Homer's Odyssey

23 • Intimations of Immortality

No one was ever yet so fortunate as you have been, nor ever will be, for you have been adored by us all.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING, HOMER STOPPED EATING.

Within the past few months, I had taken the cats off dry food completely as it became clear that Vashti’s sensitive digestive system—which had only become more sensitive with age—could no longer handle it. All three cats had responded to their new moist-food-only regimen with enthusiasm—particularly Homer, who had always been fonder of “human-food” meats than the other two.

I wasn’t initially alarmed that first morning when Homer, rather than muscling past the other cats to get to his food bowl the way he usually did, approached the bowl halfheartedly and sniffed at it a few times before ambling off. It wasn’t his typical behavior, but more than a decade of being a “cat mom” had taught me not to be an alarmist about such things. It might be that he was tired of that specific flavor. While Homer had never been a finicky cat, he was getting on in years (it was so hard to believe he was eleven already!), and I knew it wasn’t unheard of for a cat to become finickier as he grew older. Or maybe he simply wasn’t hungry. Where was the law that said a cat had to eat the exact same amount of the exact same food at the exact same time every day? I made a mental note to put down a different flavor in a few hours when I gave them their midday feeding, then went about reviewing proposals and price quotes from lighting designers for the wedding.

When I put down food again a little after one o’clock, this time making sure I selected a different variety from what I had given them that morning, Homer once again refused to eat. He walked into the room somewhat sluggishly, sniffed the food as he had that morning, and made digging motions around the bowl, the way he did when burying something in the litter box.

I wondered if there might be something wrong with the food. Not too long ago, there had been a major scare among pet owners when a substance toxic to cats and dogs made its way into several popular brands. It hadn’t affected us directly—Vashti’s allergies and colitis having long since required me to buy specialty brands—but who was to say that this batch of food hadn’t been tainted with salmonella or E. coli? Homer’s sense of smell was so much more acute than the other two’s, and the way he was acting seemed to indicate that something didn’t smell right to him. Perhaps he’d detected a hazard that wasn’t apparent to Scarlett and Vashti.

I took all three ceramic bowls away (over Vashti’s ardent squeaks of protest), emptied them out, scrubbed them vigorously, and ran them through the dishwasher twice. While they were cleaning, I dashed out to the pet store two blocks away and selected several cans of Newman’s Own organic cat food. It was pricier than I would have liked (Hey, it’s for charity! I told myself), but I couldn’t remember any negative stories or health scares associated with the Newman’s Own line.

The food was new and the bowls were as sterile as they were ever going to be. To be completely safe, however, I pulled out three small dishes from the set Laurence and I used ourselves, arranged the Newman’s Own food on them, and put everything down for the cats.

This time, Homer didn’t even bother going into the room where the food was. He sat on his haunches in the middle of the hall as the other two cats charged past him, and then, after a minute or two of apparent deliberation, shuffled like an old man in the opposite direction to curl up in a patch of sunlight on the living room rug, carefully wrapping his front paws around his face.

I was still determined not to panic, but by now I was definitely concerned. I realized that I hadn’t seen Homer scamper around playfully once all day. The only things he’d done since that morning were wander up and down the hall a couple of times and sleep. His lack of energy could be explained by the fact that he hadn’t eaten—I wasn’t very high-energy myself when forced to skip meals—but that, of course, begged the question: Why wasn’t he eating?

As a last resort, I ran out once more—this time to the bodega across the street—and purchased a box of dry food. Maybe, enthusiastic as he’d always been about it, Homer had developed a sudden revulsion to moist food altogether. I was the kind of person who could eat the same thing for breakfast every day for two years straight, and then one morning feel as if I couldn’t eat that breakfast again, ever, even if it meant I wouldn’t eat anything at all. It seemed entirely reasonable that Homer might be experiencing a similar feeling. Since Homer hadn’t eaten all day, I bought a box of Kitten Chow, thinking it might go down easier than one of the adult formulas.

I locked Scarlett and Vashti in the far bedroom, so Homer could eat in peace. Then I poured some of the dry food onto a small plate, sat next to Homer on the rug, and stroked his back. “Come on, kitty,” I coaxed, “make your mother happy and eat a little something.”

