Homer: The Ninth Life of a Blind Wonder Cat

Strong Like Bull

There is a time for many words, and

there is also a time for sleep.

-HOMER, The Odyssey

IT WAS A COLD, GRAY AFTERNOON IN EARLY DECEMBER, and I was pulling our freshly cleaned winter bedding from the laundry basket, planning to swap it for the lighter sheets and blanket currently dressing our bed. Homer and the kittens (who had, by now, grown into full-fledged cats) were sitting in a semi-circle on the floor at the foot of the bed. “Helping” me change the linens was always a popular activity among our three. Homer would perform the vital job of attacking each corner of the bed as the fitted sheet went over it. Fanny pitched in by diving under the top sheet and creating a lump I couldn’t work around until I’d pushed her onto the floor. And Clayton, not as good a jumper as the other two, would dig in his front claws and haul himself up onto the bed—dragging blanket and sheets halfway to the floor—and hop around after the other two until I said, in an exasperated voice, “That’s enough!” at which point he would flop down and look at me with deep reproach for having spoiled the game.

It was unquestionably a frustrating way to make the bed, but I couldn’t help but smile now as I saw Homer’s face turned up to mine in anticipation of one of our oldest and most cherished rituals. Homer was fifteen years old, and more apt than he’d used to be to choose naps over play. Where once he’d been the “poster kitty” for special-needs animals, he was now more of an elder statesman. His one gray whisker had become six, and the ebony sheen of his head was flecked with gray as well. Fanny and Clayton had helped him recover the joie de vivre he’d lost after Scarlett’s passing a year earlier. Still, I was bringing out the heavier blankets sooner than I normally would—usually I’d wait for the first snow—because I thought Homer might appreciate the additional warmth and softness a bit earlier this year.

I’d just gotten the old sheets off and dumped the new fitted sheet onto the middle of the bed, when I noticed that Homer, resting on his haunches, wobbled a bit before falling over to one side. He quickly righted himself, but fell over to the side again. Then he tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t support him. He went down in a small heap and curled all four paws beneath his body.

At first I wasn’t even sure that I’d seen what I thought I saw. Maybe Homer was just lying down, and I had only imagined that something seemed “off.” But then I saw how Homer struggled to hold his head up, like a kitten fighting to stay awake while falling asleep on his feet, and I knew that something was very wrong.

“Laurence!” In two long strides I was in the hallway and buried halfway to my chest in the hall closet as I struggled to free one of the cat carriers from its storage place. Clayton and Fanny had followed eagerly (She opened the closet! Closets are awesome!) and I shooed them away impatiently. “Laurence!” I called again, and found that Laurence had already abandoned his home office next to our bedroom and was standing beside me.

“What happened?” he asked.

“There’s something wrong with Homer. He just…fell over.” I spoke calmly, not wanting to alarm Homer, who was always so attuned to the sound of my voice. “We have to get him to the animal hospital.”

Laurence regarded me for a fraction of a second. It was only when I saw his face tighten with concern that I knew what my own looked like, despite the forced evenness of my tone. “Let’s go,” was all he said, and went to round up keys, coats, and cell phones.

Getting Homer into his carrier was usually an onerous task. Once upon a time, a trip in the carrier had meant a move to a new home and new territories for Homer to explore. But we’d lived here with Laurence for just over seven years now—nearly half of Homer’s life. These days, the carrier meant only one thing: the vet. There was nothing in the world Homer loathed and feared as much as the vet’s office. He’d never exactly been a good patient, but the problem had gotten exponentially worse over the years. The last time we’d gone, in January, I’d had to cradle Homer in my arms in order for the vet to get close enough to draw a blood sample. When the needle went in, Homer had panicked and bitten my hand so hard that I’d had to go the emergency room later for a tetanus shot. He’d seemed immediately remorseful upon hearing my yelp of pain, struggling to get his front paws onto my shoulder so he could nuzzle my neck, the way he had that very first day we’d met, all those years ago. When the vet had tried to approach him again, he’d hissed at her wildly over my shoulder, like a thing possessed. Leave me alone! he seemed to say. Look what you made me do to my human!

We hadn’t been back since.

Homer didn’t struggle at all now. He was still breathing, and he appeared to be awake. But whether he was on the floor or in his carrier seemed to be a matter of equal indifference to him.

Seeing his utter lack of resistance made the knots in my stomach tighten. I held him for a moment, pressing my cheek to the top of his head before gently lowering him in. “You’re going to be fine,” I assured him in a soft voice. “You’ll be just fine.”

It was the lunch hour—always a difficult time to catch a cab in front of our Midtown apartment—so Laurence walked a couple of blocks up while I huddled Homer in his carrier as close under my coat as I could, trying to keep him warm. With my cell phone cradled between my shoulder and my ear, I let the receptionist at the vet’s office know that Homer and I were on our way in with an emergency. As I hung up, I saw the blessed sight of Laurence in the back of a cab pulling up to us.

Homer didn’t budge or call out once during the entire ten-minute ride—also very unlike him—and I found myself unable to stop unzipping the top of the carrier just far enough to slip my hand in, to stroke Homer’s head and side and make sure he was still breathing. The traffic on First Avenue was too heavy for our cabbie to cross, forcing him to drop us across the street from the animal hospital’s entrance. I left Laurence to pay him and, like the true New Yorker I’d long-since become, darted into the street against the light, breaking into a run so none of the oncoming cars would have to slow to avoid me. I was slightly out of breath by the time I reached the receptionist’s desk and placed Homer in his carrier on top of it.

