Confessions of a Forty-Year-Old Cat-sitter

Artistic rendering of an early cat-sitting gig

1. Every cat-sitting job I take is penance for a cat-sitting assignment gone wrong back in the early 1990’s. I can’t remember what year it was, exactly, but it was a year in which I was convinced that if I practiced hitting a tennis ball against my garage door enough, I could somehow help Martina Navratilova stage a Wimbledon comeback. So it was also summertime, and I was about to start the seventh or eighth grade, and I certainly had only a tenuous understanding of the relationship between my actions and the fate of those around me. I can’t remember the name of the family whose cats I was watching or even the name of any of the cats, but every time I agree to take responsibility for the lives of any cats now, I think of my first charges and how profoundly I let them down.
2. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t kill any cats that summer. This isn’t my version of I Know What You Did That Summer Twenty-seven Years Ago (you killed a cat whose name you then forgot). In fact, looking at them thirty years later, one might call my sins childlike — some mild neglect, some emotional distance, some guilt I couldn’t assuage with overdue ear-scratching. Nevertheless, the whole situation continues to have a real Flowers in the Attic vibe. Not because of any incest or even any twins, but more because part of my responsibility was to keep the cats locked away in a room not unlike an attic, and maybe I was supposed to water the flowers?
3. I know for a fact that the room was attic-like but not an actual attic because the house of the unnameable neighbors was a mirror of my own, as houses in the suburbs tend to be. Now that alone seems like a subject worthy of exploration, either by some psychologist or horror novelist — is it not a weird and uncanny thing that so many people are living separate lives and pursuing separate dreams and dealing with separate emotional issues in houses that are distinguished only by the most minor of variations? What sort impact must it have on kids every time they walk into their own house, but occupied by a different family…is this not just exposing young minds to cognitive dissonance and a realization of their own insignificant place in a carnivalesque world of copies in a way that cannot be anything but tediously traumatic? You know, from that perspective, it’s really no wonder I never wanted to go trap those poor cats in the attic-like room of the mirror house of my neighbors. (Plus, not to be a huge jerk, but that house smelled weird.)
4. Surely that first cat-sitting gig lasted only a week or two, unlike my recent stints, which often stretch on so long that I develop some real fondness for the cats and occasionally a reliable memory of their names. As we all know, though, time moves differently for pre-teens, or any group of people who have three months off for summer and are waiting to get their periods, so that first ambit into pet-caring territory felt like it lasted for months. Months in which I would not go and visit the house I was meant to, but would feel the need to visit every day — sometimes every hour of every day. Why I didn’t go when I was supposed to but rather let the shame of not going eat me alive is a mystery I can’t resolve for you, but…well, I mean, that’s still something each of us now does every day, right? Are you trying to tell me that you don’t have an unanswered email that you started to feel bad about not getting around to three months ago? So, really, who am I to try to solve one of the biggest problems of the human condition? But, also, I suspect my reluctance to diligently discharge my adolescent cat-sitting responsibilities could just be blamed on sub-par kitty litter technology
5. Seriously, I wonder how much people appreciate that — how much kitty-litter has evolved in a mere thirty or so years. Today, there is odor-eating litter, there is clumping litter that turns cat waste into a post-modern sculpture making a statement about ownership and freedom, and there is litter made from recycled newspapers in which front pages that once reported Trump’s victory are now being shit on. This litter inspires in the cat-tender a truly unique feeling that combines the pride of taking care of the environment with a hubris engendered by masking the foul odors of the natural world. But the litter of the early nineties? That was just this plain dusty white stuff that my father used to soak up the oil our cars leaked on the driveway and that turned cat excrement into shit covered in sand.
6. Oh, but, sand — that is one thing that encourages me now in my cat-sitting, since I’m usually watching the pets of people much wealthier than me and thus within walking distance of the ocean. Recently I not only walked to the ocean, but walked into it, and found the reports of the unusually warm water to be no way exaggerated, and only creepy and portentous if one ruminated on it too much (or saw any of the little dead fish that would float temporarily to the shore before being sucked back in by the super-heated waves that killed them). The house for which I first cat-sat had no such draw. I couldn’t see the ocean when I saw the cats, but rather only a different view of my own house. That was creepy and portentous at all times (I was, after all, on the brink of a gothic teenagedom).
7. As a teenager, I can’t recall pet-sitting at all, and I even ultimately stopped babysitting (a much higher-paying and more dignified occupation). I had college applications to think about and was also quite occupied with the marching band (it was cool at my school, we said). Or, perhaps, word got around of how I neglected the cats of my first cat-sitting gig. Like I said, none of them died, but there may have been severe emotional scarring, and plenty of sand-covered shit in places there shouldn’t have been.
