My world was knocked askew earlier this week. Since then I’ve been wandering around the house remarking on the sensation that something is missing. I turned around in my chair at the breakfast table one morning to gaze at the sofa corner behind me and said to my husband C, “There should be a cat there.” Alfie was a constant presence in our lives for 10 years and 8 months; my husband’s first pet ever, and my first as an independent adult. Wherever we went for a decade-plus, he was there when we got home (probably grumbling that his bowl was empty). We adopted him 10 months into my freelance career and he was a faithful work-from-home buddy. He has been with us our whole time in Newbury; I associate him inextricably with home and work life. Even if he spent most of a day sleeping or doing his own thing, just the knowledge that there was another creature in the house was all the company I needed. He was an expert at getting in the way, and just a matter of days ago I was still admonishing “Watch out for the cat” and hearing C trip over his food bowl and litter tray.

Both of our phones’ photo libraries are full of ridiculous and repetitive pictures of the cat asleep. Now I’ve been going around taking photographs of absences. Everything in our house was tailored to an older cat’s needs. His food and water bowls were raised on a fleet of Tupperware to make standing postures more comfortable for him. He used steps all through his mobility-challenged last years. We inherited a proper set of pet steps from a neighbour, but elsewhere rigged up makeshift ones from boxes, document files, crates and stools. In the final weeks, when his claws either slipped or got stuck on everything, I covered the steps in towels so he had something to grip onto and put a strip of carpet in front of his kitchen bowls.

I’ve taken away the food stations, dumped and washed the three litter trays, and laundered the blankets he used the most. It’s the steps I can’t bring myself to take away. I think it’s because I look at them and feel so proud of how he adapted to his limitations. He was by no means the sharpest crayon in the box – he regularly forgot how to use his cat flap to go outside and would ineffectually scrape at it or cry at the back door to come back in – but in the lounge he worked out how to climb the steps plus a pouffe to get to any of the seats. If he got to the top step and looked perplexed, I’d tap out a route for him and he’d follow it. While I would often accuse him of stealing my seat, I knew better. All of the seats were his.

Tuesday was the day. The next day’s sun and birdsong made it feel more like mid-autumn or early spring. The handyman came back to lay floor tiles in the bathroom. I iced my swollen eyes, went for a long walk by the canal, and then faced a day of bustle and noise. It was fine.

Since then it has been worse. Drizzle has set in, C has been away at work or networking events, and the house is too quiet. I half expect to hear, any moment, the pock-pock of the cat climbing the carpeted stairs one by one, claws catching threads on each; his final triumphant heave to the landing accompanied by a huff of effort. I’ll wheel around in my office chair to lock eyes and call, “Hi, buddy! Where you gonna go? Whatcha gonna do?” When I’m downstairs, I expect the opposite: the thump of him getting down from the bed and the steady plop of him gingerly lowering himself one stair at a time and landing at the bottom with a muffled jingle of his collar bell. I’ve found myself doing peculiar things: sniffing an empty Felix beef soup pouch (had I known it was his last meal, I’d have given him his favourite, lamb, instead) and sifting through the kitchen bin and lounge fluff for an empty claw casing to keep. No luck, alas.

I’m comfortable with the terms “cat lady” and “fur baby” despite the stereotypes surrounding them. I don’t apologize about the shape my life has taken. The combination of the unconditional love and weight of responsibility that I felt and the intimate physical care that I performed for him – especially in the few months between his seizures in late October and the day we knew a goodbye had been forced on us – is absolutely akin to what parents feel for their children or what it’s like to undertake the care of an elderly relative.

For 116 days I was a full-time kitty hospice nurse – just like my sister is a hospice nurse for humans in Frederick County, Maryland. Every day curved around his needs. My first tasks on getting up were to check his litter trays, top up kibble and water upstairs and down, add a blood pressure pill to the dry food, and set out a wet food breakfast. Twice a day, around 11, I’d prepare the other medications. The easiest way to get anti-seizure and steroid pills down him was to crush them in a ramekin and mix the powder with a yoghurt-like cat junk food and a dash of water. Then it was time to ambush him with Lick-e-Lix. I’d find him asleep in his basket or on a couch and gently wake him. Like a recalcitrant infant in a highchair, he’d turn his face this way and that, mouth firmly closed. Increasingly, I had to coax him by smearing a bit onto his nose or chin. I’d persist until he deigned to lick the spoon clean.

Early in January, a kind neighbour who could correctly be called a cat-a-holic came to check on Alfie one evening and morning so we could visit our friends in Exeter for an overnight. She brought with her a magical substance she called “cat putty” and, for a while, it was a game changer for pill-giving. Our next-door neighbour and the cat-sitter found it a cinch to get him to eat pills wrapped in putty when they looked in on him once each in early February so we could visit another set of friends in Bristol for a partial weekend. Still I kept going with the Lick-e-Lix. There was something so sweet about spoon-feeding him, regardless of the smelly goo that got all over his face and sometimes dripped on the couch.