Reina, the woman behind the desk, knew me well. I’d been there at least once a month during the two years when Vashti and Scarlett were sick, and more recently when Clayton had to have his hind leg removed. Laurence and I liked to say that we’d probably financed a Cooper-Lerman Memorial Wing of the animal hospital, given our outrageous expenses there over the past few years. It was a joke, of course, but I don’t think I’d ever felt less like laughing than I did in that moment, finding myself yet again in that familiar waiting room.

“What happened?” Reina asked, making sympathetic clucking sounds at Homer through the mesh sides of the carrier.

“I don’t know. He just kind of fell over,” I told her.

Reina pressed a button on her phone that summoned a vet tech through the swinging door that led to the exam rooms in the back. She took the carrier from Reina but turned to stop me when I tried to follow. “You’ll have to wait out here,” she said kindly, but firmly.

“But I have to go with him.” My voice was calm. Just two reasonable people having a reasonable disagreement. “He’s blind, and he’s terrified of the vet’s office. I don’t think you’ll be able to handle him without me.”

She peered at Homer, silent and stone-still in his carrier. He’d always been a little guy, but now he looked positively frail. “I think we’ll manage.” She smiled reassuringly. “We have to bring him to the tech area for tests,” she explained, “and there are other animals back there. That’s why we need you to wait out here.”

I turned to Reina, who was also our pet-sitter when we traveled and knew Homer better than anyone else at the clinic, hoping for a reprieve. “He’ll be fine, mami.” Behind her, the vet tech had already disappeared with Homer back through the swinging door. “He’s so out of it, he probably won’t even know what’s going on.”

I TOOK THE seat Laurence had saved for me in the cozy, wood-paneled waiting area—made welcoming with posters of puppies and kittens, flyers for pet-sitters, and copies of Best Friends magazine—and tried to imagine what went on when a nearly unconscious cat was brought into a veterinary emergency room. My sole knowledge of what happened when someone was rushed unconscious to the hospital came from television and movies. Would they plop Homer onto a gurney and wheel him speedily into another room while a doctor called for CCs of this and tests for that? Would nurses cluster around trying to get blood pressure and pulse readings? I was heartsick, miserable at the thought of Homer—tiny Homer, weakened and terrified—being subjected to unknown probes and prods and lord-only-knew-what-else without me there to comfort him.

But, as it turned out, I was luckier than I realized. I wouldn’t have to wonder for long.

The tech area, where Homer had been taken, was all the way in the back of the building, and the waiting area was in the front. Separating them was a long corridor with exam rooms branching off from it. We were probably a good hundred feet away from Homer, with two closed doors (one at either end of the corridor) between us. Nevertheless, within a few minutes I heard what was going on.

Everybody heard what was going on.

Over the years, I’ve probably heard the full range of sounds that the average housecat is capable of making—the meows, burbles, and coos; the purring and deep-throated whines; the shrill, unforgettable screams of a cat who’s enraged or terrified. Homer himself had always had an especially rich vocal repertoire, with a series of highly distinct mews, yips, and growls meant to indicate things like, I can’t find you; I’m hungry; I’m coming over to be petted now; and This is irritating me.

What I heard now wasn’t any of those. It hardly even sounded like noises a cat should be capable of making—and, at first, I didn’t think it was a cat. I didn’t even think that the sound came from any natural source. For a second, I thought that maybe a nearby construction worker had started up a chainsaw. But, after the briefest of pauses for breath, it became clear that these were animal noises—the sound of some enraged wild beast fending off hunters or defending its territory. The vicious, furious snarls rose in volume to fill the entire waiting room, so deep now, so sustained, so impossibly loud, that they could only be described as roars.

It was lunchtime, the busiest time of day at the animal clinic, and the waiting room was packed. There were huge dogs and tiny ones at the ends of leashes, cats and rabbits in carriers, two cages containing a parrot and a parakeet. Every animal was accompanied by a human, and it was something of a miracle that Laurence had managed to score us two seats at all.

As the roars from the back of the hospital continued and grew in both volume and anger, the comfortable hum of conversation and scuffling animals in the waiting room fell silent. Reina, from her station behind the receptionist’s desk, put the call she was taking on hold and turned to stare in open-mouthed wonder at the door leading to the back. For a breathless moment, the entire animal hospital was dead silent except for the enraged clamor rising from the back. Then a hushed murmuring rose in the waiting room, as if everybody was instinctively wary of elevating their voices above a whisper. What the…? What’s going on back there? What is that? One woman, in an undertone, said something that ended with…a panther? The man she was with muttered darkly about the kind of idiot who thought it was okay to keep exotic pets in a New York apartment.

Two large dogs had begun to whimper and cringed behind the legs of their owners, while a smaller dog issued a low rumble, the hackles raised on the back of his neck. From the dark recesses of carriers, I heard hisses and growls. The parakeet twittered and fluttered frantically around his cage. I thought of my younger sister, who’d always shrieked so loudly and continuously when receiving childhood shots that every other kid in the pediatrician’s waiting room would break into terrified sobs.

“What do you think it is?” Laurence whispered to me.

I threw him a wry, sideways look.

“You think that’s Homer?” Laurence appeared dubious. But then his glance took in my face, which felt so hot that I knew it had to be fiery red. His expression changed from incredulity to awe. “Damn,” he muttered.

I was already standing when the door to the back swung open, and I nearly walked right into the vet tech who’d initially brought Homer to the back of the hospital. She’d been so calm and confident when we’d first come in, but now she was profoundly flustered. Her face looked as red as mine had felt a moment ago, and I could see that her hands were trembling. “They need you back there,” she blurted. Pointing down the hallway, she added, “The last exam room on the left.” Once she’d made sure I was going the right way, she ducked into a small side room, quickly closing the door behind her.

I felt a bit like a character in a scary movie as I headed in the direction the vet tech had indicated—some not-very-bright girl inexplicably walking toward the room containing the terrifying monster, rather than away from it. I’d known that the sounds I’d heard in the waiting room would only grow louder as I approached their source, but it was still unnerving to hear how much louder they became.

