The King is Dead

Last month we entered a period of mourning for the passing of the King of our household, our much beloved cat, Manny.

There is a cat-shaped hole in the house, and every room is full of cat-shaped memories.

He would sometimes sleep in the bed between us, his little furry body generating more heat than we needed in summer but providing welcome warmth in winter. Some mornings he would tap our faces to wake us up, then settle down to sleep next us, resting his head on the pillow.

We had to keep an extra water bowl in the bathroom because sometimes he liked to come upstairs and drink water from the shower tray. We didn’t want to encourage this, so instead we kept a secondary water bowl so he had something “nice” to drink from.

The spare room was unofficially known as “Manny’s room”. We had to warn guests that this room is also the cat’s room. If they didn’t want cat hair – or an actual cat – on their pillow, they should keep the door shut. Some didn’t heed our warning, regretting it when they found a furry little beastie asleep on their pillow.

The study where I work from home has a chair next to the desk which is called Manny’s chair because when i was working from home on days before that was a regular thing in Covid, he would come up and sit on my lap to me help me with some typing for about two minutes. Feeling satisfied this was a good day’s work, he would try to go to sleep on the laptop, and then, disgruntled when I objected to this, move to his chair to go to sleep. I’ve had worse work colleagues.

There are certain places in the hallway where he used to like to sleep: like outside the bathroom so he can see me when I’m working from home and monitor the downstairs hall in case someone was going to the kitchen (they might be getting some food!)

At Christmas time, we put the “unbreakable” ornaments on the bottom rung of the tree, along with some bells that would alert us to Manny attacking the tree. But he never did. Sometimes he would sniff at it, very occasionally he would sit under it, but it never bothered him. I see those videos of cats attacking Christmas trees and I can’t help but think, Stupid cats.

Later in life he took to sitting outside the living room rather than coming in to sit on the sofa with us. I could try and console myself that he was physically distancing himself from us to prepare us for the permanent separation that was coming. Or maybe he was old and achy and he didn’t want me fussing over him and disturbing his sleep or touching his arthritic back legs.

The kitchen was probably his favourite place. He would follow us into the kitchen hopefully, even if it wasn’t dinner time, and if we were only making a cup of tea or getting a glass of water he would look disappointed and sigh. (Do other people’s cats sigh? Or just Manny?)

He would try and trick us into feeding him early but we would point at the clock. “Six thirty,” we would say. He would sit and watch the clock and at six thirty he would get up and loudly say “Miaow!” He was the cleverest cat.

Every death comes with admin. Even the death of a cat.

It starts with removing things around the house. For many years, cat corner of the kitchen was also the washing machine corner. Many the time in pulling laundry out of the machine, we would curse upon dropping socks (and it was always socks) into the cat’s water bowl. Now we would be happy to drop in any number of socks in the water bowl if only there was someone still there to drink from it.

We had to remove the chair that has stood in the middle of our kitchen since we had major works done 11 years ago. The chair was always in the way, but was the cat’s chair so it had to remain. We put it there so he had something comfortable to sit on (instead of the cold tiled floor) and look out the back door into the garden.

In the past week we have had to amend our online grocery order favourite items to remove “triggering items” such as cat treats, cat food, cat biscuits, cat litter. We don’t want to see these things popping up, reminding us that we don’t need them anymore.

Every day when we prepare food or eat in the kitchen we remember him.

When we spill food on the floor we have to clean it up ourselves now – there’s no cat coming running to see if what we dropped was something nice to eat.

We opened a tin of tuna to make dinner and that was sad because we didn’t have anyone in the kitchen tapping at our legs to remind us to give him the tin to clean out the last little flakes of tuna.

Husband has to re-learn how much milk to pour onto his cereal now that he no longer has to leave a few spoonfuls in the bottom to give to Manny, who would be sitting beside him while he ate, occasionally tapping at him, telling him to hurry up. (Manny was never interested in my almond milk.)

There are a few last things we still haven’t done to remove all cat traces from the house.

One thing we haven’t done yet is remove the fleece blanket that forms a protective cover on the sofa. The cat liked to sleep there at night. He was unhappily prone to throwing up during the night so we wanted to protect the upholstery against cat puke stains. We don’t need to do that anymore.

He was an old cat and he had some medical issues. What do we do with his leftover medicine? We know it’s expensive. We tried contacting a cat shelter – we would like to at least feel that his medicine is going on help some other cats – but they didn’t get back to us.

We tried another cat shelter. They will take the litter tray and cat carry box and any food we have. We just got two boxes of the pouch food he loved so much the day before he died. We see it there, every time we go to the food cupboard.

We haven’t told the vet yet. We want to get in ahead on that one because he would be due for his check up next month and they will contact us soon. Another triggering event.

How long will it take, I asked Husband, before we stop looking for him around the house, or looking out into the garden, hoping to see him coming up the path?

Months, said Husband, if not years.