Ashes

Ashes, January 24, 2006

I don't think I've ever written about Ashes before. On what may be the last night of his life, it seems appropriate.

Ashes came into our lives more than 14 years ago, in October, 1991.* My brother and his fiance had bought a kitten as a present for my future sister-in-law's mother, a tiny gray Tabby kitten. Unfortunately, physical limitations prevented her from being able to take care of a pet, and the kitten reverted to us.

As seems to be the rule, while my mom was on vacation in Florida with my sister several major events happened: we acquired a cat, and Skatarama burned down.

At the time we had a dog (Kitty) and a cat (Josephine, or Josie.) We had lost our Chihuahua Chico the year before, and my mom didn't want to get any more animals. But once my mom heard our new kitten purring over the phone, there was no turning back. And once he started purring, he never stopped.

We didn't want to jump into naming him, but everybody had the same general idea: his coat was not a perfect gray, but had a considerable amount of pinkish-white in it - exactly the color of anthracite coal ashes. (Everybody in Nanticoke is familiar with the color of anthracite coal ashes.) It was after the fire at Skatarama (in which my brother, who was a firefighter at the time, was nearly killed several times by structural collapses) that we decided to commemorate both his color and the destruction of a longstanding Nanticoke landmark with the name "Ashes".

Ashes was a tiny kitten. I decided to train him to ride around on my shoulder, like the Siamese cat in the Bob Dylan song. Josie didn't care for the new cat in the house, but Kitty was ecstatic over the new friend. Ashes explored his surroundings and made himself at home. He would sit near the TV screen when we played video games, and would chase the cursor around the screen on the Wheel of Fortune video game for the Sega Genesis. (This was 1991.)

He wasn't a perfect cat. He once peed on my raincoat, which wasn't much of an issue since it was Scotchguarded - the urine rolled right off. My grandmother, afraid I would spank him, begged me not to because I might "hurt his kidneys and his liver." In the end a badly-timed alarm clock went off by coincidence, and I told Ashes that this was the "bad cat alarm". It scared the hell out of him.

He used to be a very active cat. Late at night we would hear a galloping sound, followed by silence, followed by a scrape, more silence, and a thud. In the morning we would find scratchmarks two feet up along the walls of the hallway. Ashes had been charging up and down the hall, launching himself at the walls, and kicking off.

He later became a very large cat. Fat, in the way of many housecats, but big also, with a head almost as big as my two fists put together. Upon seeing him once a friend asked "What do you feed him, other cats?"

He eventually became the male head of a herd of housecats. He and Josie would roughhouse frequently, and he would play with Kitty the dog and later Haley. He and Minnie, a female nicotine-stain-brown Tabby that we acquired in 1998*, treated each other as equals. Joey, our most recent addition, was adopted as a favorite son. But Nikki, a naughty little cat that we raised from the time he was a few weeks old (my sister had raised him from the time of his birth and abandonment to that point), never found favor with Ashes, no matter how hard he tried to ingratiate himself with the Alpha cat.

Ashes has been a constant presence in our lives. He has had a few close calls, urinary tract infections and bad teeth, but he has always been there, wanting nothing more than to be loved up and occasionally brushed.

A few weeks ago my mom took him to the vet because he had displayed rapid weight loss. The vet found something puzzling: while he does not have leukemia, he apparently does have some other condition which is causing a shutdown of red blood cell production. He began a regimen of medication - administering the pills has been my job, and I do not know if the gradual reduction in difficulty has been due to improvements in my technique or a gradual loss of strength on his part. My mom has also been taking him to the vet every Tuesday morning for the last few weeks for a shot.

This morning my mom was sick - it seemed like a combined allergy and cold - and she asked me to take Ashes to the vet before I went to work. I usually go in to work around 9:00 to get there sometime after 9:30, and as far as we could tell the vet did not open until 9:00 this morning. But I figured the visit would be a quick in, quick out, and I would be back home and on my way no later than 9:30.

Turned out the vet had some other tests planned. Ashes and I waited together for the results. The vet eventually arrived and gravely explained Ashes' condition to me. He pulled back his eyelids to show me the whiteness within, where it should have been red. He pointed out that the inside of his ears were also white when they should have been pink with red veining. As he had less than 36 hours before Haley's death, he expressed astonishment and bewilderment that Ashes was still functioning at all.

He gave Ashes a shot of B-12 and gave me some new liquid medicines to administer starting tomorrow morning. I took Ashes home, a little numb, but glad to have a little more time with him. False hope is better than no hope.

It was well after 10:00 when I got home. I didn't get in to work until almost 11:00, which put my quitting time after 8-and-a-half hours at 7:30 PM. Fair enough.

Work kept me busy, filling the normal work day as well as my few late hours at then end of the day. Truth be told, I like after-hours work. I love my coworkers, but there is much to be said for the few hours of isolation that I can grab at the end of some days that allow me to focus without distraction.

I had a special project scheduled for the end of the day: a client had requested the return of specific assets from six very old projects. This meant I had to go climbing through my archives to retrieve the old project boxes, pull out the assets where available, and research return dates of any missing assets. It was fun and relatively mindless.

I came back to my desk at 6:15 after a half-hour of isolated gruntwork in my Asset Library with a handful of assets and a list of return dates. I was about to sit down and compose an e-mail to the client when I noticed I had a message on my phone.

Two messages.

The first was from about 5:50. My mom said that Ashes had just made some ungodly yowls - possibly like the yowls Josie let out just before she died on the day after Thanksgiving several years ago - and that he was being very still, laying in her lap, letting her scratch him. I should leave work very soon, she said.

The second message was from 6:12. Same message. Come home quick.

I called her back and began to shut down my computer. Ashes was still alive. I should leave right away.

I raced home as quickly as I could. No point in getting into an accident on the way home. And getting pulled over for speeding and reckless driving would only delay my arrival.

I got home. I ran up the steps from the basement. Halfway up my mom called down, "He's fine."

There was Ashes, laying on the kitchen table happy as could be as my mom went over him with a comb. Apparently he had rallied shortly after I had set out from work. There even seemed to be some color in his ears.

We worked him over, first with the comb, then with a sticky brush, then with a special cat and dog brush. He was in ecstasy.

Now he is stretched out behind me on what used to be my sister's bed, using a paperback dictionary as a pillow. I check from time to time to make sure he is still breathing. He is.

Soon my mom will be going to bed, and Ashes will be joining her. I will make sure I kiss him goodnight.

And in the morning, God willing, I will start him on his new medication.

UPDATE (6:52 AM, Wednesday, January 25, 2006): Ashes made it through the night. He looks quite perky right now. I will give him hist first doses of his new antibiotic and vitamin supplement in a few minutes.

*Dates have been changed from original, based on conflicting information from other sources. Someday I have to sit down and work out the definitive chronology of my life so far. Did we get Ashes before I started to work at Specialty Records, or after? Did we get him while my grandmother was with us due to her sciatica, or while she was with us due to her stroke?