The tableau that greeted me when I reached Homer’s exam room might have been comical under different circumstances. Standing in a semicircle—facing the high metal exam table bolted to the wall, but at a judicious distance from it—were three women. One was the doctor, who must have been new to the practice, because I’d never seen her before. The other two were clearly assistants. They’d donned long, thickly padded gloves that stretched from the tips of their fingers all the way up to their shoulders, like the ones that falconers wear. They’d also knotted bandanas behind their ears and pulled them up protectively over their faces. Their foreheads above the bandanas were a vivid pink and beaded with sweat. Their bodies were poised with a tense wariness, leaning slightly forward at the shoulders while their feet were half-turned in the opposite direction, ready to carry them back to a safer distance if the need arose.

Seeing Homer—all four pounds of him, crouched defensively on the exam table—took me back instantly, all the way to that summer night more than twelve years earlier, when a Homer I hadn’t recognized had chased a large male intruder right out of our Miami apartment. If he’d looked helpless and fragile a half-hour ago, when I’d first brought him in to the clinic, he now more closely resembled the panther the woman in the waiting room had thought she’d heard. The hind part of his body was elevated and his chest was lowered until it almost touched the table beneath him. His head was raised with his mouth wide open, lips pulled back in a cruel rictus that bared all his teeth. His head and ears moved evenly from side to side as he listened for a cue as to where the next assault might come from, one paw raised with claws at full extension, ready to lash out as soon as someone came within striking distance.

One of the assistants was holding a yellowish hand towel in front of her, the way a lion tamer might hold a chair between himself and the roaring lion before him. As I entered, the assistant—still maintaining a safe distance between herself and Homer—gingerly tossed it over his head. Homer immediately erupted into a fresh round of anguished, deafening roars, thrashing angrily as his claws attempted to escape the towel and find his tormentors.

I knew that putting a towel over the head of a distressed cat was standard procedure, that it usually calmed them, and that the hot bolt of rage that stabbed from my chest to my belly was therefore unwarranted. Everybody in that room wanted only to help Homer. Still, it took a wrenching effort of will to make my voice sound as serene as it needed to, for Homer’s sake.

“Okay, so Homer is blind.” I said Homer in the gentle, sing-song cadence I used at home when I was particularly happy with him. The wild thrashing beneath the towel stilled. “Putting a cloth over his head isn’t going to quiet him the way it does other cats. You’re just making him more upset.”

The assistant who’d thrown the towel now leaned forward and, grabbing the corner closest to her and farthest from Homer’s claws, quickly pulled it off while simultaneously taking a large step back. The Homer thus revealed, puffed up to several times his normal size, bore little resemblance to the Homer I knew. Nevertheless, his ears had pricked up and turned toward my voice. Once freed from the towel, his nose followed, rising inquisitively in an attempt to discern whether there was a familiar scent to match the familiar cadence.

“You’re a good boy, Homer.” I approached him slowly, my hands raised in front of me in an instinctive gesture of non-threatening compliance that was, of course, wasted on a blind cat. Cautiously, I put one hand directly beneath his nose.

Homer immediately pressed his whole face into my cupped palm, and I used the other hand to rub gently behind his ears. As frightening as it had been to see Homer in his rage, my heart nearly broke now to see him morph back into his normal self—just a scared little cat, terrified out of his wits at being separated from the human he trusted. “You’re a good boy, Homer, a good, good boy,” I repeated soothingly, and Homer’s fur sank as his entire body seemed to relax.

If I’d levitated into the air right in front of them, the vet and her assistants couldn’t have appeared more gobsmacked as Homer transformed from snarling beast to docile housecat in my hands. “I’m sorry,” the vet said. “With the way he was brought in, we didn’t know he’d put up such a fight.”

I told you so! I told you so! a voice in my brain shrieked. But I only laughed ruefully and said, “I understand. It is hard to believe that such a little guy can make such a big ruckus.”

“He’s so teeny!” one of the assistants exclaimed almost indignantly, as if she’d been trying to restrain herself but couldn’t hold it in any longer—couldn’t quite fathom how one small cat, and a sick one at that, had been able to cause three grown women who handled animals for a living to fear legitimately for their physical safety.

“Maybe you should spend a few minutes alone with him,” the vet said now. “It looks like we’ll have to sedate him before we can examine him. That might go easier if he’s a little calmer before I try to inject him.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Is it okay if I sit on the floor?”

At her nod, I sat down cross-legged about a foot from the exam table. “Come here, Homer-Bear,” I said, and Homer leapt a touch awkwardly from the table to the ground. In the crouched, creeping way of an animal that suspects it’s being hunted, he made his way over to where I sat and crawled into my lap. The three women, still shaking their heads in amazement, filed silently out of the room.

Homer and I sat there for long minutes as I continued to stroke him. He didn’t purr, and he didn’t fall asleep, but he did fall into a calm, quiet reverie. My poor boy, I thought. My poor, poor boy. At this point, I felt well beyond guilty and heartily sorry that I’d brought Homer in at all, knowing how very traumatic the vet always was for him—although what choice had I had? Eventually, the vet returned and knelt over us just long enough to jab a needle into the back of Homer’s neck. Homer instantly hissed and reared up, trying to catch her with his front claws. But the sedative kicked in pretty quickly, and Homer fell unconscious back into my lap.

“We can take it from here,” the vet said, lifting Homer and bundling him back into his carrier. “We’ll draw blood and run some tests. I’ll let you know when he’s ready to leave.”

