I Lost My Pet and It Still Affects Me
He was just a cat, but he meant so much to me
This month would have been the twelfth birthday of my cat Mokey.
After my Dad died in December 2016, I felt I had nothing left for me in the state where we lived, so I packed up everything in our house and moved back to my home state. My brother was able to help me find a small studio apartment and I put down a deposit on it and for the first time ever, moved into a place of my own with no one to live with me.
I had wanted to live by myself for a while now that I was in my twenties but I hadn’t been able to due to living as my dad’s caretaker. But of course, I had imagined doing so with him still alive, having tried to plan for a way to stay close to him while having my own space. Now I was living alone because I had no choice–because he was gone.
I was surrounded by his things, everything he had held onto over the years that was passed down to him by his parents, namely furniture like bookshelves, end tables, and cabinets, and that which had been uniquely his, like his recliner. My brother got it as a gift for him and Dad would spend the days of his retirement in it, playing video games. Nobody else sat in that chair, not my brother, not me. I came to associate it with him, as I did the other furniture we had grown up with and taken with us to the different homes we lived in.
Now that I was living alone, his belongings felt like a ghost of him, a lingering manifestation of his presence without him to give them life. It made me feel more isolated than ever. Not just because I was physically alone now living by myself, but because I was surrounded by reminders of what was now gone from my life.
I got a job at a supermarket working late shifts and I would come home at night when all my neighbors had gone to bed and everything was silent. When entering my apartment it would be dark and despite me furnishing it with what I brought with me, empty. Lifeless. The silence in the room was oppressive and crushing.
So when I saved up enough money, I got what I had been wanting for years: a cat. My brother came with me to a local shelter where, because of a recent donation, all cats over a certain age were free to adopt.
I had an idea of the kitty I wanted. The cat I pictured would be black because I knew black cats typically have a harder time getting adopted. I wanted the cat to be an adult because I knew with my work schedule I didn’t have enough time to dedicate being with a kitten that would have needed more supervision and training. I also just don’t have the energy for kittens, any more than I have the energy for puppies in all their youthful exuberance. For that same reason, I wanted that cat to be a little heavier set, hoping that would contribute to it being calmer.
One of the people who strongly encouraged me to get a cat was my close friend Hannah, who absolutely loves them and is hyped up about having one quite a bit. She has a little black kitty named Mochi, and when I went to the shelter I found a fat black cat named Mokey.
I stuck my fingers through his cage and he rubbed up against them, encouraging me to ask one of the employees there to open it so I could pet him. He loved it. He was sweet and affectionate to the point that my brother thought I should name him after one of his old cats, Friendly. The similarity of his name to that of my friend’s cat made me stick with Mokey though.
It felt like fate. He was exactly what I had been looking for and his name was so close to that of the cat of a friend who was dear to me.
And he brought life into my empty apartment. When I came home from work late at night, he would meow at me for attention and I would pick him up, kiss his head and cheeks, and hold him.
He had a lot of health issues, one being a respiratory problem that never got resolved because no vet could figure out what it was or what caused it. I thought for a long time it was his weight, but even when I got him down to a much lower number it persisted. It meant his breathing was always very loud, to the point he sometimes sounded like a pig with how he snorted.
In a weird, almost silly association, his breathing kind of reminded me of living with my dad. Our house was small, so sound carried pretty well throughout and Dad often slept with his mouth open, breathing loud enough for me to hear from my room. Sometimes he snored.
Instead of this being annoying though, I found a strange comfort in it. It was the sound of another living being in the house, reminding me that I wasn’t alone, even in the darkness of night. It made me feel safe.
Mokey’s breathing came to represent a similar thing for me. While my dad actually made me feel protected from real-world dangers, my cat’s presence kept my mind from getting swept up in the excessive amount of horror I consumed. He just reminded me that there was life beyond myself and his loud breathing noted his presence as a constant in my life, something living that was reliably always there. After Dad passed, that was a feeling I badly needed to rediscover.
I had come to rely on the noises he made to provide that feeling of connection to life outside of myself when at home to the point that anytime he wasn’t there, the feeling of emptiness returned.
One time I took a fairly long trip and so had him stay at my brother’s place while I was gone. When I got home it was too late at night to go get him, so I slept in the apartment without him. The silence was consuming and induced in me a nauseating dread. It was worse when I had to take him to the vet and he had to stay there overnight.
Sometimes I enjoy silence, but the type of quiet brought on by his absence felt more like an irritating buzz ringing through the air that I couldn't stand to listen to. It reminded me that he wasn’t there, that I was alone.
When he died, I couldn’t bear the silence at all. I had to keep some kind of noise going at all times, even when I was sleeping. I would play videos on my laptop and set it close to my bed at night, leaving it running the entire time. I would run my fan as a way of producing white noise to block out the quiet, so I could pretend he wasn’t gone.
Over a year after his death, my resistance to silence has gradually lessened, helped by the presence of a new cat. Still, I have a hard time accepting he’s gone. Sometimes at night when laying in the dark and petting Sadie I try to pretend she’s Mokey, so I can act like he never died. A lot of that though, is guilt.
Guilt that I didn’t get him to the vet sooner than I did. Guilt at what I may have done to contribute to his illness. In his last week, he had grown weak and wouldn’t eat or drink anything, but I had kept hoping he would recover on his own so I wouldn’t have to pay for another visit to the vet.
He had just had a $7,000 surgery four months earlier, and I was already buried in debt from all the vet bills and was unemployed, struggling with my finances. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for that delay.
I also don’t know if it would have mattered, given the vets couldn’t seem to figure out what was wrong with him and how his medical problems kept compounding over time. But I was responsible for him and there’s room to interpret my inaction as playing a part in his death, so my mind fills that space with self-flagellation.
I wish I could have done more for him. I wish I moved into my current, bigger apartment when I had him so he had more space to live in. I wish I could have afforded to take care of both him and Sadie at the same time so they could have been friends. I wish I could have showered him with more affection.
I wish I could have saved him.
