Changing Flow

I love our boy cat Flow the way Republican Senators love Trump; no matter how many turds he drops around the house, I am still slavishly devoted to him.

Flow, like any animal, has always been utterly himself, with his own quirks and habits and personality.  We had had Flow and his sister Stachie in our home for four years before he would sit in our laps (Stachie was a lap cat after only a month), but once he started, he always got in the same position: stretched out on our legs, facing away.  When he would sleep on the bed with us at night, he always curled up below our knees.  We sometimes called him Trotsky because when we were ready to set down a meal, he would trot a little circuitous path through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and back to the kitchen.  He and Stachie both loved their food with a noisy passion, and would start asking for it two hours before the feeding times we had chosen for them.  We knew Stachie was sick the day she turned away from food.

Stachie died in 2019 of kidney failure.  Flow has enjoyed being an only cat these past years.  But he has begun to eat less, and has to be coaxed to eat at all.  He drinks prodigious amounts of water, so his kidneys are probably failing.  He doesn't seem to be in pain or even uncomfortable, so we love him up as much as we can.  He still wants affection, but he doesn't sit on our legs any more and doesn't sleep with us at night.  He used to like to curl up in either of two big fuzzy beds we put under the hutch in the living room.  Now he sleeps mostly in a little round gray bed in the coat closet.  When we walk past, he almost always blurps a funny little mew, which sounds as though he's saying "Hey!" or "What?" or "I didn't do it" or "Don't forget me."  We also sometimes find him meat loafing in odd places: twice on the bathroom floor behind the toilet, and recently half on the hallway carpet and half on the bare floor of the guest room, staring off into space.

Flow is changing. He's old and dying.  It's natural.  It's inevitable.  There's not really anything sad about it, although we'll be terribly sad when he dies.  But still, I'm grappling with that inevitability.  I still think about my Mom and Dad and Stachie and think "Really?  I'm never going to see them again?  Really?  How is that possible?"  I just don't get death, can't quite absorb it.  Flow is so much a part of the landscape of our home that it's almost unthinkable that he might - will at some point no longer be with us.  I see it coming, bit by bit, that loss, but somehow I just can't quite believe it.  Our sweet, funny, strange old man kitty.  Gosh but I love him.