Truman, our most reclusive cat, has gone onward tonight to what my grandfather would call “the Church Triumphant,” and I hope we gave him a life that he enjoyed in his own weird way.
On a chilly evening in late December of 2011, Aimee and I were getting into our car after dinner at Panera when we heard a kitten mewing. After some rustling around in the bushes, we found a small black-brown ball of fluff who could fit in one hand.
I’d like to say that we fell in love with that cat immediately and brought him home, but we tried first to find him a different one. We were already flush with cats and we weren’t sure we could take care of yet another one…but eventually we discovered that we could.
He was a skittish little boy, though perhaps not so young: the vet who neutered him told us that his teeth were too developed to be younger than four months. We had no idea what he lived on or where before we found him at Panera. Rats? Lizards? It couldn’t only have been bread.
We called him Truman Cat-pote, continuing our theme of cats named for authors we liked. He seemed to like us more or less in return, though his raging anxiety disorder kept him from curling up on our laps for long. He preferred when we were lying down, and throughout the night, he’d paw through Aimee’s hair or bat either of us on the cheek for attention. He didn’t settle when we’d pet him, pacing back and forth instead.
In that way, Truman was our most Norman-like cat: skittish, rumpled, inconveniently weird, sometimes annoying, but still somehow needy for affection. When he got used to friends who visited us, he’d make an appearance in the living room like a cryptid, and a Truman sighting was always an honor for them.
We managed to get him to the vet maybe twice because he would writhe and fight when we tried to place him in a carrier, clawing at your head like a facehugger from Alien. I feel terrible that we didn’t get him better medical care, but he was impossible to pill or otherwise medicate, and we were terrified that his heart would explode on the way to the doctor.
He seemed content to live in our house and be weird, sometimes leaving a tooth or a clump of fur for rent.
We don’t have many stories about Truman. It wasn’t until we installed cat-calming diffusers in outlets around the house that he began to lounge in the front window or on the couch. Mostly he hung out in the bedroom like a strange stoner roommate, not contributing much but amiably showing up to be social when it suited him.
We had no idea what he wanted from us, so we did the best we could by sitting still and petting him until he dozed off.
For the last few weeks, he’d been eating less and less, and today when we tried to take him to the litter box, he couldn’t quite stand on his back legs. Harlan had taken to sleeping near him as a guardian this week, and we knew this evening that Truman was ready for whatever’s next.
I’m sure my mother is waiting to greet him when he crosses over, though God knows how she’ll catch him. Maybe there’s no anxiety disorder over the Rainbow Bridge.
In his memory, take some time over the next day or so to show some love to a challenging weirdo in your life who doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.
Like Truman, they need and want it anyway.
