dada

dada could be a harsh critic of my work

         Dada was my favorite, in the way that a child might be their parents favorite.  Not that they love one child more than the others but due to some experience they shared together which was special or unique they have memories that will cause them to to be closer.  His life ended tragically the day after Easter in 2008.

Not long after finishing our Junior year in college, Jaime and I kicked around the idea of getting a cat.  We called the Bellevue animal shelter and went down “just to take a look.”  The number of kittens was limited but there was one we locked eyes with.  He was completely black and sitting way in the back of his cage so that all you could see were his little yellow eyes.  He was scrawny, clearly the runt of the litter which is what drew Jaime and I to him.

We took him home named him Esteban and watched him grow.  We were the typical doting parents who loved him and worried about him like we were raising the Buddha reincarnate.  Much to Jaime’s joy Esteban loved to cuddle and often I could find Jaime asleep in bed her body curled around a black fuzzy ball.  Sadly just over a year later Jaime and I found ourselves driving to the Eastlake Veterinary Clinic with Esteban wrapped tightly in a blanket for the final time.  

For months Esteban had been having difficulty passing his stool.  You could see it lodged in his rectum as he would slink into his litter box trying to pass it, but nothing would happen.  Eventually the build up would become so great that he would crawl around the apartment crying out in pain.  The vet diagnosed him with mega colon a condition which caused a part of the intestine to become enlarged and the stool gathers until it becomes impassable.  We would take him to the clinic where they would give him an enema and keep him overnight for a fluid treatment.  On one such visit they took X-rays of him and showed them to us.  In the black and white image you could see that he was literally full of shit.

They gave us some medicine which made the stool softer and passable.  Because it was a compound it had to be specially made for us and a thirty day supply cost us $60.  The medicine worked, unfortunately it made his stool so soft that it would literally leak out of him.  We were finding little puddles of gray matter in corners of the apartment.  (Gray because of the special food we had to feed him.)

We had to lower the dosage which unfortunately required us to go back for more enemas at about $300 a visit.  Our last resort was an expensive surgery where they would remove part of his colon, even still we were not guaranteed the procedure would be effective.  There was a slim chance that the whole thing might just clear up on its own.  We decided to keep him on the medicine and hope for the best.

On a cold week that following October we noticed a lack of stool in his litter box and we waited for the impending pain.  Jaime and I had never discussed euthanasia but I think we both had it in the back of our minds.  After about a week without a bowel movement Jaime and I knew we needed to make a decision.  We could not afford another enema nor could we afford the needed surgery.  Silently we decided to spend a quiet weekend at home with him watching TV and trying to forget anything was wrong.  By Monday morning he was howling in pain and we reluctantly wrapped him in his favorite blanket and drove to the Vet where they would put him to sleep.  Neither of us had ever made a decision like that before, part of me still feels that I was a bad owner because I did not try for the surgery.  We bawled throughout the entire process, and held him in our arms while they injected him with a fatal dose of Phenobarbital.  There is a strange moment one that I think of often, where while holding him I tried to understand when he ceased to be Esteban and instead became just an empty dead vessel.  We held his dead body until we realized it was time to move on, there is no harder feeling than watching a technician take away your cats body knowing you will never see him again.  We didn’t have enough money to cover the euthanasia so the Vet graciously allowed us to make payments.

A week later unable to fill the void in our seemingly empty apartment we went back to the Bellevue animal shelter “just to look” and adopted a small black and white kitten we named Addison.  She was the opposite of Esteban in almost every way, bright and bubbly she was mischievous and less likely to cuddle with you than nibble on your hand.  Now we were the parents who’d lost a child and were constantly afraid of something happening to her.  In the first week we had her we lost in the apartment three times and brought Jaime to tears each time.

That Christmas we began watching a cat for a friend who was having a difficult time.  Riley was a big cat who had a heart of gold, one of the sweetest you would ever meet.  He arrived at our apartment covered in flees and filled with worms.  I remember giving him a bath and watching as blood swirled down the drain.  He had a patch of fur right above his tail that he’d scratched bald and bloody.