Laurence and I had to wait another half hour before we were able to bring a still-sedated Homer back home. I was given some instructions on how to care for him and things to watch for until the sedative wore off. “Do you know what caused him to fall over like that this afternoon?” I asked. After all the drama of the preceding hour, the thing that had brought us there in the first place seemed almost like an afterthought, like something that had happened years ago to somebody else.

“We’ll know more when the bloodwork comes back tomorrow,” the vet told me. “We’ll call you as soon as we have it. The important thing now is for him to get some rest.”

HOMER SLEPT FOR the rest of the afternoon. He didn’t stir into consciousness again until early evening, when he woke just long enough to eat his dinner before staggering back into the bedroom and collapsing in the little nest I’d made for him on the floor from old t-shirts and sweaters. I moved his litter-box into our bedroom and kept him in there with us overnight, away from the curious noses of Clayton and Fanny, who couldn’t figure out why their big brother smelled so different (like the vet’s office, although they didn’t know it), and why he didn’t wake and acknowledge them, even when they touched his head and face with tentative little paws. At some point in the middle of the night, Homer made an unsuccessful attempt to jump onto the bed but fell over backwards, the sedative having still not worn off entirely. I didn’t want him on the bed—which, being a king-size, was rather high off the ground—because I wasn’t sure he’d be able to jump off without hurting himself if he needed his litter-box. But I also didn’t want him to have to sleep by himself. I ended up moving my pillows and a blanket down to the floor, so I could curl up next to him.

The next morning, Homer was almost miraculously back to his old self. He ate a big breakfast and greeted Clayton and Fanny in his usual imperious way. A couple of hours later we were playing one of his favorite games, wherein I would wriggle my finger under the bed covers and Homer (who could once again get on and off the bed just fine) would pounce on them. I was delighted to see him cocking his head to one side in familiar fashion as he listened for the slight noises that would pinpoint where, exactly, my fingers were.

He was still doing well enough when noon came around that Laurence and I went out to grab a quick lunch at a sandwich place next to our apartment building. We’d just placed our orders when my cell phone rang with a call from the animal hospital. The vet who called wasn’t the one who had seen Homer yesterday, but she assured me that she’d thoroughly read both Homer’s test results and his medical file.

“How’s he doing today?” she asked.

“He seems okay, actually.” I’d risen and was walking through the restaurant, so we could continue the call outside where I wouldn’t disturb the diners around me. “He was even playing this morning.”

She sounded surprised. “He was playing?”

I think I mistook her surprise for reproach—as if she were implying that I was a dangerous lunatic for running an invalid cat like Homer around—and I quickly backtracked. “It wasn’t strenuous play. He was in a playful mood, is what I meant.”

“No, that’s good!” She seemed to file this tidbit away for future reference before continuing. “So I’ve looked over the bloodwork and Homer’s file, and I wanted to go over the results with you.”

She started with the numbers that fell within the normal range and therefore looked good, and that was the shortest part of our conversation. The problem, it quickly became clear, was Homer’s liver. I didn’t have to understand all the ins and outs or medical jargon to know immediately how serious the problem was. Doing some rapid calculations, I realized that Homer’s liver values (the enzymes that were supposed to be found in the liver itself, not in his bloodstream) were about fifteen hundred percent higher than what was normal in a cat. Fifteen hundred percent! “If his fur wasn’t so black, you’d probably have noticed a while ago that his ears are yellow, and how jaundiced he is,” the vet told me, and I cursed myself for having been so stupid—so unforgivably stupid and unobservant. “I sounded surprised when you said Homer was playing this morning, because frankly a cat with numbers like these shouldn’t even be able to walk.” She didn’t say it aloud, but I knew what she was thinking: He shouldn’t even be alive.

My mind instantly rejected that thought. Numbers or no numbers, anybody with two eyes in their head could see that Homer was still Homer. He ate, he played, he cuddled in my lap. Maybe on paper he shouldn’t be alive, but in the real world he was still walking around the same as ever—and where there was life, there was hope. So I took a deep breath to steady myself and asked, “Where do we go from here?”

“I’d like you to bring Homer in this afternoon,” the vet said, “and plan on leaving him here for a few days—maybe a week.” She launched into her recommended course of treatment, an aggressive one that would involve hooking Homer up round-the-clock to various drips and medications, which would drain harmful fluids out and introduce healthier ones in, and give his liver a fighting chance to recover.

I didn’t even know I’d started to cry until I became aware of a pain on my cheeks, and realized that the icy December wind had frozen the tears to my face. My god, was all I could think. My god, how can I do this to him? How can I bring him back to that place and leave him there all alone?

“Let me talk to the doctor who saw Homer yesterday,” the vet concluded. “I’ll call you back so we can make a plan.”

Laurence was waiting at our table when I re-entered the restaurant, and I saw that our food had arrived in my absence. I couldn’t touch mine, however, and as I relayed to Laurence the substance of my conversation with the vet, my tears began to flow in earnest. He reached across the table to cover my hand with his and tried to say something comforting. I suddenly became aware that we were in a very public place, and that the other patrons closest to us were beginning to take an interest in our table. “I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice sounded like I was choking. “I have to go back outside. People will think you’re breaking up with me.” I got up and left him for a second time, crouching once I’d reached the sidewalk again and putting my head between my legs as I tried to pull myself together.

I was still outside, grateful for the cold air I inhaled in greedy gulps in the hopes it would clear my thoughts, when the vet called back. “I spoke with the doctor who saw Homer yesterday,” she told me. “We talked a bit and…” She hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “We’re not sure that Homer would benefit from a hospital environment.”

For a moment, I was hopeful. “You mean you think I can treat him at home?”

Her voice softened. “Look, the doctor you saw yesterday told me what happened. We can’t get near Homer without sedating him, and we can’t keep a cat fully sedated for days at a time. And we can’t sedate a cat at all with bloodwork like Homer’s. If we’d known how bad his numbers were, we wouldn’t have sedated him yesterday.”

