guys loved him.  He didn't really know you existed, but that's hardly his fault.

There was a blog circle back in the day that--well, really it was a social media circle of online friends, not all of whom had blogs.  Technically it's still a thing.  Some of us have still never met in person.  Anyway, we called ourselves "The UCF" which has a whole story behind it connected to SF writer John Scalzi's blog and forums, and that's not important right now.  What I wanted to mention is that many, many years ago Tania in the UCF sent Elvis a catnip blanket--a big red square with a pocket for catnip, you see--that was sewn by a friend of hers, and I wanted to thank her again and mention that it will be part of Elvis's ashes when they're returned to us.

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2017

I can never remember when he got his death sentence.  I'm going back through old emails and not seeing exactly when we got the diagnosis except it was either 2017 or 2018; so if we're being conservative, we were told he had maybe eight months or a year, oh, about six years ago.

Elvis had been acting a bit off and wasn't really eating and was throwing up a lot, by which I mean a lot more than a cat usually does, so we'd taken him in and there were tests and scans and things, and the upshot was that there was a growth in his belly and he had maybe eight months to live if we were lucky, maybe even a year, but it was a choice between surgery that might not even accomplish much of anything or just trying to make him comfortable for his remaining months.  Thirteen (or fourteen) is a good full age for a cat, really, and surgery expensive and possibly was just going to make him miserable, so Kat and I discussed it with the vet and we all decided to let things ride.  He started taking two pills a day, an anti-inflammatory and something to help with appetite, and we resigned ourselves to a death sentence.

A thing about being told your cat is going to die is that all of the rules come off.  Who worries about spoiling a cat that only has months, months left to run out?  Who worries about rules and permissions.  "Yes, you can sit there.  Yes, you can have some people food. [sniff, rubs eyes]"

We wound up making jokes that Elvis had worked something out with the vet, blackmail or bribes.  "I think I deserve hot people chimkin from their plate, not this cold canned dreck, don't you?"  In the last year or so, if I baked a salmon fillet, I'll be damned if I didn't slice off a piece to cook separately so that there would be one piece of meat with nothing on it for the sweet boy.  He'd jump up next to me on the bench at the dining room table.  He'd get very upset to learn we were eating something that didn't have MEAT in it.

One reason for writing about this is that he lived a good six or seven years beyond what we were told he had and we loved and were lucky to have every minute of it even though it sometimes made travel plans a challenge (and a subtextual fear--if we asked a friend or family member to look in on him, were we setting them up to find him passed on, or would he pass alone and without his people?).

Another reason I'm writing about this is because I need to make myself lunch and I think I'm procrastinating because it's going to be the first time in years Elvis doesn't jump off the futon he bedded on to come over and demand his cut of whatever I'm making.

He'd do it to me and Kat both.  "Something happening in the kitchen?  This concerns me.  Personally."

This was also the last time he went to the vet.  Because you start thinking there's no point in a yearly checkup, and then you start thinking whatever the hell's happening in his gut, why disrupt the status quo?  So I'd go every few months to refill his prescriptions and answer any questions, but 2018, I guess, was his last car ride until today.

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2017

There's another reason to write about the death sentence, and that's because we've been preparing for Elvis's passing for years, but of course you're never, never ready.  And we talked about it and cried over it and cried over him and held him and told him we weren't ready and worried about our own selfishness because you hope your long-dying cat is happy and comfortable and that you're not going to let him linger too long or let him get away from you too soon.

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2018

There's another another reason to write about the death sentence, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to offer you a trigger warning to skip this section, but I'm about to talk about finding him this morning and this is something that is very important to me and that I'd want people to know about Elvis.

Maybe you should skip to the next section if you're still here.  Or not.  Because, like I said, this is important to me.

I went downstairs to give him his morning pill and I didn't see him, and I don't know what the hell is wrong with me because I looked under the blanket on the futon he usually burrowed under and I didn't see him, though I felt something wet underfoot and thought maybe he'd been sick.  And I looked to the kitchen--the first floor of the condo is an open plan--to where his bowls are and the door to the bathroom where his litter boxes are because some mornings lately he'd already be over there when I came down, but I didn't see him.  So I walked over to the blinds and opened them to let some light in and turned around and that's when I saw him.

He wasn't on the side of the futon he normally slept on and he wasn't totally on the futon: he was standing on his hind legs, front paws up on the futon like he was climbing up--he'd been having increasing trouble with his hips, which was something we'd anticipated for years--and he was an empty vessel.

