So long, old friend

   It is with much sadness that I write that we had to let Pepper go today. I was “her person” for almost 18 years. She has lived in three apartments and one full house with us, enjoyed 10 years of peace and leisure with us before we had children, and then pleasantly adjusted and accepted our offspring (and our offspring only) to become not like a sister to our kids, but more of a cranky old aunt that lived with us. She will be much missed.

   Pepper’s twin sister, Pansy, had her health take a very sudden decline in December of 2019 and we had her put down at that time. Pepper’s health had still seemed quite good at that time, but she started to gradually decrease over the past two years. Frankly, I think she had geriatric depression. I hypothetically administered a psychiatric test on her, and she scored 14 out of 15 on the Geriatric Depression Scale. A score of 5 and up is considered a diagnosis of depression. She didn’t seem to be in acute pain, but she kept shrinking away from being a part of the family, so that this cat that was once always underfoot and talking to you was now difficult to find and easy to forget.

For example, she stopped coming upstairs from the basement in October. She was still capable of it, as she did come back upstairs twice in the past four months, enticed by the smell of a fresh tuna can opening, but she didn’t stay upstairs. We brought her up once in November to show her the first woodstove fire of the year, as laying on the little hearth rug had always been one of her favorite spots. She looked it, looked at us, and then went back downstairs to her then-hideout, the space under the drying rack in the laundry room. At Christmas time, we carried her up to the foyer to see the decorated tree and drink some Christmas juice--also known as tree water--which we had always considered to be her personal fountain of youth. She sat behind the tree for about three minutes, sniffed at the base and seemed to find the needles too pokey this year, and then slinked back down to the basement. 

Around that time, she moved her home base from under the drying rack to inside the walk-in shower in the basement bathroom. She even stopped visiting the laundry room, about 12 feet away, for food, so we moved her food and water into the shower with her. She still got up fine to use the litterbox outside the bathroom and just around the corner. Then in the middle of January, she moved from sleeping in the shower to curling up between the wall and the toilet. It was a depressing sight, but I received her message: she was preparing to die. Had she been an outdoor cat, she would be wondered off into the woods and looked for a sheltered and hidden place to die, but inside her comfy home, behind the toilet in the least-used bathroom in the house was what she had to work with.

She would still let me pick her up and she would sit on my lap and let me pet her in the evenings before we went to bed, but she kept shortening the amount of time she was willing to cuddle, from about 15 minutes to five minutes at the end. We were afraid of her jumping down from the couch, so we gently lifted her down before she could jump, and still she would limp away as if one of her back paws had fallen asleep.

   

    She was also nearly completely deaf. She wouldn’t come when you called, nor even feel your footsteps approaching. However she was quick to react if she noticed the level of light changed in a room — a sign that her vision was compensating for her loss of hearing.

 All this is to say that I have felt Pepper was drifting away from us for the past year or two. As a young cat, and even in her younger teen years, she was constantly aware of our family going-ons. If she heard me unlocking the front door, she would run over and give me a loud and angry meow. I always imagined her saying, “Where have you been, you know I can’t sleep without knowing that you are home and safe!” In a way she was almost like a dog with anxiety, although the only way her anxiety played out was her angry meowing and unrestful daytime naps. She never was a vengeful cat either. She never peed in anyone’s shoe or threw up on an important document or anything. I suppose she was quick to forgive us in all the ways that we disturbed her rest.

When it came to people outside of our household, she was extremely guarded in who she trusted or let her guard down with. (If you have touched Pepper, even if it was only one time, consider yourself to be a member of a very exclusive club.) I kind of loved how she wasn’t afraid of visitors, and never hid from them. Even when people would try to pick her up and she didn’t want them too, she would stand her ground, dodging just inches out of their grasp and look back over her shoulder as if to say, “How dare you!” How dare they, indeed. Once this guy Mark thought he was a cat whisperer and he just went and picked her up and held him to his chest. I remember thinking, “What in the world are you doing? You have to let a cat smell your hand just to have them LET you PET them!” She clawed into him with no mercy. I believe he may have bled through his shirt from those wounds. Josh and I had no sympathy. That might have been the one time that she ran and hid from someone after he put her down.

   We had Pepper so long that the friends who lived above us at the Westminster Avenue apartment in 2007 moved to Frederick, then Pittsburgh, then back to Carroll County, and had dinner at our house in 2019. As they were leaving, Kevin looked over and said, “Hello, cat.” And I responded with, “Kevin, that’s Pepper,” and his mind was blown. And do you remember the 17-year cicadas that came out in 2004, and have you heard how they’re going to resurface again this spring? Pepper was there for them last time. I remember catching a few and putting them in the back porch room with the cats (now my writing office), but she and Pansy were kind of terrified by their big bodies and strange, loud flying. At least I don’t have to feel bad that she will be missing out on their reappearance in May.

Josh says we’re never getting pets again, but I will never say never. Pepper was not the most loveable cat, but she was loyal and she was ours and she saw me through many a hard time in the past 17 years. Rye took the news very hard. I explained to him that in cat years, it was like she was 90 years old. Heck, in people years, she would be moving out to go to college in the fall! That made him laugh.

   Her passing is definitely the end of an era.