“So you’re saying you can’t treat him without sedating him, but you can’t sedate him until you’ve been able to treat him.”

“That’s about it,” the vet agreed. “The thing is, even the really mean cats, when they have numbers like these, are usually so sick and weak that we can do whatever we need to with them. I don’t know how much longer Homer’s strength can last—it’s a miracle that it’s lasted this long—but as long as it does, there’s really nothing to be gained by you bringing him back here.”

She was, as I would later recount at innumerable shelter readings whenever I told this story, saying to me in the nicest possible way, Please don’t ever bring your demon cat back to our animal hospital again. I couldn’t argue. I was no more anxious to bring Homer back than they were to have him.

“Is there anything I can do for him by myself?”

“I’m going to write you a couple of prescriptions,” she said. “Some medication to support his liver and other functions. There’s a pharmacy uptown that can compound it with something yummy-tasting like chicken or tuna. That way you can just squirt it into his mouth or mix it with his food, instead of trying to pill him. It’s a two-week course of treatment.”

My voice cracked when I spoke again, dreading the answer even before I asked the question. “What do we do for him when the two weeks are up?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and the sorrow in her voice was genuine. “But Homer’s numbers are incompatible with life.”

It was an awful phrase, incompatible with life—at once so brutal yet efficiently descriptive that it told the whole story. So it seemed almost superfluous when she went on to add:

“I don’t think he has more than two weeks left.”

AS A KINDNESS to my fellow sensitive readers (and I’m assuming that applies to most of you reading this), I’ll risk ruining the suspense and tell you up front that we did not lose Homer within the next two weeks. Nor did we lose him within four weeks, or even four months. Homer, as it turned out, had more fight left in him than even those of us who knew him best (and had seen him at his worst) thought he was capable of. In the end, he would stay with us for the better part of the next year.

But, at the time, we still had to go through it all and make our decisions without knowing outcomes. Looking back now, I realize that I didn’t really have any decisions to make. Homer had made them already. All I could do was let things take whatever course they were going to take. But I didn’t know this then—or perhaps it’s more honest to say that it was a knowledge I resisted.

It was hard to believe that Homer’s condition could really be as dire as the vet had said. I scanned his ears anxiously when Laurence and I got home from the restaurant, and indeed, when I looked at them closely, the insides had a definite yellow cast beneath the black of his fur. But Homer quickly grew impatient with his ear exam. He was far more interested in the bag I’d brought home containing my uneaten sandwich. After downing a generous helping of sliced turkey—which pretty much depleted my sandwich entirely, and it was astonishing to watch Homer put away a quantity of food that would have more than filled me up—Homer trotted over to his bed on the desk beside my computer, waiting patiently for me to sit down after lunch as I usually did, and spend the afternoon typing away with him by my side. It was as if yesterday hadn’t happened.

I spent the next two weeks on a sort of doomsday watch. Every time Homer ate a meal with gusto (which was pretty much every meal), I counted it as a triumph. Every time I watched him chase a crinkle ball around, every time he cuddled up to have me spoon him on the couch, I thought, Is this it? Is this the last time? Every time he was slower to awaken from a nap than I thought he should be, I wondered if he was going to wake up at all.

I watched and I wondered—and I agonized. What was I to do for him? When Vashti had been diagnosed with chronic renal failure (and hyperthyroidism, and high blood pressure, and anemia), I’d forced pills down her throat once a day, and given her shots twice a day, and administered subcutaneous fluid injections every other day. I’d taken her to the vet for monthly check-ups and twice she’d had to stay there overnight. Scarlett had had surgery for her cancer, and I’d had to give her insulin shots twice a day for her diabetes. Certainly none of it could be described as fun—and the two of them had struggled and fled and clawed and even hissed on occasion enough for me to know how much they disliked all the poking and prodding and pilling—but all that had been a few unpleasant minutes out of our days, which the two of them seemed to forget completely as soon as it was over. And the reward for those unpleasant few minutes was the additional time we had together that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

But Homer wasn’t like Vashti and Scarlett. For the past few years, he wouldn’t even let me trim his claws anymore. I had known even before Homer got sick—back when I was going through everything I went through with my two girls—that I wouldn’t be able to do the same for him. Regular vet visits would be difficult enough, probably even impossible. As much as Homer loved and trusted me, I knew he’d never let me pill him regularly, or stick needles in him. The best-case scenario was that I’d win those battles (maybe!) but end up injured and bloodied for my efforts, and Homer would come to fear my scent and the sound of my voice as much as he’d ever feared the vet’s office. Homer would never understand why I was doing all these terrible things to him. What would be the point of extending his life only to rob him of all the security and love and trust he’d built that life on?

There would be no point, I had assured myself, back when Homer was healthy and these were only abstract thoughts.

But now the abstract had become concrete, and the sand beneath my feet had shifted. I couldn’t just do nothing, could I? I mean, maybe I couldn’t do anything—but I certainly couldn’t do nothing. The collective wisdom of Homer’s Facebook community recommended milk thistle, which I began liberally sprinkling into his drinking water. Perhaps it helped. But it certainly didn’t seem like the kind of heroic measures I should be taking on his behalf. How could a few drops of milk thistle be sufficient when I was willing to do anything—literally, anything—that could be done for Homer, if only he would let me help him?

I remember one day when it was especially bad with me, when the certainty that I was losing Homer and could do nothing to stop it was the only certainty I had in the world, and it sat in my chest so heavily I could hardly breathe. I was at my computer, and Homer was sitting on his haunches on the desk next to me, leaning the entire weight of his body heavily against my left shoulder, as he did when he sensed that I needed comfort. I went to his Facebook page and, unlike my usual habit of posting funny pictures and amusing little stories, typed a single sentence. How will I live without this cat? I quickly deleted it, embarrassed at having posted such a stark (and melodramatic) cry of pain on a Facebook page for anybody to see. But it had been seen already, and my phone rang a few minutes later.