Rising unsteadily to his feet, Homer lowered his head and began to nibble at the dry food. He didn’t eat with much enthusiasm, but he did eat. It was only as I watched him swallow his first tiny mouthful and go for a second one that I knew how worried I had been. If Homer truly couldn’t stand moist food anymore, and Vashti was unable to eat any dry food, then feeding times were about to become a nightmare of complications in our home. Nevertheless, I was so thrilled to see Homer eat that this scenario struck me as more comic than cumbersome. Cats! I thought. Leave it to a cat to assume my life revolves around his food preferences. I was laughing as I said to Homer, in a mock-scolding voice, “Silly cat! You had me so scared!” I gave him a small bowl of water and, after he’d lapped at it for a moment, I took the food and water away. I didn’t want him to pile too much into an empty stomach and wind up vomiting.

After I covered up the food and water and stowed them in the refrigerator, I released the other two cats and settled on the couch. Homer crept after me, moving his joints in a slow and deliberate fashion, and halfheartedly rubbed the top of his head against my chin before curling up in my lap. He purred, but his purr was feeble. “Poor thing,” I said to Laurence, when he got home that night. “His tummy’s been upset all day.”

Homer didn’t move much the rest of the night, but whenever he seemed even half awake, I rushed to the refrigerator to pull out the bowls of water and dry food. He didn’t eat or drink with as much relish as I would have liked, but he consumed enough to alleviate the worst of my fears. It seemed that whatever had been troubling him was already working itself out of his system.

“You’re so good with him,” Laurence said. His expression was uncharacteristically soft. It was the same look he occasionally wore if, for example, we went to visit friends who’d just had a baby and I held the newborn in my arms. Laurence would lean in to kiss my cheek as I cradled the infant and murmur, You look good like that.

“I love him,” I told Laurence. “If I’m good with him, it’s because I love him.”

I went to sleep before Laurence did that night and asked him to keep an eye on Homer. When Laurence came to bed a few hours later, I sat up groggily and asked how Homer was doing. “I gave him a little more of the dry food when the other two weren’t looking,” Laurence said. “He seemed fine. I think he’s sleeping in one of the closets now.”

Sleeping in a closet? Homer never slept in closets. Scarlett and Vashti sometimes liked to burrow deep into a closet and doze where nobody could find them, but Homer always wanted to sleep in the vicinity of at least one other person or cat. I felt a small pang of alarm as Laurence relayed this information, but Homer’d had a rough day. If he wanted to be alone for a while, that was understandable.

The following morning, Homer wouldn’t eat anything at all—not even the dry food he’d eaten the night before. After Vashti and Scarlett had eaten, Homer left his small cave in the closet just long enough to stumble into the far bedroom. I didn’t like the way he was walking. His steps were hesitant, and he bumped his head repeatedly into walls and furniture. I had never seen Homer like this before. He walked as if …

As if he were blind, I thought grimly.

Homer staggered in this befuddled fashion into the bedroom, climbed slowly up the side of the bed, and balled himself up on one of the pillows. I sat down next to him and stroked his back. Homer had always—always—acknowledged my touch, had purred or leaned into my hand or raised his head so I could scratch beneath his chin. Now, though, he didn’t stir. He didn’t so much as twitch a muscle.

“Homer?” I said. No matter how deeply asleep he was, Homer would at least lazily flick one ear at the sound of his name. But this time he didn’t respond at all. It was as if my Homer, the cat I’d known and loved so well for more than a decade, was trapped somewhere inside this shell of a cat who now lay beside me on the bed.

This was something beyond the vagaries of a bad day or a sour stomach. I immediately called my vet’s office.

The vet was seeing other patients, and I was told that I should leave my phone number and he would call back. There was nothing for me to do in the meantime except pace the floors and wait for a return call—which I did, for the better part of the morning.

I couldn’t begin to imagine what was responsible for this dramatic change in Homer’s behavior. By lunchtime, when I’d called the vet again and still hadn’t heard back, I decided to consult Google. I was sure there was some perfectly benign, nonalarmist way of accounting for Homer’s malaise that the collective wisdom of the online community would reveal to me. So I sat in front of my computer and typed in the phrase, “cat stopped eating.”

Here’s a tip for the cat owners out there—and I want you to take this advice very seriously, because it’s important. Should your own cat one day stop eating, do yourself a favor and do not Google the phrase “cat stopped eating.” I mean it. You will be tempted to do so, but I’m here to tell you that you really, really don’t want to, because oh my good God.