He looked a little surprised, I think.

And I can only think he was trying to get back up on the futon and something went--a heart attack or a stroke--and he was gone,  And these are the things that are important to me, that he went quickly and I have to assume painlessly, and also fuck cancer or whatever the hell was in his belly, because it didn't get him.  I can't find exactly when we got the diagnosis, but I can find the email where the vet "noted in the record that metastasis from the abdominal mass had been noted causing concern for suspect malignant mass."  Well, it didn't get him.  He outlasted that thing.  He told it to fuck off.  He went on his own terms.

Why that matters to me, I don't know except I sort of do.  Maybe you know how that kind of thing is.

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2017

When Mori passed, it was a while before Elvis figured out she wasn't going to hiss at him if he came upstairs, and even so it seems like there were years before he recovered from suspicions she was hiding to ambush him.

And then he'd come upstairs and sleep on the bed again when we went to bed, down at my feet.  And he had a thing for the very special water that was in my bathtub.  He'd go into the bathroom and yowl until somebody came in, stoppered the tub, and put a little water in for him.

There was a time we worried about feline dementia because he'd go into the bathroom and just yowl for the sake of yowling even if we gave him tub water.  Maybe he liked the acoustics.

And then he mostly stopped coming upstairs in the last months or year because of his hips.  We'd been told arthritis might be a concern, before we were told he wasn't going to live long enough to deal with it, which of course turned out not to be true.  It was hard for him to come upstairs, though occasionally he'd get a spring in his step or a bug in his ear or whatever and come up to see us, which always felt special because it was so much work for him.  And when I carried him upstairs for a visit, sometimes there was a twinge of guilt because yes, I wanted him up there with us, but he didn't like to stay as often or as long and that was almost certainly because getting downstairs on his own was a matter of stepping onto the next step down with one forepaw and then the other and then both hindlegs coming down at once because of those hip problems; this is where, by the way, you hope you're not keeping one of your best friends and beloved family members around for your own sake because he can't tell you if he's miserable.  I don't really think he was miserable, though; I think his hips and legs just bothered him more than they didn't.  But he was almost a hundred if you convert cat years to human, that happens.

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2024

He tolerated, or no, I think he legitimately loved, the fact that I'd pick him up and hold him on his back and rub his belly.  This is not a thing cats normally allow, and I don't think he allowed Kat to do it.  The other way I used to hold him was with his forepaws on my right shoulder, his face against my ear, but that wasn't as comfortable for him in the last year because of the hips, I think; sometimes, these last several months, I'd hold him up so that we were cheek to cheek, and I'd kiss him and he seemed alright with that.

I knew him longer than I've known most human beings.  Twenty years, and change.  I'm fifty-two; almost, not quite half my life; 40% of my life, anyway.

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2014

When I brought him home, he hid, the way cats do.  I gave him time, the way a cat's human does.  He came out from under the bed when I had some Depeche Mode cranked up.  He didn't seem to mind and possibly enjoyed loud music, which was good because I play guitar badly sometimes (I mean I always play it badly and play sometimes) and so he was exposed to plenty of noise.  The thought that inevitably crossed my mind this morning was maybe Elvis overheard me telling Kat that Steve Albini died yesterday, and that wasn't a world the Elf wanted to hang around for.  I kid.  Steve Albini did a lot of awesome stuff, but he never fed Elvis, so Elvis wouldn't have known he existed.

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2016

Also when I brought him home, a thing he did was to climb on my chest when I was in bed and stick his tongue in my nose.  No, I don't know why.

There's a big heavy Rooms-To-Go dresser in the garage now that's covered with scratches because when it was in my bedroom in Belmont way-back-when, Elvis Kitten liked to scratching post it and climb on it, and I tried to deter that by covering it with double-sided tape because that's supposedly a thing you can do to discourage a cat from misbehaving, and what happened in Elvis's case was that he liked to lick the adhesive off the tape and claw at the dresser anyway, and he had more reason to do so if it meant he could get some more of that sweet, sweet tape adhesive.

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2012

You open one memory and another comes out: one year, here in Charlotte, there was a freeze and I had some little flowerpots on the Juliet balcony with herbs in them so I brought them in and put them on the kitchen counter, which in those days Elvis could still make even though he knew he wasn't supposed to.  And when I came down in the morning, the little flowerpot that had contained cilantro was knocked over on the counter and most of the soil and cilantro plant was on the floor, and it was all very mysterious.

Elvis's breath was also the freshest it's ever been.

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He was a very good cat.