Within a month the flees and worms were gone and the bald patch was covered in hair.  He became as much of the family as Addison and they spend most of their days cuddling together in the sun by the window.  Riley’s owner rarely came to visit him and two weeks before  our move to Los Angeles we debated what to do with him.  We wanted to take him with, not only because we’d become attached to him but also Addison was attached to him.

In an effort to save our friendship with Riley’s owner we tried to be as diplomatic as possible.  We told her that we would be leaving in two weeks and that we would be more than happy to keep Riley.  She took deep offense to our offer to took Riley back, I hoped not to become flea ridden and full of worms again.  I still truly believe that we should have kept Riley and dealt with the consequences later.

When we arrived in LA Addison began wandering the apartment at night holding a toy in her mouth and howling.  It was clear that she missed Riley and we did as well, it felt like he had died and all three of us were trying to get over the loss of him.  On our second week in the apartment Addison slipped out the door unnoticed, it took us two hours before we realized she was missing.  We started looking for her and when we concluded that she must have gone outside Jaime began to loose it going from door to door in the building crying big wet tears of loss.  After an hour of scouring the building and thinking that she was gone for good, Jaime found her tucked up inside an old broken Coke machine.  Afterwards we started talking about getting another cat to keep Addison company, deciding to wait till after Christmas.

On a mid December Sunday Jaime and I were driving up to Target, on our way we passed the Burbank animal shelter which was advertising a “Kitty fair.”  We vowed not to stop, but on our way back we agreed to stop by and “Just look.”

The room with the fair was held in a room separate from the cages, the kittens were kept in little pens.  People were taking turns holding them deciding if they were a good fit.  At first it seemed we would in fact just look but Jaime spied this small black and white cat with long disheveled hair.  Jaime held him for a while until she handed him to me while she talked to the staff about adoption procedures.  As I held him he proceeded to fall asleep in my arms purring like a tiny motor.  I remember thinking that this is what it must feel like for parents holding their newborn child.  Here was this kitten who didn’t even know me trusting me completely.  By the time Jaime came back there was no doubt we were adopting him.

We couldn’t take him home that night because he hadn’t been spayed yet, they told us we could pick him up the following Tuesday after the operation.  On the drive home we discussed names, concluding that he was a serious cat and thus needed a serious name.  Something distinguished, perhaps something after a distinguished writer.  I threw in Spalding, Kafka, and Mingus.  Jaime threw in Faulkner, Plath, and Hemingway.  None seemed to work until (and I don’t remember how) we settled on Dada.  Named for the 20th Century art movement, we chose it mainly because the Dada movement was started by serious artists who took themselves seriously but seemed to produce humorous results.

The night we brought him home we were unsure how Addison would react.  She’d never been around a kitten before and we hoped that she wouldn’t try to eat him.  Neither Jaime or I are ones to slowly introduce animals into a new environment so we just plopped Dada down in the middle of the living room/kitchen/dining room.  There was much admiring from a distance by Addison but when she started to get closer Dada began purring.  So loud we could hear him from across the room.

By the end of the week he and Addison were best friends.  Dada loved to cuddle with everyone all the time.  He was like a little dog who would follow you from room to room just wanting to be near you and know what you were doing, then cuddle up with you.  What I remember best about him was his love for the computer, he would spend hours just watching me type.  Occasionally batting at the cursor as it flew across the screen, and when he got tired he would lay down next to it and drift off to sleep.

Last Sunday while organizing paperwork in our filing cabinet deciding what should be recycled and what needed to be kept, Jaime came across Dada’s paperwork from the Burbank animal shelter.  I looked it over trying to remember what it was like to be that age, what it was like to live in that apartment in California, what it was like to have Dada.  I tried to remember what Dada was like, what he used to do, but all I could remember was sitting at my computer having a spectator basking in the bluish glow of the laptop.  We took the papers, then filed them away with the other animals paperwork.