The list of maladies to which this particular symptom corresponded was as long as it was terrifying: kidney failure, liver failure, stomach cancer, colon cancer, feline leukemia, pneumonia, tumors, brain tumors, a stroke that had already happened, a stroke that was about to happen, and on and on and on. The only innocuous illness—tooth infection or gum disease—was also the only one I could rule out on my own. Homer had eaten the crunchier dry food the night before when he wouldn’t eat the softer moist food, plus I couldn’t find any abscesses or signs of infection inside his mouth. That Homer allowed me to poke around inside his mouth without struggling impatiently was, in itself, corroboration that something more than a tooth infection was at work here.

Somewhere around page three of the Google search results, when I reached the stories of people whose cats had stopped eating one day and then fallen over dead the next, sanity and I parted company. I called the vet’s office again, and this time I demanded to speak with him. “I am not hanging up the phone until I do,” I informed the receptionist, my voice choked with panic. “I don’t care how long I have to hold.”

I was being something of a difficult client, but the veterinarian did come to the phone after only a few minutes and asked his questions patiently. I tried to answer with equal calmness and clarity. No, I hadn’t noticed any bloody stool or urine. No, neither of the other cats was displaying any unusual symptoms or behavior. Yes, it had seemed to come on very suddenly—Homer had been rambunctious as a kitten only two days earlier. I knew he had eaten and drunk a little something the night before, but he definitely hadn’t eaten and I wasn’t sure if he’d drunk today.

The last thing the vet asked was for me to pinch the skin of Homer’s neck just above his shoulder blades. I administered this strange-sounding test and reported that the skin had sunk almost immediately back into its normal position, albeit not with much elasticity. “That means he’s not too dehydrated yet,” the vet said. “If the skin hadn’t gone back down, I would have told you to bring him in now so we could get an IV fluid drip going. He should be okay for today, but I want you to bring him in first thing tomorrow morning. A cat who goes too long without eating can sustain liver damage.”

Laurence returned home from work with sliced turkey, cans of tuna, smoked salmon—all of Homer’s favorites. But Homer was equally indifferent to everything. The sound of the turkey being unwrapped or the can of tuna being opened didn’t bring the familiar clip-clip-clip of footsteps down the hall. Scarlett and Vashti followed me eagerly into the third bedroom, anxious for their share of the goodies. Scarlett clambered onto the bed and eyed Homer suspiciously as she nosed after the food in my hand that Homer hadn’t even lifted his head to examine. Aren’t you going to bother me? she seemed to ask. Is this some kind of a trick? Homer had always pursued turkey and tuna with an aggressiveness that Scarlett found distasteful, shamelessly pushing the other cats out of the way in his excitement.

But Homer remained perfectly still. If it hadn’t been for the slight rise and fall of his breathing, I wouldn’t have known he was alive.

I slept with Homer in the third bedroom that night—although slept may be the wrong word, because I was wide awake most of the time. I lay on my side and Homer nestled into my midsection as if he couldn’t get warm enough, even though it was the middle of July. I rested my cheek on top of his head and wrapped my arms around him, whispering, “You’ll be fine, little boy. You’ll see. The doctor will make you all better tomorrow.”

Homer didn’t fight me early the next morning as I loaded him into his carrier, although I would have given anything if he had. He’d always been a small cat, but today he looked frighteningly skinny. I could feel the bones of his spine poking through his skin as I lifted him into the carrier. For the first time, I found myself almost grateful that Homer didn’t have eyes; I didn’t think I could have borne the look of mute suffering that surely would have been in them. “Good boy,” I murmured as I zipped the carrier closed around him. I continued talking to him in a soft, reassuring voice in the cab to the vet’s office. “Good kitty. Good boy.”

The vet and I had a minor disagreement once we were in the exam room. He wanted me to wait in the waiting room while he examined Homer, and I had no intention of leaving. If it had been Scarlett or Vashti I might have, but Homer—ill and miserable as he clearly was—would be terrified if left alone in a strange place with strange people. He wouldn’t be able to see their faces or make any sense of what was happening to him. He wouldn’t understand why I had abandoned him. I couldn’t leave him; if anybody was going to hold Homer down while the vet performed his tests, it would be me.

