The Happiest Sad Week of a Sad Year

A new week, a new month, a new season. So what else is new?

As of the first of this month, this also became the year our son moved out. I keep telling myself it’s a happy day because it is. Still, my wife and I will miss him. He’s in his early 20s, but we would have been content to follow the Italian model and keep him at home until he got married. 

That said, he wasn’t going to find his wife here in the sparsely populated San Luis Valley, let alone the kind of job that would have him certified as a journeyman in two states. In the middle of a pandemic panic-induced lockdown, he had three companies looking to bring him in to work. He could easily have gotten work here in the Valley, but it would have been a lateral move at best, and more likely a step back. It would not be a noble sacrifice on his part to stay here for his parents’ sake. It would be a foolishly squandered opportunity.

What most impresses me is how my son, in the six weeks since he left his last job, never bothered filing for unemployment. He had too much pride and no patience for the paperwork and jumping-through-hoops. He had enough in savings to pay his bills and still help his parents on the side. When all was said and done, he had plenty left to get him started again in Colorado Springs. 

When he moved back in with us three years ago, I told him to take the opportunity to “stack paper,” i.e., put something back from every paycheck. Well, bless him if he didn’t do just that.

He’s long been too big for these toys but we can’t give them up. These, as least we can hang onto.

 

As with the passing of our longtime family cat Otis in March, this was something that had to happen sooner or later, and if we mourn, it’s for us. I scolded myself as I watched him drive away, “If it’s this damned hard on you, make a bunch of money and move yourself closer!”

Maybe that’s just what I’ll do. It’s an incentive to finish writing this last book.

The Corners We’ve Turned

...in the Year of the Panicky Demick. A not-so metaphorical State of the Apocalypse.

I would have had a post out days ago but Blogger refused to accept my photographs. I like my blog illustrated, like a magazine. It helps break up my text, provides a sort of sidebar while illustrating my main thesis and...look, I like my pictures, all right?

I’d wondered if this was the end. I was even thinking of making a post to that effect: “Blogger won’t take my image uploads, so stay tuned until I figure out another platform, which is probably never, because frankly this thing wasn’t that much fun to begin with. Just in case, and most probably, Goodbye.”

At last it occurred to me to attempt uploading photos using the new Blogger interface that I’d tried a month ago and found detestable, a load of change for change’s sake that didn’t fix the problems with formatting and required a learning curve figuring out where all the buttons were, besides. Sure enough, New Blogger took my photos just fine. I could try and learn to endure New Blogger, but it doesn’t work with my smart quotes plug-in.

Therefore, I’ll be flipping back and forth. Trust me, I don’t hate the big tech companies, Microsoft and Google in particular, because it’s cool.

Not even halfway through and we’ve seen the sun set on so much this year.

One of the sharpest corners we’ve had to navigate is the fate of the Blue Porch Kitty Committee. It’s a sad tale that requires its own post, but the précis is we’ve been brushed harder by the darkness than I expected this year, even knowing we had to euthanize elderkitty Otis, even knowing we’d been getting by far too long without incident regarding the outdoor feral colony that called our front porch home.

What was once a steady complement of nine cats, then eleven cats, is down to six. Angel has been so depressed by the poisoning deaths of his fellow toms Ginger and Spooky he refuses to re-enter the very yard he grew up in. We have some kittens in the garage that may yet grow up to fill out what’s left, but we’ve contacted the local cat shelter and we hope they get around to taking them away soon, as well as fixing as many of the un-fixed cats we still have around.

We found the opening through our foundation under our porch where the cats were getting in to have their babies. After a couple of winters without incident we’ve had to fish one dead kitten from the crawlspace, as well as the body of Ginger Tom, who needed a dark and lonely place to die. Heartbreaking and unsanitary are a heck of a combo. 

We already knew we had to renegotiate how we handled the feral colony we inherited with this house in 2016. We used to leave part of the skirting under our porch open so the cats would have a safe place to go in the event one of the many dogs running loose in our town made an appearance. Again, we were renegotiating. If they needed shelter they could duck through the cat door we’d installed in the side of the garage.

Last week all that wood latticework, much of it rotten or soon to be, was torn out. My wife raked decades of debris from under the porch, including one entire newspaper dated 1981. My son then went underneath to make sure both vent/access squares in the main foundation were covered. 