Some months earlier, out on the “cat circuit,” I’d struck up a friendship with Jackson Galaxy—Animal Planet’s famous and infamous “Cat Daddy”—and, as it turned out, he was every bit as compassionate in real life as one would expect from his show. He’d called now to see how Homer and I were doing, and I laid out my dilemma for him, sparing no details in describing Homer’s recent visit to the animal hospital. I concluded by asking him the same question I’d been asking myself non-stop for days: Didn’t I have to do something more for Homer—try some new doctor, some kind of medical treatment, something more than what I was doing?

Jackson listened until I’d talked myself out. “Homer is sending you a very clear message,” he said when I’d finished. “And that message is DO. NOT. WANT. I do not want this! It’s not fair to ignore a cat when he’s talking to you that loudly and clearly.”

“But how can I just do nothing for him?”

“Treating Homer with respect and dignity isn’t nothing,” Jackson told me. “Seeing him through this last phase of his life—however long that might be—with mindfulness and love isn’t nothing.” He paused for a moment, as if collecting his thoughts. “You have to be selfless now,” he finally said. “You made an unspoken deal with Homer the day you adopted him. In loving him, you promised you’d always take care of him. Taking care of someone means putting them before you. And that means you, in this moment, don’t matter. Your sadness doesn’t matter. You’ll have plenty of time for that when he leaves. In this moment, you’re a parent with only one job. You have to listen to Homer, because the only promise to keep is not to wait until it’s his worst day. Let him leave knowing love, not fear, not pain, not the flipside of love. Do you really want, now, to rob him of all that love and confidence he’s had in such abundance his whole life?”

“No.” My voice was husky. “No, I really don’t.”

“Just because doctors can do something doesn’t mean they should. Just because you did certain things for your other cats doesn’t mean you should do them for this cat. Every cat is different. You should follow Homer’s lead.”

“But Homer doesn’t understand the choice he’s making. He doesn’t know what I know.” I truly did want to let it go, to accept the reality of what was happening and make my peace with it. But the struggle had been too hard for me to give it up all at once.

“He knows what he knows. Maybe that’s enough,” Jackson concluded. “And Homer might end up surprising you. Cats usually do.”

JACKSON’S WORDS PROVED to be prophetic. Days became weeks became months, and still Homer was with us. Still the same Homer more or less, although he did eventually slow a bit, like a clock just beginning to wind down.

The worst thing a cat can do for his liver is to stop eating—but, paradoxically, cats with liver disease are usually reluctant eaters at best. The challenge is to keep them eating, at least enough to give their liver something to do other than eat itself.

Homer, however, had always been a cat who defied expectations, and he ate voraciously. To say that Homer became a non-stop eating machine would be an understatement—and trying to describe what it was like to watch a four-pound cat eat his body weight every day is one of the rare times when words have failed me. It started with the medication the vet had prescribed, which apparently was every bit as yummy as promised when mixed with his regular food. When the two weeks’ worth of medication ran out, I made it my mission to keep the food party going. At first I started out with some kitten-hood favorites, long-since abandoned on health grounds—although my new philosophy was, As long as he’s eating and he’s happy. Kitten Chow once again became a permanent fixture in our cupboard, and Homer attacked it with so much zeal that it almost seemed as if eating the food he’d eaten when he was younger made him feel like a young cat again. Gooey cans of Friskie’s and Fancy Feast also found their way into Homer’s food bowl.

But it was Laurence who really rose to the occasion. What was, for me, a medical imperative became a genuine source of pleasure for Laurence, and finding new and exciting foods to tempt Homer with was his passion. That Homer was eating at all was less surprising than how much he was eating, consuming more than enough food in the typical day to satisfy a grown man.

Laurence brought Homer imported European canned tunas, sliced turkey by the pound, hamburgers, prime rib, shredded roast beef, pork-fried rice, spare ribs, pizza cheese, Gerber’s baby food, and lobster dipped in butter. (The only thing Homer was particular about was his lobster—which was heaven on earth when dipped in butter, but unworthy of his interest when it was not.) He brought home salmon salad and whitefish salad from our favorite bagel place, and a stinky cheese from Murray’s in the West Village that was so very stinky—even when stowed in the refrigerator—we’d had to ditch it a day later, even though the aroma had Homer clawing at the refrigerator door as if his very life depended on getting in.

Laurence’s imagination ranged from the high to the low, and he also brought home mysterious “potted meats” found in fifty-cent cans at our local bodega, which Homer gobbled down as enthusiastically as if it were caviar (which Homer also grew to love during that final year). Cans of Vienna Sausages—again from our bodega—mashed with a fork and served au jus were a particular treat. Chinese chicken on the bone from the take-out place across the street was a big hit, although not nearly as tempting as a fried chicken breast from Popeye’s, the smell of which drove Homer absolutely wild with delight. Homer could polish off an entire Popeye’s breast in the space of half an hour, although perhaps Homer’s greatest culinary accomplishment was the time he finished an entire mutton chop—literally bigger than he was!—that Laurence brought home from the legendary Keen’s Steakhouse. (In fairness, I should add that it did take him two days to eat his way through the whole thing.) The image of little Homer, sitting in front of that giant mutton chop like a tiny Henry VIII about to dig into a palace banquet, is one I’ll always be grateful to have in my memory.