Homer had been alarmingly listless for the past two days, but he sparked briefly back to life on the exam table. He had never exactly been a good patient (what pet enjoys the vet’s office?), but I’d never—not even during the break-in—heard him growl and hiss as evilly as he did that day while the vet turned him this way and that, poking with his fingers and various instruments as he collected samples and felt for lumps, tears, or obstructions. I stood at the opposite end of the exam table from the vet, my hands firmly clenched in the scruff of Homer’s neck as I tried to hold him still. “Good boy,” I crooned, my thumbs rubbing behind his ears. I felt that I should keep talking, that if anything would calm Homer, it was the sound of my voice. “You’re my brave little boy and you’re doing such a good job. Mommy is right here with you, and this will all be over soon.”

The vet announced that he was going to collect a urine sample. I was wondering how he would accomplish this—it wasn’t as if he could tell Homer to pee in a cup, was it?—when I noted the giant needle he was preparing and saw his movement to turn Homer onto his back. The idea, it would seem, was to insert that long needle directly into Homer’s bladder.

Homer resisted being turned onto his back with all his might—and the amount of force he was able to command was startling, considering that he hadn’t eaten in two days and was now closer to weighing two pounds than three. When the vet attempted to insert the needle, Homer screamed.

I don’t mean that Homer yowled or yelped or growled—I mean that he screamed. It’s a sound I still hear sometimes in bad dreams, a scream of pain and fear that was almost human. The vet was trying to say something to me, but I couldn’t hear him. The only thing I could hear was the sound of Homer screaming. One of his front paws rose in the air and he clawed violently at me—at me—missing my right cheek by only a few inches.

My face must have looked as pale and horrified as I felt, because the vet said firmly, “I’m going to take him into another room and get some of our techs to help me. You should wait in the waiting room.” Then, more gently, he added, “Try not to worry too much. We won’t hurt him.” He bundled Homer into his carrier and exited, leaving me alone.

When I was growing up, we’d had a dog named Penny, a German shepherd who was exceedingly gentle and was, as we always said, my father’s dog. Penny loved my father, adored him, followed him everywhere with worshipful eyes and would have lived and died only to make him happy. Late in life she’d developed hip dysplasia, as large breeds often do, and my father for two years had patiently helped lift her to her feet when she struggled to get up, had cleaned up after her when she lost control of her bowels. Then one day, as my father tried to help her stand, Penny turned around and snapped at his hand. She was immediately contrite, whimpering and licking his hand in a desperate plea for forgiveness, which was of course immediately granted.

But my father, when he told this story, always said that that’s when he knew. He took her to the vet that afternoon, and Penny never came home again.

It was Penny who had flashed through my mind when I’d seen Homer’s claws—after so many years of unwavering love and loyalty—slash at me. I felt a sudden helplessness. For the first time since I’d brought him home with me, there was nothing I could do for Homer. I was standing alone in that room, Homer having been taken away because there was nothing I could do to help him. Even after September 11, there had been something I could do, a plan of action I could follow. Homer had always needed me in ways that my other two cats, fiercely as I loved them, had not. I’d promised that I would never let anything bad happen to him, had done everything I could over the years to keep that promise, yet ultimately I had failed. Such a promise, I knew in that moment, was by its nature impossible to keep. You could love someone, you could try to protect them from everything you could think of, but you couldn’t keep life from happening to them. And with that realization came the knowledge of pain, of the pain Homer was in now and the pain that would come, of hard decisions I might have to make sooner than I was prepared for.

My cats were getting old—were, by the standards of some, old already. Homer was eleven and would soon be twelve. Vashti was thirteen and Scarlett was fourteen. I was on the brink of getting married, and Laurence and I loved to talk about our future, about what we might be doing five or ten years from now. My thoughts of the future always, unconsciously, included my cats. I simply couldn’t imagine my life without them. They had come to define and shape almost all of the adult life I had known. It was only yesterday, or so it seemed, that they had come to me as kittens, barely old enough to be weaned from their mothers.

But they were getting old. In that moment I understood that I would marry Laurence in a few weeks and start a life with him, but very little of the life we would live together would include all three of my cats.

Soon enough, it wouldn’t include any of them.

I walked out, through the waiting room and the front door of the building to the street outside. I pulled my cell phone from my purse and called Laurence at his office. I’d meant to assume a “brave-but-shaken” tone, to tell him that I didn’t know anything yet but had wanted the reassurance of speaking with him. As soon as I heard his voice on the other end of the line, though, I began to cry.

“I’m coming down there,” Laurence said. I tried to pull myself together and tell him that wasn’t necessary, that I would be okay. But Laurence said quietly, “Gwen, he’s my cat, too.”