This bit of home improvement alone was a milestone. But the party being over for the Blue Porch Kitty Committee weighs heavy on our hearts. It’s not a mere metaphor; for years we enjoyed a festive atmosphere among the animals lounging about our porch. With the deaths of Ginger Tom and Spooky, who were kittens only two years ago, chasing each other around the poplars in our front yard, it’s as if the music stopped, the lights came on, and it’s cleanup time. Naturally, we’ll feed and take care of who’s left. It will never feel the same, though. Because it isn’t.

This is the core group as of yesterday evening, 30 May 2020. Angel, not pictured, blessed us with his presence for the first time in a while, but he refused to come into the yard. He used to be one of the most aggressive eaters and never missed a meal. I couldn’t even tempt him with chicken.

Today, the last day of May 2020 will be the last night my son spends here at our house. He’d quit a deteriorating situation just as the lockdowns were getting going this spring. My wife and I never thought to ask if he was looking for something else, especially as there didn’t seem to be anything else with all the restrictions in place due to the pandemic panic.

Besides, we knew boredom would get to him long before the lack of cash-flow became an issue. And so it came to pass he was interviewing via webcam with a company out of Kansas. They took all of one hour after the interview to make their offer. It’s the kind of respectable, living wage with benefits his father never knew, and he’ll be doing it at age 23. 

He will, of course, have to move back to Colorado Springs. The seats are out of the back of the van and we’re moving him there tomorrow. Cynthia and I will be empty nesters again for the first time since January 2017, when he moved in with us for lack of opportunities in the Springs. Now the polarity has reversed. He learned his trade here, but the money is over there. 

It is at once a cause for joy and mourning. I’m going to miss having my son around, even if we only talked to each other maybe twice a week because we both prefer to do our things at our computer workstations, his thing being electronic music composition and video game level modding. (He was also out of town a lot on his last job. Hell, out of the entire San Luis Valley. That says something right there. He could not stay.) His moving out the first time in 2016 as we left Colorado Springs for Monte Vista was a prime cause of my writer’s block that year. I didn’t know it until he moved in with us in Monte in 2017, and I was making coherent sentences again.

We’ve had some lovely pre-sunset Golden Hours, with a few post-sunrise Golden Hours that made me glad I was awake for them.

For what it’s worth, I do not expect to suffer from that kind of block again. I’m not the same man I was in 2018, let alone 2016, and thank God for that, too. Despite the melancholia stinking up this post it must be understood that, with the obvious exception of Blogger, all of these changes had to happen. Otis T. Cat was old and I would have had him put down sooner if I’d known then what I understand better now. We’d enjoyed a smooth ride with the feral cats outside for years. We knew we had to clean out and close up under the porch. The murders of Ginger Tom and Spooky, as well as the stillborn kittens, forced us to do something we should have done last year, if not the year before that.

Meanwhile, the great social experiment in how much suffering governing bodies can inflict upon vast populations in the name of a so-called emergency continues. It’s obvious this Chinese Coronavirus isn’t stacking bodies, nor will it ever outside of the nursing homes several governors and health officials have forced actual sick people into for safety. But the governors and the local health officials are enjoying themselves too much. So what if one business after another goes under? So what if families go bankrupt? 

So what are we going to do about it? 

I, for one, have had all worry and care about this stupid panic bludgeoned out of me. I’ve come to appreciate that there was much good among the bad this month, and that’s where I’ll put my focus. I got my old laptop up and running again. I finished reading some books I’d put off. Best of all, I solved the problem of integrating Agnes’ and Elyssa’s backstories and made massive progress with my novel. That’s a post all by itself which I hope to get around to tomorrow.

With respect to those who have taken personal hits from the Great Pandemic Panic of 2020, I can’t help smiling to think that, for all everyone’s hollering about in the media, including and especially the Internet, it’s been nothing more than a minor inconvenience for me. Passages and transitions, changes as painful as they were inevitable, are how I’ll remember this year. It just so happens that all the notable, life-altering corners turned since Otis T. Cat’s passing in March were turned this month.

I’m grateful to be here for it. That said, I’ve lost all enthusiasm with arguing about wearing a mask in public. I miss my cats; I’ll miss my son. I still have a novel to finish. I can only do so much. 

Don’t miss the kittycats for the trees. Back by poplar demand!