8. It would be remiss of me to neglect mentioning that one cat did, in fact, die on my watch, but that was at a much different time and in another country. Well, county, anyway. And in fairness to me, the cat was quite old. It’s hard to know where to begin the story, except to say that it was toward the end of a longish cat-sitting gig I took just recently, one in which I really did make every effort to keep the cat alive, including giving him medicine every morning and being around to sleep near him every night. The Wednesday before the Friday he was scheduled to reunite with its owners, the poor old cat either suffered a stroke or was internally decapitated (a real thing, I’ve read) by his fellow cat, a much younger creature who really was capable of inflicting great damage with excessive friskiness. When I arrived home that night, I found the cat under a desk in a dark room, and while he looked like he’d just casually draped his body over a powerstrip bristling with electrical cords, my long cat-sitting experience quickly told me that the cat’s inability to move himself off the power strip was a sign of a major problem. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let go of the hope that this cat was suddenly just too tired to use his back legs, which was why they dragged so piteously on the ground when I attempted to revive the creature by bringing him to his food.
9. The cat wouldn’t eat, of course, but I what I will not soon forget is that he would still purr. I heard this purring after I gave up on feeding him and settled on trying to arrange him on my bed in what seemed like a natural and comfortable position (I would see later that one of his poor paws was bent under his body in a way even the most narcoleptic cat would never have endured). I heard the purring as I stroked his head and tried to persuade him to remain alive for a mere forty-eight more hours. I heard the purring as I took a video of him with the thought that I would later send it to the owners to determine if perhaps momentary bouts of paralysis were normal for this particular cat. Twenty minutes after making the video, when the purring had stopped and the cat was dead, I realized I had a snuff film on my hands. Well, something sort of snuff-film-adjacent. The cat didn’t die while I was filming him, but rather while I was lying next to him, petting him, and wondering what this cat had done to so piss off the other one that the other one internally decapitated it. I nevertheless deleted the video before showing it to anyone.
10. This was all happening in the middle of what I was beginning to think of as my plague year. Despite the amazing advances in flea-eradication technology, it increasingly felt as if all around me the people I loved were dying, coming down with cancer, or taking extended leaves of absence to figure out how to live in a world in which criminals were reigning and all the dead fish were being ignored. To some, I know, such an onslaught of loss after decades of abundance would not seem a plague so much as the normal fever of the human condition — yet even that awareness of my former good fortune felt like a source of disease. As one worst-case scenario after the next was realized and I spent more nights sleeping on couches in hospital rooms than I had slept on pull-out beds near cats, I had the persistent impression that some cosmic scales were finally being balanced. It is no comfort to know that one’s pain is paying a long overdue debt, and it is an almost unspeakable and selfish fear that causes one to wonder if there will be no more good days.
11. Towards the end of this cursed year, I myself came down with an almost literal plague, or what the nurse-practitioner at the local Urgent Care called “probably not the flu” despite the fact that it caused fevers in the afternoon and made it impossible for me to laugh for a month (both because I was sad to be sick and because every time I thought about laughing, I wound up coughing in a distinctly un-funny way). This was my first real illness as a middle-aged woman, and one that came to feel not so much like an ailment with biological causes but rather a spiritual malaise in which everything bad I had ever done was trying to sneak out from where it was buried in my subconscious via phlegm. There were times, late into evenings in which my coughing kept me from sleeping, that I wondered if my bone-deep fatigue was the beginning of a state of paralysis that soon would deprive me of my legs and leave me lying over a power cord.
12. Not to be too dramatic or anything. I mean, things were rough, but I often found myself vacillating between being burdened by the sudden heaviness of the mortal coil and being elated by a recognition of how absurd and temporary the whole condition of being alive actually was. The vertigo of it all eventually dropped me into the chair of a counselor who assured me that every death — no matter how small the thing deprived of life — should engender the sort of existential angst that inspires a woman to revisit her childhood experiences via a list on Medium.
13. And it was surely because the death of the cat (see 8 above) was coming at the end of the middle of this plague year and because, by that point, I had come to realize how important it was to rely on those around me for guidance that I had the presence of mind to Google “what to do with dead cat” in order to determine what to do with the dead cat that was on a bed I was meant to sleep on. Though many bad things happened during the plague year, one of the moments I will look back upon with pride was when I had the temerity to follow those internet instructions, including finding plastic to wrap the cat in and then putting that plastic-wrapped cat into a cooler. Some might consider this insensitive and morbid, but I see in these actions the sort of responsibility and care-giving that distinguishes an adept cat-sitter from a mere child feeding cats.
14. Of course, ultimately, I half-Googled/half was dragged out of the plague year. One day a scan for cancer came back clear, another day someone whom I thought was gone forever returned only slightly more worse for wear, and one delightful afternoon I stopped wondering what penance I would have to pay for a temporary pleasure. Still, though, I now bring a certain anxiety to any cat-sitting gig, a realization that no matter how much I care for a thing, I can come home one day just in time to see it slip away. I’m not sure if this makes me a better cat-sitter or person in general, but I have been reading a lot of poetry in an effort to figure it out. I’ve also been looking back with a lot more forgiveness at that poor girl who neglected those cats while practicing sympathetic magic decades ago.
15. Oh, and before you ask if I can also water any sort of foliage or tree that somehow thrives indoors, I should probably tell you that I have a really complicated relationship with plants.