MY PAL BUTTERS, MY CAT, PASSED TODAY

How does one reconcile with the fact that a sentient being is no longer in the home you shared with him for twenty years? I feel different now that he is gone. The house is empty. I feel a bit empty. He was a loyal pal for sure. His name was Butters.

Butters was a well-known cat in that I used him as an icon, in memes and in posts. He was part of my everyday life, both personal and business.

Butters succumbed to intestinal cancer, which caused him considerable pain. It had reached a point where it was cruel to keep him alive. He was not eating nearly enough to keep going, and his last blood test confirmed the cancer, as did the doctor’s examination. I spared nothing with respect to expenditures to keep him going. I wished he could last forever, but life is not like that.

Losing your pal is hard. I remember the first time I thought I would lose him. He was roughly two years old when I had the windows washed in my Marina del Rey, CA, condo. The window washer forgot to put the screen back on the window, and I, thinking it was there, opened the window. I lived on the third floor, and I had special “cat screens” that secured the windows against such incidents.

On the day that I was coming home from being out, I entered the house and could not find him anywhere. I concluded that he had jumped. I was truly frantic and started screaming and slapping myself in the head to allow this to happen. I ran downstairs and asked the guard to keep an eye out for him, should he have jumped. About an hour later, when I checked, he told me he had seen him sitting in front of the garage. Thank God.

I ran down to the garage, and when he saw me, he bolted, as I guess he did not recognize me or felt, “Hey, free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I am free at last.” Of course, when I approached him, he ran under the car. Calling his name did no good, but at least he stayed fixed so that when I crawled under the car, he held his ground and allowed me to secure him and bring him home.

Many people don’t realize this, but indoor cats have, on average, about four times the lifespan of outdoor ones due to traffic, disease, starvation, or predators. If that was how I felt thinking I had lost my buddy when he was two years old, having been with me since I rescued him when he was four months old, losing him after twenty years is a whole different ball game. He was my constant companion for all those years, while I worked from home.

I spent the day cleaning out his “possessions,” along with the many medicines and remedies I had accumulated and told the vet to donate them to patients who may be in need and could not afford them. Pet medicine is not cheap. My housecleaner, who has a cat, will inherit all the rest.

All in all, it’s been a tough week. I lost my friend Barry after sixty years, and now Butters. That surely is a kick in the heart. But I will hang in there, and writing is a great form of expression, as it crystallizes how you feel and acts as a catharsis. The pain, though, will be with me for a while. This is how life works: good days and bad. That is our lot.

One of the things I have come to realize is that, since my personal journal started about fifteen years ago and morphed into a memoir, I have grown to love writing. I will continue writing about things like the loss of Butters and Barry, as they are part of the postscript and my continuing saga in life. I hope that, as you, the reader, read this, you will find some meaning for yourself in it.

I will miss you, Butters, my friend. You are now in kitty cat heaven and without further suffering.