Goodbye, Aimee
posted at 9:37 pm
on Apr. 21, 2017
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Aimee and I went to the vet today, and I came home.
Emily and my mom were there with me. I’ve never done that before. It’s not like you think. There are all these little details you never imagine, like how purple the towel is, and how many kleenexes you use, and how many times people come in and out of the room. Deciding which card to pay with. The look of people in the waiting room who are there to get a distemper shot or a few stitches, when they realize how lucky they are.
People always say that pets become like one of the family. I get called Dad a lot, and Emily’s called Mom, especially because of Mack and his baby-like size, and some pets do act almost human at times.
But Aimee was never a person. She was a cat, dammit, and she never let you forget it.
Would a person meow so sharply, so conversationally and so mysteriously? What are you saying? What? What? I’ve never met a cat with as wide a range of meows.
Would a person throw up so casually and frequently while making her daily rounds? Would a human think that a great place to sleep was not in your lap but on your forearms?
Would I have tolerated a person waking me up at 6 in the morning, 5 in the morning, 4 in the morning, because the food in her food dish was NOT FRESH and she wanted DIFFERENT FOOD? Or maybe there was a DOOR CLOSED SOMEWHERE and that was UNFAIR.
Would a person ever be so light in my arms, so slender and fragile that she was nothing but fur and bones and a large unyielding mass in the middle that was pretty much all that was stopping her from floating away as she balanced on the vet’s gurney this afternoon.
No, Aimee was a cat, start to finish, and was born the way a cat should be, in a literal alley. She escaped certain death by poison only thanks to some good samaritans whose office opened onto that alley, who took her in and rescued the whole litter. They needed to find homes before the boss came back from vacation, and Susie got an AOL Instant Message from a complete stranger that asked, do you want a free kitten, and that’s how AIMee came into our lives.
She had the longest name of any of my pets: she was named Aimee from AOL Instant Messenger, then we expanded her name shortly thereafter to “Aimee Crash, Action Cat” when it became apparent that she could jump and dive faster than anything else in the world.
She moved in with Susie and I in Pasadena, and irritated the crap out of Lukaska, who wanted to know why this little bundle of energy wanted to play so much. Later in life, when various other pets irritated Aimee, I always laughed at the turnabout.
She was separated too soon from her mother, and had a strange suckling behavior that never fully went away. She was a watcher, not a participant, but never shy when there was activity. She liked to go outside, but stuck close to home—she wasn’t a wanderer.
Free kitten—ha ha! Hardly. When she developed a thyroid tumor, the treatment was a combination of large doses of radiation and cash. The cash evaporated quickly but the radiation stuck around for about 10 days—explaining to our airbnb guests that they shouldn’t let Aimee sit in their laps for the next week or so because she would set off a geiger counter—that was fun.
She moved from Pasadena to Coal Harbour to Kitsilano to Shaughnessy to Strathcona to Chinatown to Calgary. She met a lot of wonderful people, and was an office cat at times, too.
Aimee was old enough that there aren’t any digital pictures of her as a kitten. She was a wonderful, wonderful pet, and I like thinking back on all her wonderful adventures, because they are my wonderful adventures too, and she helped make them more joyful, more interesting, more real.
Goodbye Aimee. Thanks for teaching me how to be a better human.