The day of the seizures had been a dress rehearsal. We were forced to face his mortality in a more than theoretical way. Once his system adjusted to the phenobarbital, though, we all quickly found a new normal. For those 116 days he plodded along – if not quite as before, not in a significantly diminished way either. They were good days; we are grateful. But they could never be enough. We were greedy. We wanted more. I talked with the vet about the flexibility of medication timings so we could book holidays for the summer. We dreamed up a 17th birthday party for 9 May. I could have kept up this routine indefinitely. Alfie couldn’t.

In my review of Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit, I complained that too much space was given to each pet’s physical decline. “On the threshold of my cats’ demise, it prescribed the kind of suffering that seemed to have erased the sweetness of all their previous years at once,” she writes. We’re lucky that wasn’t the case. Alfie had quality of life right up until the day or two before the end. I want to remember every phase of his life, not just this final one of more docility and quietness than we’d ever have believed years ago. I would prefer not to focus on the suffering, yet I need to acknowledge that it happened and that it mattered.

I’ve always been interested in medical matters and, detective-like, have been running the sequence of events back through my mind. We never subjected him to expensive imaging or invasive procedures, so we can’t know what precisely was going on, but the vets had some educated guesses: that his weight loss was caused by lymphoma and his seizures by a brain tumour. This was in addition to early-stage kidney disease, high blood pressure and arthritis. So there were serious medical issues there. A cancer was always going to get him, but I’ve still been second-guessing how his last weeks went and whether there was more that I could have done. When did X first happen? When did we first notice Y? Why didn’t I start Z sooner? I can’t quite bear to think of it, but there were probably signs of pain that we didn’t recognize out of ignorance, assuming they were just old cat behaviours or him being weird. Towards the end, there must have been pain that went unmanaged. I will have to forgive myself.

Ultimately, I think we made the best decisions possible with the knowledge we had, as well as the guidance of vets who saw him three times in his last six days. Everything was shutting down and he had had enough. Still, guilt is clearly chasing me. I had a symbolic dream the following night set at one of my childhood homes. The back door opened onto a stairwell with a drain and concrete steps leading up to the backyard. When it rained an exceptional amount, the stairwell filled and the basement sometimes flooded. In the dream, the steps were so wide that Max – the Shetland sheepdog we had when I was ages 7 to 19, and the only other creature at whose death I have been present – and Alfie were side by side on the middle one, while Chewy, my sister’s mutt who lived with us and Max for a time, sat above them. As the water rose right up to their bellies, they remained calm and looked at me. But instead of rushing to help them, I thought that I had to go grab my phone to take pictures.

I had it after my mother’s 2022 death, too: a build-up of futile what-ifs, even though, likewise, a stroke was always going to get her. There was also an urgency to archive everything about her: every quirk, every maddening habit, every key incident. It’s different in that I treasure her own words in letters, cards, e-mails, and her 150 journals; it’s the same in that hundreds of photos can never bring back a presence. I don’t want to forget anything.

It was only Monday evening that Alfie napped on the bed while I took a Zoom call in the chair across from him. Monday night that he slurped up a little dish of gravy and spent hours on C’s lap. Tuesday morning (when he’d stopped eating and drinking) that I, in desperation, shoved an anti-seizure pill down his throat. Weak as he was, he fought me off as stubbornly as ever; I have the network of scratches on the knuckles of my left hand to prove it.

While the cuts are still fresh, while they still sting, I want to get the whole story down. I won’t think about how indulgent it is to post something this long. I won’t tell myself no one could possibly care. I’m writing mostly for myself, after all. As I narrate what happened, I seek to make sense. When I do write more personal material, I cherish the details years down the line. Have you loved another being with your whole heart and had them leave? However the circumstances differ, then, you know my pain. He was my most precious thing.

I’m in the middle of dozens of books, but my heart isn’t in any of my reading. Apart from those with deadlines for paid reviews and library due dates, I will only resume reading when I feel ready. If I miss pub. dates and challenges, so be it. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be drawn to cat books later this year (“Reading the Meow” has run the past two Junes) or whether it will hurt too much. A couple of years ago I decided that A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye was the perfect chronicle of life with a cat. Maybe I’ll pick it up to reread and imitate.

I know from my mom’s death that, after some time and cycles of depression and anger have passed, I will be able to take joy in everyday life again. Good memories will overtake those of the last day, and lingering regrets. Meanwhile, I’ll try to be gentle with myself and not run away from the loneliness and emptiness but sit with them. I don’t feel like much of a cat lady without a cat, but I won’t let a petty identity crisis rush me into anything. We may well adopt another cat or two in the future, but not right away. No one can ever replace Alfie anyway.

Some fun stuff:

• Alfie’s nicknames spreadsheet, introduced here, has been updated and categorized. There are 250+! (Some only applied to his heavy years and others to his old age.)
• He also had four theme tunes based on snippets from “Asleep on a Sunbeam” by Belle and Sebastian, “Don’t Bother Me” & “Old Enough” (“whatcha gonna do now?”) by the Raconteurs, and “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” by the White Stripes. (Jack White has the best hooks.) The last two captured his Foster-like indecision.
• I made a bloopers album of some of the more ridiculous photos of him.
• I’ve reviewed loads of cat books over the years. He made it into this post and this one.