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

Thin Strands, Heavier Hearts

How much of this hair is yours?
I wonder as I pull a longer strand away
from my sweater, a filament of orange 
and white that could
only be yours.

How much is left?
I wonder as I roll the thing with
the sticky paper on it over my clothes
as I push the vacuum cleaner 
one more time
over the carpet

We marveled at how much you shed 
over 18 years, over how many kittens
worth of fluff we might comb 
from your coat in one sitting

no matter how many times
clothes and bedclothes go through
the laundry, no matter how much
is swept up, mopped up,
put away

a piece of you will always
remain along a crack in the floorboards
woven snugly into the fabric of a shirt
someone wore while holding you close
while you purred 
into our chests
touched your nose
to ours

so I like to think
even as we chase every last
strand of yours and the surviving
cats down with our sticky rolls
and vacuum cleaners
because we pride ourselves
on our place
not smelling 
like pets

Someday it won’t even 
smell like us but all the dead 
cells we’ve shed everyday as dust
will have already settled
to mingle with yours
in the seams of the floorboards
under the molding 
along the walls

breathing in and out
of the ductwork

and no matter how hard 
the people after us 
try to clean….

Otis T. Cat, 2001-2020
Forever in our hearts.

Forward, Beneath the Sun of Another Sky

Notes on a particularly pivotal week.

It was a genuine miracle and the biggest blessing, that as my wife and I cried uglier for the death of Otis T. Cat than any human we ever knew, that as our grief turned our home into a strange, empty place we could barely stand for the first couple of days, that as the world outside, even the very air seemed alien to us...no one came at us with, “Durr, I don’t get it. He was just a cat. You had him for a long time, sure, but, like, come on, you know?” That Cynthia and I have enjoyed nothing but compassion and empathy online and in meatspace during these darkest of hours proves unequivocally and most unironically what an awesome God I serve. We all know how the world is. If it isn’t the ubiquitous clueless fools and would-be comedians, it’s the predators.

I’m aware of how the above paragraph might serve as a can’t-resist invitation to trolls whose self-esteem depends upon the complaints elicited from the strangers they go out of their way to outrage or hurt. I still beheld the miracle. Throughout the time of our greatest vulnerability, we were shielded. Although this loss will always be with us, we’ve were led quickly out of the worst of our grief, enabling us to adjust to this new chapter under a sky that looks changed with the absence of a lovely creature who was with us for almost one-third of our lives (much more for our grown children, of course).

That is the most powerful thing about grief to me, incidentally. It changes your very perception of the universe. The sky is still blue, but it doesn’t look the same. The last time this happened for me was in 1986, when my mother took ill and died. I’ve lost many people since then—and, frankly, I grieved harder for that big, ornery cat than I did my mother, and why not? For all his cussed cattitude, Otis was certainly more empathetic and loving when the situation called for it.

The new thing I picked up about grief on this go-round was how physically and psychically exhausting the extreme forms are. Naturally, in keeping with the accompanying depression, sleep was hard to maintain. 

We’re adjusting though, and with surprising swiftness, given that I write this on Saturday, and the veterinarian and her assistant made their visit on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday afternoon already feels like a month ago. This is a very, very good thing. Let’s make it a year.

This bald-head/Van Dyke beard period lasted only so long in 2008. Otis was with us for nearly 18 years, and was there for everything I had to do as a writer in the 21st century.

Marching On

Pardon the corny title. Let’s just get through this.

This leap year’s bonus day was the first day of the year I could wear short sleeves outside. The weather, at least, keeps getting better.

We’d suffered days in January that were so frigid, cloudy and gloomy it made one scream to get out. If we’d had to put our elderkitty Otis T. Cat down then I don’t know if I’d have made it. It’s going to be hard enough this week under sunny skies as the temperatures rise above 50° F (10°C) and the first big tourist event of the year, the Crane Festival, brings Monte Vista out of hibernation.

It is, of course, impossible to feel the least bit festive when you’re dealing with a death in the family. Again, though, if this had happened in January...seriously, I shudder to think about it. I will make a point of getting the sun on my face this week, so I’ll have that much to look forward to.

