Remembering Maggs

The day after our cat dies, I close the laundry room door for the first time ever.

My toddler is standing in the open doorway, blocked by the gate meant to block the dog, though too often the dog charges right through it, tempted by the taste of cat food and dirty litter. I usher him away from the room and push the door shut, making sure to leave an opening large enough that the cat can fit through it, can come and go as he pleases. We use a small rubber doorstop to keep the door from closing all the way, but I can’t find it. It has slid beneath the bench by the back door. I am already down on the floor, lying on my belly, my hand wading through the dusty recess beneath the bench before I realize all of this is pointless. There is no longer a cat who needs laundry room access. I close the door and start to cry.

It has been just over a week since our cat died and I am trying to picture him in the months before he got sick. What was he like in January? I can’t remember. All I can see is his mangy, thinning body, the slow wasting away. When our dog died, fourteen years old but having received a recent bill of good health, it was heartbreaking in its suddenness, in the unexpected four-day spiral from puzzling at the fact that he wouldn’t eat anything one afternoon to gently kissing his soft head as the last breath left his body. Our cat’s death has been a different kind of heartbreak, expected and at times wished for, and yet no less crushing when it finally arrived.

I am waiting to reach a headspace where I no longer think I see him out of the corner of my eye whenever I walk into a room. Where I can picture him again, plump and healthy, snuggled between us on the couch, taking up lots of space. Where I can remember the fullness of his presence over the last seventeen years of our lives instead of just the bookends as a big-eared, long-tailed energetic kitten, or a paper-thin, ragged old cat on death’s door.

It is so painful to lose a pet. My son asks me when it will stop hurting and I tell him, never really. You will always feel the pang of it in your memories. But your life keeps moving forward and growing bigger around it and eventually, the hurt is a small speck in the distance. A place you visit less frequently and for shorter periods.

I can’t picture my cat in January, but I can still feel the softness of his belly when I close my eyes. The warm fluff against my cheek. It both soothes my pain and intensifies it, to sit in this memory. It makes me miss him more. It makes me miss my dog, and my friends, everyone I’ve ever lost. It makes me want to pull my children into the softness of my own belly, to snuggle my face against theirs. It makes me want to hold my husband in my arms and whisper, remember, remember, in his ear, recounting all the shared joys of our lives.

I have packed up the leftover cat food to pass along to family members. I have dumped out the litter box, rearranged the laundry room, and mopped the food stains from the floor. I have gathered all the blankets the cat slept on, their fabric still holding the rank smell of his final days. I put them in the washing machine and turn it on. For some reason, our pipes whine whenever water is added to the machine’s cycle—a high-pitched squealing noise that makes my teeth clench. With the laundry room door closed, I barely hear it.

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