Grumpus

April 9 is yet another anniversary that leads me to reflection. Three years ago today, our loving Maine Coon cat, Longfellow (aka Grumpus), died. I was still recovering from open-heart surgery, and because our kitties are chest cats, they were still living in the basement. Sandy was spending a fair amount of time taking care of them, and I ventured down for an hour or two each evening, settling in carefully with pillows blocking my chest from those who would perch there. The evening of the 8th, Grumpus slept peacefully a few feet from me on the TV room sofa, and he was surprisingly accepting when Belly lay down next to him.

On the 9th, Sandy went down to give the boys their dinner, concerned because Grumpus hadn't eaten that much at breakfast. She came up and said, "I think Grumpus is dead." Her hesitation was so strong that I thought he might just be sleeping soundly. I slowly trudged downstairs with Sandy and followed her into the storage room, calling, "Grumpus! Hey boy, stop worrying Sandy," until she interrupted me, saying she thought it was inappropriate. That's when I saw him. There was no doubt about it: he was dead. We sent Nada and Belly upstairs and found a burial box for Grumps. He hadn't been dead long, and the boys had no idea anything had happened. He'd died in his favorite cozy hiding place, curled up on a folded piece of soft canvas.

We realized I was doing well enough that we could have been allowing the cats upstairs during the day; I only needed to be shielded at night, when I couldn't protect my chest. So we let the boys stay upstairs, and Sandy carried Grumps in his box everywhere she went that evening, talking to him, apologizing for stepping on his huge, fluffy tail. I was still numb enough from surgery's aftermath, just trying to slog through each day as I regained some strength, that his death didn't hit me as hard as Pico's had two months earlier. Sandy was pretty shaken, though. And the next day, she dug his grave and I helped her say goodbye to our beautiful boy as she buried him. Twice, we buried cats during the time I couldn't help dig because of my heart, first, and then my healing sternum.

Grumps was a stray. When he first started showing up on our deck, I thought he'd just moved into one of the condos or an apartment on the block. He was friendly and seemed healthy enough; I shooed him off the deck the first time we met because I was trying to call our cats in for the night and knew they wouldn't come if a strange cat was loitering near the door.

We never fed him, but he kept wooing us. Before we claimed him, he'd start to walk in the open back door on the deck, and I'd say "No" firmly, and he'd back up and turn away, looking a little sad. (Once he lived with us, I'm not sure he ever heeded the word "No" again.) We noticed that he got scragglier as time passed. Presumably he was eating the food our neighbor, Millie, put out for the ferals, but he was losing weight. I've always wished I had taken a picture of him when we first met him, to see whether I was fooling myself when I thought he looked healthy. But eventually, it became clear to us that we needed to take him in, get him fixed up, and find him a home. We started planning for it. I attempted to trap him on the deck —  I put the large cat carrier out with food tucked deep inside it. But he was long enough that he could easily eat the food without putting his back legs in the carrier.

I'd been planning to prepare an area of the storage room for him, but hadn't gotten to it yet. One evening, he was hanging out in our front yard, keeping us company, and Sandy said, "Just pick him up." I reminded her that I didn't have a space ready yet. She looked at me with exasperation and said, "This is our chance. Do it." So I did. I reached down, put him on my shoulder (with no complaint from him), and carried him to the basement. I took him into the storage room and looked around, trying to figure out how to set it up. Sandy opened the door, and off he went. He couldn't get out of the basement, so he sat in the window ledge in the basement kitchen, staring at the back yard and yowling. Eventually, after many hours (and after I'd set up the storage room for him), we managed to get him back inside.

He was a scrawny, nervous boy when he first took him in.

We thought he was young, fooled by his skinniness, but the vet suspected he might be as old as 12*, given the state of his teeth. We left him at the vet to be neutered (angry that irresponsible people had left an adult male unneutered, when he'd clearly been a pet), and they called me to let me know he tested positive for FeLV. They wanted to know what I wanted to do, code for the question of whether to "destroy" the animal. I knew he was a total love, and FeLV wasn't going to be enough for me to let him go. So they went ahead and neutered him, and we brought him home. The storage room was his quarantine area for three months as I nursed him and kept him company for several hours a day, always careful to change clothes and wash with diluted bleach so I wouldn't spread the virus to the girls upstairs.

He got healthier. He gained weight. He got hair — lots of hair. That's when we realized he was a Maine Coon, possibly purebred (which could have explained why he wasn't neutered). And after three months, he tested negative for FeLV. We rejoiced, and I started trying to find a home for him. Meanwhile, now that he wasn't quarantined, he spent a lot more time in the TV room. He and Sandy spent a lot of time together. And she was falling in love. I stopped trying to find a home for him.

He grew big and beautiful, and Sandy adored him. She thought
that he saw me as bigger because I'd cared for him when he was
weak. But Sandy was a littermate; they roughhoused together.

We named him Longfellow because he was so darned long. When we set him up in his quarantine area, I had to go buy a new litterbox for him because the standard boxes weren't really big enough. He never particularly answered to the name Longfellow, but we thought it suited him.

When the kittens came into our lives in August 2005, they were tiny balls of long grayish fur. They looked a lot like Longfellow, and given that he'd been hanging out in the neighborhood unneutered for many months before we took him in — and that the kittens had been born in the property behind our house — we theorized that he could be their grandfather. He wasn't interested in them; when we brought him down to introduce him, he went to their food and ignored the curious little cats who were frolicking next to him. But we were thrilled that they might be related. So, because he might be their grandpa and because he was grumpy that they were in his space, we started calling him Grumpus, or Grumps. Unlike "Longfellow," he responded to "Grumpus" readily. The name stuck.

Grumps died of lung cancer, after years of struggling with inflammatory bowel disease. When we described the death scene to our vet, she assured us that he'd died quickly, probably unconscious before he would even have suffered. And, coincidentally, he'd been on steroids for the IBD, which had probably made his life much more comfortable as the lung cancer progressed. The cancer wasn't a total surprise to us. He'd developed a disturbing cough late the previous summer, helped by steroids, and we'd had chest Xrays taken in November that showed that there was something going on, but it didn't quite look like cancer.

He was with us for seven years, and we were grateful that he chose us. I'm still amazed at how persistently he pushed the idea that he should live with us, even when we weren't feeding him. He knew this was home.

Tina took this gorgeous photo of Grumps in January 2009, a few
months before he died. He was a beautiful boy, though he lost
much of his mane whenever the IBD got particularly bad.

*Our initial vet thought he was probably 12, because of his teeth, but later thought his teeth might just have been so bad because of his life on the streets and the FeLV infection. Our later vet talked about his "kitten face," which was adorable, and said she thought he might be younger. We eventually decided that he was probably somewhere between 6 and 10 when he came to us, and therefore between 13 and 17 when he died.