We were going to give it yet one more weekend before we made the appointment. When I came home from a volunteer gig Thursday night, however, I leaned over to pet Otis where he lay in his bed and noticed his entire back end was matted with urine. The deal was, when Otis is too weak to keep himself out of his own waste, his quality of life was below optimal and it was time to make the call. And so it came to pass that the call we were putting off until Monday was made on Friday. On Saturday, the first day of the year warm enough to go out in short sleeves, Cynthia took the can she’d chosen for Otis’ ashes from the thrift store and began painting. It was a festive little Christmas cookie gift container with old-timey London storefronts across it. Was....

Tuesday is the day, though. The veterinarian, bless her soul, will bring her needle to our house at about 1345 hours on Tuesday. We’ll pay the vet, and drive out to the local animal crematorium—coincidentally, right next door to the animal clinic the vet will be driving from. We were grateful this could be done at home, though. 

After that, it’s a post-Otis world. Now what?

Otis, in his bed where he spends his days, just after I’d come back inside from photographing his future resting place. Since September when it was clear Otis couldn’t hold his water, he’s moved from a chair in the laundry room, to the kitchen, and now in the area between the downstairs mud room and the kitchen. Farther and farther away from us. The isolation has to be the worst. That, and his failing kidneys.

I have a book release party to attend in La Jara on Wednesday so I can pick up a copies of the annual poetry collections I’ve been published in since 2018. It’s a 60-mile round trip, but it’s either go now or miss out. This is the third edition I’ve been published in, and I don’t have a copy of either. I’ll count myself lucky to get the earliest one. I’ll do a reading if I’m asked, but I want to get that drive home over with as soon as possible.

Thursday at my volunteer gig will be especially trying as I expect the early crowd for the Crane Festival to packing the place. It’s just one night, I keep telling myself. I should be okay. As I also must remind myself, I don’t want to disappear up my own backside in this office. Which can and has happened. Current conditions are optimal for such an occurrence.

Meanwhile...is this the month I finish The Wrong Kind of Dead? An important corner was turned last month. More on that later. I’ve got to get out into the sun, take a long walk. I’ll scratch behind Otis’ ears as I go out and come back inside. These will be among the last.

Last year we had tourists all the way from China. Maybe not so much from China this year, given current events, but the Crane Festival, along with the Stampede Rodeo in late July and the Potato Festival in September, keeps getting bigger with every iteration. Come to think of it, Otis first started seriously failing the week of the Potato Festival. And now...okay, I’ll stop.

The Series Finales of Seem

“Let be be the finale of seem/The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream.” It’s okay if you don’t get it. Its an elder English major thing.

Ever notice that series finales of all these once-celebrated TV shows rarely satisfy?

Granted, my first example was by no means celebrated, but it was almost funny—almost—when Star Trek: Enterprise, after its one decent season, got canceled and went out with a Clip Show from the Future episode in which people of the future, namely Riker and Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation, see what happened to the brave pre-Kirk-and-Spock explorers. 

In the course of this dull affair I barely remember 15 years later, one of the more beloved characters was killed, and for no apparent reason than to import gravitas into this clip-show finale. The death was cheap, everything about this episode looked cheap, and you could tell the cast couldn’t wait until this humiliation was over. At least Scott Bakula still found work after this sad ending to the series of spinoffs from Star Trek: Next Generation (itself a spinoff) beginning with Deep Space Nine in 1993. Glasses are raised for the less fortunate.

Then there was that show Lost, the one that made executive producer stars out of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. For a while in the late ‘00s it had a dedicated cult following. That following did not survive the sloppily written finale. I wonder how many young people under age 18 remember it. I never saw it, so I’m grateful to have been spared the disappointment.

The most famous and recent disaster of a series finale was the one for the once mighty Game of Thrones. Given the opportunity for cosplay (costume + play), the fan base will survive, if only as a niche among sci-fi/fantasy media fandom, which is better than most get. Especially when the Great Big Supernatural Bad and his army is dispatched with one poke of a dagger by some little elfin thing and the much-beloved Mother of Dragons turns evil at the last minute because, as one bystander helpfully offers after all these seasons, it’s what her bloodline tends to do.

When the tweenage girl in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep cried out, “I feel like I’m Daenerys Targaryen!” during a particularly non-heroic heroic escape from the Bad People she never seemed to be in any real danger from, I knew I was reading my last Stephen King novel. Knowing this Great Platinum Blonde Hope ended up murdering an entire village with one of her pet dragons at least makes it a little funny to think back on. Only a little, though.