The vet released Homer to Laurence and me half an hour later, with a promise to call within twenty-four hours when he got back the test results. “What should we do in the meantime?” Laurence asked, and the vet responded, “Try to get him to drink some water. And if he shows any interest in eating, let him eat as much as he wants of whatever he wants.”

Laurence dropped us off at home and returned to his office. I sat with Homer all day; he crept out of his carrier and, exhausted from his grueling morning, fell asleep on the floor a few inches away from it. Later that afternoon, I wrapped him in an old blanket and brought him out onto the balcony so he could sleep in the sun. It had always been Homer’s fondest wish to go out on that balcony, like Scarlett and Vashti sometimes did, and I’d never let him, feeling that he tended to move so quickly, it would be impossible to keep him safe.

I didn’t think there was much chance he’d dart away from me today, though.

Homer seemed completely unaware of the distinction between inside and outside. He didn’t even sniff the air or flicker an ear to capture the sounds and smells he’d always been so curious to explore. “Eres mucho gato, Homer,” I murmured, sitting beside him and stroking his head. “Eres mucho, mucho gato.”

The phone didn’t stop ringing all day. My parents called every few hours to see if there was any word from the vet, as did Laurence. Laurence must have spread the word that Homer wasn’t well, because his parents and sister also called, as did many of our friends—even our friends who weren’t “pet people,” who’d never had pets of their own, and who I wouldn’t have expected to empathize with a pet’s illness. But it had always been that way with Homer; to have met him even once was to interest yourself in his welfare. As the number of callers swelled, it was clear how important it was to many—and not just to me—that this scrappy little Daredevil, this small cat who’d made a heroic and extraordinary act out of living an ordinary life, pull yet another life from the nine he’d been burning through since he was a blind, half-starved two-week-old a hairbreadth away from an inglorious end in a shelter.

Call me, they all insisted. Call me as soon as you hear from the vet.

The vet never was able to determine what, precisely, had made Homer so ill. When the tests came back, the only thing he could say was that there had, indeed, been some minor damage to Homer’s liver—which could have been the cause of his illness, but could also have been one of its effects. The vet asked me to keep him apprised and to bring Homer back for a follow-up visit in a week, which I did. Homer received a clean bill of health.

And, in a sense, Homer recovered fully. By the next day he was up and around a bit, eating sparingly and halfheartedly batting around a crumpled-up ball of paper. Within three days, he had resumed his usual eating habits.

Homer still scampers and darts joyfully through our home, but not so often as he used to, and not with the same ease. He moves with a certain stiffness to his joints, and I’ve begun adding a supplement to their food that helps promote joint flexibility in senior cats. He sleeps more often and more deeply than he did of old, and if awakened unexpectedly he can be downright cranky. He still loves to doze near Scarlett and Vashti, but sometimes he hisses at them when they accidentally disturb his rest—Homer, who never hissed, except when there was danger. His coat had been as purely black as a piece of polished onyx, but now it’s flecked with gray, and a single whisker grew in a conspicuous shade of silver. He never regained all the weight he lost, and Laurence and I joke that he has the hipbones of a supermodel, but it isn’t a joke that either of us finds especially funny.

Perhaps the most visible change of all is that Homer no longer plays with his stuffed worm. It sits discarded and bedraggled—it’s as old as Scarlett, after all—in a corner of our apartment. From time to time I pull it out and try to reintroduce Homer to his former best friend, but it’s as if he decided one day that the stuffed worm belonged to a different era. The era of his youth.

Yet not even the onset of old age can completely defeat Homer’s irrepressible high spirits. He still scraps tooth and claw for a stolen morsel of turkey when Laurence makes a sandwich. He still hasn’t given up on his life’s dream of successfully trouncing Scarlett—always “sneaking” up on her from the front, in plain sight. The two of them play this game with less speed, perhaps, but with equal vigor, and the look on Scarlett’s face seems to say, Aren’t we getting too old for this? He spends entire days following the path of the sun across our living room rug, purring happily in the warmth of the light he’s never seen.

Most of all, what remains the same is Homer’s overwhelming joy in the morning when I get out of bed and his day begins. He still spends a good ten minutes rubbing his face vigorously against mine, still purrs with as much singsong richness as he did that first morning, as a kitten, when he’d realized that both of us were still here.

With age, perhaps, Homer has realized—as Laurence himself is fond of saying—that any day spent above ground with your loved ones is a good day.