Perhaps the only truly perplexing food that Homer developed a taste for was carrot cake. I’d brought home a slice without frosting from a health-food place, saving it as an after-dinner treat for myself. But a couple of hours later I found Homer on the kitchen counter, clawing off the plastic it was wrapped in and gobbling the cake down greedily. I was on the verge of stopping him—carrot cake striking me as an odd and potentially unhealthy choice for a cat. But then I thought, why not? and carried the rest to his bowl, for him to finish at his leisure.

It was clear to us that Homer was waging a tremendous battle, one that required an almost incomprehensible amount of fuel to keep it going. It seems to me now, looking back, that forgoing aggressive medical care turned out to be the right decision, if only because Homer would have fought it, and me, every step of the way. He almost certainly couldn’t have battled on two fronts with nearly as much success as he battled now on just the one.

But even with all his strength—and I’ll admit that I was a bit awed, this late in Homer’s life, to realize fully just how tremendous that strength actually was—the battle was taking its toll. He napped far more than he used to, and lost weight until he was barely more than skin and bones. Running my hand down his back, I could feel every vertebra in his spine. His coat, once so lustrous and sleek, began to look oily. But as long as Homer still played and ate, as long as he still cuddled and purred and chased Fanny and Clayton around, I told myself that I would let him fight for his life on his own terms, without taking anything away from him.

Our bedroom became Homer’s bedroom, and he slept with me every night. Whether because he was confused, or too tired to make the effort of jumping from the bed and walking to his litter-box (which I’d moved permanently into our bedroom), the bed became his nighttime litter-box during those last few months. Honesty compels me to add that those nighttime poops were…something—although who among us hasn’t cleaned up that and worse while caring for an ailing cat? And, given both the size and nature of Homer’s new daily diet, what else could be expected? Laurence moved temporarily into the guest bedroom, and I put a rubber sheet over our mattress. Stripping off all the sheets and blankets, I made a little nest for Homer from some of my old t-shirts and sweaters. As for myself, I slept wrapped up, cocoon-style, in a comforter. Homer and I were still able to cuddle, and it made clean-ups much easier.

I realize that, in the retelling, this sounds like an odd and cumbersome way to live—although it’s amazing how quickly the unusual becomes routine when it’s the landscape of your everyday life. I never thought of it as an imposition at all. I wanted to be there for all this—not just the playtimes and the cuddling, but the late-night cleanings and nursing Homer through bouts of upset stomach and every last messy, inconvenient bit of it. Once upon a time, I had saved Homer’s life. And then, years later, he had saved mine. I can honestly say that I never loved Homer more than any of the other animals I’ve been lucky enough to live with. But Homer and I were bound to each other in a way that was nothing like anything I had experienced before—and I knew that I would never have anything in my life quite like this again. I couldn’t have felt more tied to Homer if he’d literally been flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.

When spring came, I resumed my schedule of shelter readings and fundraising appearances. Because I worked from home and spent, in the typical day, twenty-one hours or more within ten feet of Homer, it should have been easier to leave him once or twice a month for an afternoon trip upstate or a twenty-four-hour overnight to speak at a shelter farther away. Paradoxically, though, the more time I spent with Homer, the harder it was to go away from him. Still, talking about him at these events was a source of deep, deep pleasure.

People always asked about Homer during the Q&A sessions after I’d finished reading. Was he still alive? Was he in good health? I would tell the story of that last visit to the vet’s office, how Homer—tiny Homer, sick as he was!—had overpowered the staff and thrown the entire animal hospital into disarray. I told them of the dire predictions that Homer wouldn’t last out the month, wouldn’t live to see the New Year. But here it was, the following summer, and Homer was still with us! A little slower, perhaps, and a little skinnier, but eating like a champ and enjoying his life.

People would shake their heads in astonishment. How was such a thing possible? How could such a little cat have so much fight in him? It became a standard part of these talks, of telling this story, for me to clench my right hand into a fist and strike the left side of my chest—just over my heart. In my best approximation of a Russian accent, I would proudly declare:

“Because my cat is strong like bull.”

HOMER WAS STRONG like a bull—and he’d fought hard and far longer than any bull in a ring ever had. But it was a fight we’d always known couldn’t go on forever.

The end came one late-August afternoon, nearly four years to the day since Homer’s Odyssey had first been published. Laurence and I had gone out to run a few errands. When I walked back in through our front door, the first thing I saw was Homer hanging from the side of the couch, his front legs splayed out to full extension as he dangled from two claws—one in each front paw—that had become snagged in the fabric as he’d tried to pull himself up. Too exhausted to try very hard to free himself, he simply dangled, waiting mutely for me to find him and help.

I’d noticed that Homer had slowed down even more in the past few days, that he’d gone from being tired to being tired, not stirring from his spot on the couch unless it was time for him to eat or follow me into the bedroom for the night. I’d also noticed that Clayton had seemed to be sticking to him more closely. Clayton was always fascinated by Homer and loved nothing more than to follow him around, even if Homer was ignoring him. But a sleeping Homer had never held much interest for Clayton, and when Homer settled down for a nap, Clayton would usually hop off to find something else to do. For the past week, though, whenever Homer curled up on the couch to sleep, Clayton would lie down on the floor directly in front of him—not moving, not bothering Homer in any way. He’d just watch him intently without taking his eyes off him.

I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, and I’d tried not to think at all about Homer’s increased weariness. On the face of it, there wasn’t even a connection between those two things. But it all came together in my mind now in a single, blurred rush.

“Oh, Homer.” I threw down my purse and ran to the couch. “Oh, my poor boy. My poor, poor boy.” I gently released the two claws and sank to the floor, cradling him in my arms, my cheek pressed to the top of his head. “I’m sorry, Homer-Bear. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. I’m so sorry, little boy.” I swayed back and forth, kissing his brow, as he lay inertly in my arms. “I’m so sorry, Homer-Bear. I love you so much.” I placed him on the ground, on his own legs. He feebly took a few steps, then laid down, clearly spent from the effort.

