Life With Sassy

I found two jars of Gerber baby food in the glove compartment of my car today. They were not for any baby – I had actually bought them for my 17-year-old Himalayan cat back in February.  She was very ill and her appetite had stalled. I had bought the food with the intention of spoon-feeding her back to health.

Sassy passed away on February 19, and I never tried to feed her the baby food. When I looked at her that morning, it was obvious that her time had come. I spent the rest of the day watching her rest, cuddling with her, and letting her know that she was loved. When my wife got home from work, we drove her to Animal Hospital of Cotati, our regular vet, and we all helped her leave her sick and pained body and go to wherever cat heaven is.

Sassy was 17 when she died – but we got her when she was ten. On my weekly trip for pet supplies at PetSmart on the west side of town, I spotted her in a cage one afternoon. She was a 10-year-old Himalayan with beautiful markings. “You’ll be adopted soon,” I told her.

When I returned the following week she was in the same cage.  It was the same the next week, and the week after that. Finally, after seeing her in that cage for 5 weeks in a row, I texted a photo of Sassy to my wife, Robin, who then drove over with the checkbook and we adopted Sassy from Little Paws Kitten Rescue, the Rohnert Park nonprofit that adopts out felines of all ages.

Adopting an older cat was something we had never done.  Robin had come into my life with a small pride of Maine Coon’s, all of which she had adopted as kittens. We had adopted another kitten, after one of her originals had passed.

It would be okay, I assured myself. Sassy’s paperwork said that she got along well with other animals.  The opposite turned out to be true, and the name Sassy, which she came with, turned out to be a very well-deserved moniker. The other cats learned to keep a wide berth around her, less she lunge at them like a rabid pit-viper.

When it was just Sassy and the humans of the house, she was a different cat – an affectionate love-bug. She liked to stay on the bed, resting at the end. After two years, she crawled up onto my chest one Sunday morning, and this is where she is pictured in most of the photos that followed.  I would even wake up in the middle of the night sometimes to find her sitting there, upright, usually facing away from me with her tail in my face.

On night when I had insomnia, Sassy would jump up on the sofa behind me. She was good company, just being there. One night, at about 3 a.m., she went to jump up – and instead hit the floor.  She tried again – and missed.  This was when we discovered that Sassy had arthritis, and her hips had gone out.  She was in so much pain that I called the vet to put her down, but cooler heads prevailed, with Robin saying that the doctor had a different plan.  Soon Sassy had a morphine patch on her, and we saw her through that bad time.  Once she healed, we got her a heating pad, and kitty stairs were put around the higher places in the house.  She could get up and down now with ease.  But mostly she now stayed upstairs.

Sassy also peed or pooped on our bed every now and again.  At first, we suspected it was behavioral, but after a period of time had her blood run.  Sassy was hypothyroid and needed medication.  For the most part, this helped her stop urinating on the bed.

When we first got Sassy, I noticed a cyst like organism on her forehead – crusty and unusual.  The doctor said to keep an eye on it, and we did.  One morning, about three years ago, I noticed that the cyst had suddenly grown to about the size of an eraser-head on the end of a pencil.  We took her in and the decision was made to remove it.  Both Robin and I worried all day the day that she was in surgery. But by midday, she was home, walking around in circles, bleary-eyes from the pain meds, and looking very “punk” with half of her head shaved.  She recovered quickly, and the cyst, or tumor, turned out to be benign.  Bullet dodged.

Robin gave me an iPad for my 50^th birthday 2 years ago, and I discovered an app that feature a mouse running back and forth across the screen, and making squeaking noises when it is hit.  Sassy loved this and spent lots of time chasing her mouse across the screen, stopping occasionally to groom herself before going back in for the kill.

There is not a single photo or video of Sassy with Robin – although we took plenty of pictures.  Mostly, Robin took the pictures of Sassy and me, or I took them myself holding the camera away from us.  It’s sad, because Robin is the one who gave her all of her medicine, pulled mats from her fur, and made sure she had the right foods that her finicky pallet would eat.  It was clear that I was Sassy’s “person”.  She loved Robin, too.  But I walked on water in her eyes.

Losing Sassy was harder on Robin than it was on me. I had prepared for it somehow, and at the end, I knew that we had given her 7 years of a good life. We have no idea what her situation was before she wound up at PetSmart, but we could rest easy knowing that she had been freed from the cage, and had a fulfilling life with Robin and me.

Maybe the most surprising is that she learned to live with the other cats in the house. Don’t get me wrong – Sassy could turn on one of them in a heartbeat.  But we do have photos of her and the others spread out on the bed, or in sunspot in the living room.

If you have the chance to take in an older animal, there are plenty to go around.  They are the ones that stay in the cages the longest. Sassy, it turned out, had been in her cage not for 5 weeks, but for 5 months before we adopted her, something that I believe attributed to her weakened hips.  Recently, Fran Laws, who runs Little Paws, told me that she adopted out another cat that had been with her for a year!

Little Paws Kitten Rescue (for cats) and Noah’s Bark (for dogs) are two good rescues that work out of PetSmart on Rohnert Park Expressway each weekend. If you are looking for unconditional love, this would be a very good place to find it.