Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

Chapter 27

Loving Dewey

I was in Florida for eight days. I didn’t read the newspaper. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t take any phone calls. It was the best possible time to be away because Dewey’s death was hard. Very hard. I broke down on the flight from Omaha and cried all the way to Houston. In Florida, I thought often of Dewey, alone, quietly, but also surrounded by the family that had always sustained me.

I had no idea how far word of Dewey’s death had spread. The next morning, while I sat crying on an airplane to Houston, the local radio station devoted their morning show to memories of Dewey. The Sioux City Journal ran a lengthy story and obituary. I don’t know if that was the source, but the AP wire picked up the story and sent it around the world. Within hours, news of Dewey’s death appeared on the CBS afternoon newsbreak and on MSNBC. The library started getting calls. If I had been in the library, I would have been stuck answering questions from reporters for days, but nobody else on staff felt comfortable speaking to the media. The library secretary, Kim, gave a brief statement, which ended up in what I now think of as Dewey’s public obituary, but that was all. It was enough. Over the next few days, that obituary ran in more than 270 newspapers.

The response from individuals touched by Dewey was equally overwhelming. People in town received calls from friends and relatives all over the country who read about Dewey’s death in the local newspaper or heard it on a local radio show. One local couple was out of the country and learned the news from a friend in San Francisco, who read about his passing in the San Francisco Chronicle. Admirers set up a vigil in the library. Local businesses sent flowers and gifts. Sharon and Tony’s daughter, Emmy, gave me a picture she had drawn of Dewey. It was two green circles in the middle of the page with lines sticking out in all directions. It was beautiful, and Emmy beamed as I taped it to my office door. That picture was the perfect way for both of us to remember him.

Gary Roma, director of the documentary about library cats, wrote me a long letter. It said, in part: “I don’t know if I ever told you, but of all the many library cats I’ve met across the country, Dewey Readmore Books was my favorite. His beauty, charm, and playfulness were unique.”

Tomoko from Japanese Public Television wrote to tell us Dewey’s death had been announced in Japan, and that many were sad to hear he was gone.

Marti Attoun, who wrote the article for American Profile, wrote to say the Dewey story was still her favorite. It had been years, and Marti was now a contributing editor. It seemed so unlikely, given the hundreds of stories she had written, that Marti would remember a cat, much less still think of him fondly. But that was Dewey. He touched people so deeply.

By the time I returned to my office, there were letters and cards stacked four feet high on my desk. I had more than six hundred e-mails about Dewey waiting in my inbox. Many were from people who met him only once but never forgot him. Hundreds of others were from people who never met him. In the month after his death, I received more than a thousand e-mails about Dewey from all around the world. We heard from a soldier in Iraq who had been touched by Dewey’s death despite what he saw there every day—or perhaps because of it. We received a letter from a couple in Connecticut whose son was turning eleven; his birthday wish was to release a balloon to heaven in Dewey’s honor. We received numerous gifts and donations. A librarian at the Naval History Museum, for instance, donated four books in his memory. She had followed Dewey’s story in library publications and read his obituary in the Washington Post. Our Web site, www.spencerlibrary.com, went from 25,000 hits a month to 189,922 in December, and the traffic didn’t let up for most of the next year.

Many people in town wanted us to hold a memorial service. I didn’t want a memorial service, nobody on staff did, but we had to do something. So on a cold Saturday in the middle of December, Dewey’s admirers gathered at the library to remember one last time, at least officially, the friend who had had such an impact on their lives. The staff tried to keep it light—I told the story of the bat, Audrey told the story of the lights, Joy remembered the cart rides, Sharon told how Dewey stole the meat out of her sandwich—but despite our best efforts, tears were shed. Two women cried the whole time.

Crews from local television stations were filming the event. It was a nice thought, but the cameras seemed out of place. These were private thoughts among friends; we didn’t want to share our words with the world. We also realized, as we stood there together, that words couldn’t describe our feelings for Dewey. There was no easy way to say how special he was. We were here; the cameras were here; the world stood still around us. That said more than any words. Finally a local schoolteacher said, “People say what’s the big deal, he was just a cat. But that’s where they’re wrong. Dewey was so much more.” Everyone knew exactly what she meant.

My moments with Dewey were more intimate. The staff had cleaned out his bowls and donated his food while I was away, but I had to give away his toys. I had to clean out his shelf: the Vaseline for his hairballs, the brush, the red skein of yarn he had played with all his life. I had to park my car and walk to the library every morning without Dewey waving at me from the front door. When the staff returned to the library after visiting Dewey for the last time, the space heater he had lain in front of every day wasn’t working. Dewey had been lying in front of it that very morning, and it had been working fine. It was as if his death had taken away its reason to heat. Can a malfunctioning piece of equipment break your heart? It was six weeks before I could even think about having that heater repaired.

I had Dewey cremated with one of his favorite toys, Marty Mouse, so he wouldn’t be alone. The crematorium offered a mahogany box and bronze plaque, no charge, but it didn’t seem right to display him. Dewey came back to his library in a plain plastic container inside a blue velvet bag. I put the container on a shelf in my office and went back to work.

A week after his memorial service, I came out of my office a half hour before the library opened, long before any patrons arrived, and told Kay, “It’s time.”

It was December, another brutally cold Iowa morning. Just like the first morning, and so many in between. It was close to the shortest day of the year, and the sun wasn’t yet up. The sky was still deep blue, almost purple, and there was no traffic on the roads. The only sound was the cold wind that had come all the way from the Canadian plains, whipping down the streets and out over the barren cornfields.

We moved some rocks in the little garden out front of the library, looking for a place where the ground wasn’t completely frozen. But the whole earth was frosted, and it took a while for Kay to dig the hole. The sun was peeking over the buildings on the far side of the parking lot, throwing the first shadows, by the time I placed the remains of my friend in the ground and said simply, “You’re always with us, Dewey. This is your home.” Then Kay dropped in the first shovelful of dirt, burying Dewey’s ashes forever outside the window of the children’s library, at the foot of the beautiful statue of a mother reading a book to her child. Mom’s statue. As Kay moved the stones back over Dewey’s final resting place, I looked up and saw the rest of the library staff in the window, silently watching us.