Like most television shows I prefer to spend my time reading about them online than watching them. I’ll view the occasional clip, but that’s all. It’s not so much the overt pseudo-moralizing and mean-minded ideological agendas that stink up these things these days, though those are certainly a factor. It’s a matter of committing the time to a structure that involves so much talky/ broody/ gratuitous sexy-time sandwiched between moments of gross and visceral shock. 

The Walking Dead was a great example of this. I’m impressed it’s still around, years after the women on Twitter abandoned the “follow me back pls Norman Reedus” line in their handles. I can imagine the reaction when the series finale to that is announced. I can imagine no one being happy as it finally winds up.

Every now and then I learn of some great, “binge-worthy” series that I’ve never heard of before that is concluding after seven or eight seasons. I’ve heard a credible case for this last decade being something of a Golden Age of Television for all the stuff you can watch. And so much is so cleverly written, too! 

Thrill to the high school teacher’s descent into evil as he manufactures and sells methamphetamine to pay his medical bills! (After all these years Breaking Bad is still considered the gold standard for binge-watching a series. General consensus holds that it was consistently good from its bitter beginning to its bitter end.) Nod sadly and knowingly at the cartoon character with the horse’s head on a human body as we examine the effects of alcohol abuse on the people around him. That last one, Bojack Horseman, recently concluded on a blue note, but at least its fanbase seemed satisfied with the conclusion—although some thought it would have been better with the character dying as he did in the penultimate episode. (It turned out to be a dream, or something like that).

Supernatural, the only TV series I’ve been following consistently since Stargate Atlantis wrapped up years back, is concluding after 15 years on the air. I’m heartened to see the writers are doing their best to send Sam and Dean out with good stories; I had feared everything was going to fizzle as with Stargate S.G. 1, which was the longest running genre show at 10 seasons when it went out. The boys are up against God Himself this season. Talk about a Final Boss.

I can only hope the writers, cast, and crew manage to pull it off. When Supernatural is done, that’s it. That will be my series finale of contemporary series. That corner having been turned, like a lot of older people, I’ll go to YouTube and catch episodes of the old classic stuff from the 1960s, most of which were lucky to have lasted three or four seasons back in the day. 

I’m already doing that with the black-and-white first season of The Wild Wild West. It’s nice to have something to sit down and watch with my wife. In the meantime, I raise a most fittingly cooled cup of coffee to the turning of this corner. When there were only so many channels and only so much content, we all had that much more in common. But it’s been 40 years since an entire nation wanted to find out who shot J.R., and over half a century since electric guitar sales spiked because some band from England played them on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show.

It is what it was, and the beat goes on.

When the Only Way Out Is Through

...or, as one of my favorite depressive functional alcoholics put it, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” A recap of a long week and the (we hope) longer game ahead:

The one thing that kept me going throughout this week was the Friday evening date my wife and I had scheduled at our favorite restaurant. The Mountain View was closed the day of my wife’s birthday on Monday, I’d committed to some things outside the house on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so Friday would be the day we properly celebrated.

Given the expenses of the Christmas season and our limited cash flow, we’d been unable to make our once-weekly appearance at our favorite eatery for a while, so this had to happen. Dealing with our failing elder cat, and realizing we’d be dealing with more failing elder cats later on top of own failing elder selves, even as our grown son talks about moving not just from the house (where we prefer having him; it’s good having a professional handyman around), but from the San Luis Valley where the opportunities more closely match his considerable skill sets...all this change, worse, all this going away, was very hard on the spirit, to say the least. 

These are more than transitions we’re dealing with. They’re departures. Finales. Endings. And even sitting in the restaurant last night, smiling for the Valentine’s decor everywhere, I reflected that the owners of this most excellent establishment were getting on in years, too. How long would it be until they had to give it up to new management? It would, of course, never be the same.

And the obvious answers are stick around and find out; you know it’ll be sooner than you’d like. Just get there and enjoy it while you can.

Still, it’s difficult to maintain good cheer when all you’ve got to look forward to is one thing after another winding down into oblivion.

Sunsets are pretty. Until it’s dark.

My wife was astonished when I told her happy birthday. I had to remind her this was why we were at the Mountain View in the first place. Monday already felt like a month ago to her and I knew exactly what she meant. I hesitated to bring up, as I’m prone to do, that Christmas Eve was exactly one month ago. And imagine how far away New Year’s Day seems already! January can really mess with your sense of time. 