I went outside on our balcony then. Pulling the sliding door firmly closed behind me, I began to sob—great, gasping heaves that seemed to start at my knees before being wrenched upward and out through my mouth. I cried for having been gone when Homer needed me, and I felt the pain of that, his pain, as a physical pain in my own body. I cried for all the times I knew I would cry about it again, that image of Homer hanging from the couch. Countless times at unexpected moments, down through all the remaining years of my life. I cried for what I already knew in my heart even though I hadn’t yet told it to myself in words. I cried for the blind kitten nobody had wanted, who’d come at a time in my life when I wasn’t sure that anybody did, or ever would, want me. I cried for the last tangible link to those years of youth and uncertainty and discovery—a time that, even though it had since evolved into things infinitely better, was a vanished country now, one I could never return to. I cried for other things that would never come back, the greetings at the front door when I came home; the funny, sonar-like, sweeping turns of a little black head; the rattlesnake vibrating of an ecstatic tail (Hooray! We’re both here! We’re together!) that had been the first thing I’d seen every morning for sixteen years. I cried for all of it, although the only articulate word in my head was, Never. It was suddenly the only word in the whole world. An awful word. A final word. Never. Never. Never.

I had gone outside because I didn’t want Homer to hear me cry like that, or Laurence for that matter. For their sakes, but also for my own. That first convulsion of grief was an animal thing, and instinctively I’d crawled away to hide my wound, to be alone with it. There was no one to hear me now but the buildings across the courtyard from ours. Their walls caught the sounds of my cries and sent them back to me, until the entire courtyard wailed in a Greek chorus of woe. Alas! Alas! I hung my head and arms over the balcony railing, pressing my hands over my eyes, and howled my loss to the empty courtyard below.

But I didn’t allow myself to stay outside for more than a minute or two. I knew what had to be done, and I didn’t want to give myself time to second-guess, to argue that maybe tomorrow would be better, that there might still be plenty of good days ahead. I had vowed that day when I’d spoken to Jackson, in preparation for just this moment, that I wouldn’t wait until worse came to the absolute worst. I wouldn’t wait until Homer wasn’t Homer anymore before I let him go.

Months earlier, we’d found a vet who would be able to come to us at home when the time came. I had no intention of subjecting Homer to the animal hospital again, of making him spend the last moments of his life in the only place in the world of which he’d been starkly terrified. I spent the few hours before her arrival cuddling Homer in my lap and stroking his head in our old way. Laurence went out and got him a Popeye’s chicken breast, which he mixed up with some turkey in Homer’s bowl. Homer managed to make it from my lap as far as the bowl, but he was too tired to eat standing up and so ate reclining, like the Roman aristocrats of old. He did eat, though. He may not have cleaned his bowl, but he did eat.

The vet, when she came, was as kind as she’d sounded when I’d first spoken with her. She sat in the living room talking to Laurence and me about nothing in particular, until her presence among us stopped feeling awkward and ominous, and I was almost comfortable. Homer was lying in his spot at the end of the couch, close to her chair, and she affectionately stroked his head while she talked. He lay passively under her touch, although at one point he turned his head to press it into her hand.

Eventually, I picked Homer up and carried him into the bedroom, and the vet followed.

In the end, Homer died in his own home, in his own bed, in the arms of the person who’d loved him most. The vet left and quietly closed the bedroom door behind her after she’d given him the shot. I cradled Homer in my lap as I watched the muscles around the place where his eyes would have been relax into sleep for the last time. “Eras mucho gato,” I whispered into his ear. Thou wert plenty of cat.

It was, in its way, one of the most beautiful moments of my life. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t even cry.

WHEN VASHTI DIED, we scattered her ashes at Fort Tryon Park, far, far uptown in Washington Heights. It was a beautiful, hilly park with acres of wide lawns and lush flowerbeds, and it commanded stunning views of the Hudson River and the Palisades beyond. Vashti had always loved water, and I had wanted to give her a whole river of it, a place from which she could watch the water sparkle and dance before it was carried out to sea. Scarlett had never shared Vashti’s love of water and grass, but we had brought her ashes there too, so that she could be with Vashti.

And so, a week later, when we received Homer’s ashes, we carried them all the way up to Fort Tryon Park, to the same lawn beneath the same oak tree where we’d released Scarlett and Vashti. My original three—Homer and his first, fastest friends—would be together again. The views were as sun-dappled and peaceful as I remembered. I hoped, I wanted to believe, that Homer at last was able to see them, to see all the beautiful things in this world that he never had, even though he’d seemed to be born knowing them already.

There was hardly anybody else at the park that day, and Laurence and I were alone in our little spot. I kissed the wooden box holding Homer’s ashes before I opened it. As if awaiting its cue, a breeze blew up and carried them away from us, into the sunlight and out toward the river.

I wish I could say that I had a stirring eulogy for the occasion, something as heroic and fine as Homer himself had been. Something befitting the send-off of a cat who had touched so many lives, who had become the symbol of something so much bigger than himself, but who had never stopped being my own, my much-loved, dear little guy.

But I had expended so many words on Homer already—tens of thousands of them. My words were all used up. I could only think of someone else’s. A scrap of an E.E. Cummings poem I’d first read back in my college creative-writing days, when I couldn’t possibly have foreseen the little black cat who would find me someday and become the author of all my good fortune.

“I carry your heart with me,” I said to the air and the ashes and the water flowing below us. “I carry it in my heart.”

The breeze waned, and Homer’s ashes, which had risen high above our heads, began to fall into the waiting grass. Laurence and I took each other’s hands, and then we turned to go.