Things are so much different than when we moved here three and a half years ago, and much of it is for the better. I think of when I was on a Facebook page for a school I went to over forty years ago, and leaving because it was so depressing seeing how many of these people I knew from the 1970s hadn’t changed. Not even a little bit. I’m not even the same person I was three and a half years ago, and I thank God for that.

Things have to change. People and cats grow old. There is nothing else to do but press on and take comfort in the slowly lengthening, oh-so-slowly warming days. Meanwhile, we take care of ourselves so we can take care of those depending on us. That is all.

Otis on the bed upstairs with Jack and Puff, 25 January 2019, exactly one year ago as of this writing. What a difference a year makes.

The Lion in Winter: Our Last Days With Otis T. Cat

Our first pet ages out on us. You’d think it would be easy, with us being all old and mature and stuff. Of course, some people drop their elderly pets at the shelter to die alone and confused in a cage, or leave them alone with a veterinarian and a needle. Don’t get me started. This is one cat’s story, and we’re doing the best we can.

I can’t remember the last time I heard him meow. Otis was a very vocal cat throughout his life. He’s still with us after nearly 18 years, but the cat that once double-meow barked at me when he wanted attention hasn’t made a sound in long, long while.

I never thought I’d say this because it used to get on my nerves, but I miss his voice.

It was towards the end of the first week of September that Otis started leaving minor ponds of pee beside the litter boxes in the mud room. We hoped it was something he would get over, but the changes were already in motion over the last year or so. I’d already been carrying him up and down the stairs, given how painful it seemed to be for him.

He’s come up the stairs only once since then, and that was when he was hungry and looking for someone to feed him. He goes on memory, hearing, and smell, in shifting order. As near as we can tell Otis’ eyesight is all but gone. He can see movement, but individual shapes escape him.

Otis had already been with us nine months by the time of his first Christmas with us. Note the ancient CRT monitor he’s napping on.

Given his incontinence, his days of sleeping with us were over. I imagine this has to be the worst for him. Since the day Otis came home with us from the Anchorage Animal Shelter in April 2002 he’s spent the night with someone. 

As of September 2019, that was over. Otis was a downstairs-only kitty. He began with a special spot we made for him in a chair in the laundry room. Sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving my wife bought a foam rubber bed to rest his bones in he stays close to the mud room where the litter boxes are. He’s becoming more and more incontinent by the day. Sometimes he hits the puppy-training pads we lay out for him. 

At least his incontinence is confined to an area designed to take a wet mess. For the most part. We expect this to change.

Dawson Creek, British Columbia, 5 October 2003, on our way to our next duty station in Washington state. For perspective, the little girl in the van with Otis turns 27 this year. All the children in this photo are long-since grown adults. And Otis....

When Otis didn’t even sleep with Emily on the air mattress this Christmas I knew it was his last Christmas with us. Now, I’m not sure he’ll see the spring. My wife and I have agreed that the day we find Otis sleeping in his own filth in his bed will be when we’ll medically assist him over that Rainbow Bridge.

Eighteen years is a long time for a cat to live. It’s a long time in ours, too. After Otis, we have four more cats to go. My wife and I can only hope we survive, and with enough vim and vigor to take care of them in the sunset of their lives. Mickey is 11 years old. Jack and Puff will turn nine this year. When Otis is gone we’ll have a few years of business as usual, and then one of them will take ill. Then another. Our youngest, Luna, is four. My wife and I will be in our 70s when she’s Otis’ age. Let’s hope we make it.

Otis in his foam bed where he spends nearly the entirety of his days. With his bones so fragile, his hygiene not so optimal, we have to brace ourselves to pick him up. He purrs when paid attention thus, but cats also purr when they’re in pain. We do what we can to let him know we still love him, though. Again, I imagine the loneliness of these final days has to be the worst for this once most-social of cats.

When you bring a pet into your family, you’re not just giving them a place to live. You’re giving them a place to die. Here’s to those out there doing what they can for those who should very much count as members of the family. Otis came into our family when our children were small. He’s been with us from Alaska, to Washington state, to Virginia, from Colorado’s Front Range to what will be his final resting place in the San Luis Valley.

Attention will be paid.

From that same journey in 2003. Otis actually enjoyed the long road trips.