This is a love story about a cat named Truffle.
While I had known a few lovely felines in my life, I had never really considered myself to be a cat person. However, I had fallen in love with, become engaged to, and bought a house with someone who was. Mark’s beloved childhood pet had been a Blue Nebelung named Buster, who would follow Mark on his paper route and wrap around his neck like a giant, fluffy scarf. My then-fiancé yearned for a cat in the same way that I yearned for a dog.
Which was how I found myself sitting at an intersection in Norwood, Massachusetts in July of 2016, turning to Mark and saying, “We’re about to get two cats, aren’t we?”
We had just visited a shelter to see a cat Mark had found through Pet Finder. The cat we were there to meet had looked a lot like Buster but turned out to be the polar opposite in terms of temperament—that is, he became very pointy very quickly. Meanwhile, I had wandered over to the giant cat enclosure and introduced myself to a small, orange tabby, who had sauntered over and offered her hind quarters to be scratched. She purred at me approvingly, and I was instantly smitten. Also in the enclosure was a large tortoise shell, who didn’t move from his bed but permitted us to pet him.
As we left the shelter, already committed to the orange cat and looking at her listing, we realized she was young enough to need a playmate, and that she had been surrendered from the same home as the tortoise shell. When I asked Mark the fateful question about getting two cats, the look he gave me reminded me of the moment when the Grinch’s heart grows two sizes and breaks the ruler: a second of uncertainty turned into the most hopeful, enormous smile I’d ever seen.
Yep. Two cats.
As I pulled together the logistics of the adoption, I had more or less made peace with the fact that both cats would probably prefer Mark to me. I just hoped they would tolerate me fairly well. When I called the shelter manager to confirm the pick-up date, she told me that the tortoise shell, whom we had named Truffle in the interim, had started walking around again. I was instantly on alert: had he been hurt? It wouldn’t have changed our adoption, but I wanted to be prepared for any health issues.
“No, no,” she hastened to assure me. “He’s not hurt. He’s just been… depressed.”
Something fierce and protective unfurled in my chest, and I remember very clearly thinking in no uncertain terms, Give me my cat.
We came to know later that, after Poem (the orange tabby) and Truffle had been surrendered, their original owner had come back to visit them frequently. Already at least eight years old, Truffle had probably had his heart broken each time she came back and left again. No wonder he yowled in anguish when we put Poem in the carrier and literally soiled himself in fear when we caught him as well.
In our spare bedroom that night, Truffle wedged himself in the back of the closet, and Poem, who was already nosing around and butting our hands with her head, eventually settled on top of him like a comforting blanket. Over the next several months, Truffle developed a routine of hissing at us from the back of our closet during daylight hours and coming to cuddle on our bed during the night. Mark said in that way he was kind of like a teenage boy: scared and hostile but desperate for affection.
One night while we were in our family room, Mark gasped quietly, staring at the doorway to the dining room: Truffle had finally come downstairs and was peering at us from under the table. He looked like an owl: large and ovoid with huge eyes. It took about a year, but eventually he made himself at home. He even forgave us (mostly) when we brought home a corgi puppy, though he made darn sure the dog knew who was boss. (Hank, our dog, is now about four times Truffle’s size but still terrified of him.) He even started rolling over to give us belly access, not as a trap (as with most cats) but as a genuine offer to rub his belly, which is a light shade of brown compared to his gray and black top coat and impossibly soft.
When I got pregnant, Truffle and I would wrestle every night for primary use of my body pillow. One night in bed close to my thirty-eighth week, he sat on the pillow and stared intently at my belly. He’d never done that before, and I froze. Then he slowly reached out one paw and laid it on my bump, looking for all the world like he was listening closely for something. I was absolutely convinced I’d go into labor that night (I didn’t), but after my daughter was born, Truffle hopped up on the arm of the sofa and sniffed speculatively at her. I swear he nodded slightly in satisfaction.
On our first night home from the hospital after having the baby, my postpartum anxiety spiked hard, and I lay in bed, muscles and teeth clenched against the violent shaking that started in my knees and rocked my entire body. Truffle hopped up on the bed, looked me over, and then curled his body tightly around my knees. He purred into my bones and the shaking eased.
Truffle had always been rather bulky and his fur very soft, but in the last few months, he’s lost a lot of weight and stopped grooming himself. Though we brush him as best we can, he gets annoyed with that pretty quickly, so his fur has become matted. Our best guess is that he’s probably around sixteen years old. When we were considering adoption, my sister, ever the pragmatist, told me bluntly and truly that more often than not, when you bring an animal into your life, it will be up to you to decide when to end its life. At the time, I acknowledged that wisdom and forced myself to look it in the face, before putting it in the back of my mind. It wasn’t abstract: I knew it would eventually be true, but that hopefully ‘eventually’ was a while away.
I don’t think it’s that far away now.
I realized sometime in my mid-twenties that “adulting,” such as it is, is mostly just faking it ‘til you make it. Somehow over the last fifteen years I’ve accumulated career, a graduate degree, a husband, a house, two cats, a dog, a baby, and a second mortgage to cover daycare. I’m still not entirely sure how that happened. After all, I still wear clunky boots as I did in my adolescence, much to my mother’s chagrin. I can still sleep until 11:30 am, though I rarely have the chance. And I have a cold, dense fear I can’t shake of losing the ones I love, including the furry ones. The voice inside my mind sounds very young when it says, I’m not ready.
As I write this, Truffle is curled up in his bed, which we’ve put over the heater in our living room. He has a way of becoming a perfect circle, with his tail tucked in and his paw draped over his eyes. When I go in to pet him, he opens one eye and extends his leg, so that I can scratch his armpit, which is his favorite form of affection. He can still jump over the baby gate, and he still yowls for his breakfast and hisses at the dog. Right now, today, this morning, that’s enough. If there’s anything I’ve learned from parenthood and the pandemic, which came in quick succession, it’s that one day at a time may sound trite, but it’s the best we can do.
It’s a terrible deal we make when we love, and I hate its unfairness with the passion of a small child who doesn’t understand and an adult who does. I hate that I’ll never be ready—that I can’t change that, that I’ll never be able to make peace with that, and that loss will come regardless. I thought that being an adult meant that you were ready, that you were prepared to take things on. I guess I was wrong, and a suitably adolescent voice in my head comments, Bummer.
I can’t control when it will happen, but I might be able to help with the where: when the time comes, we will pay the extra fee to have the vet come to our house, so that Truffle won’t need to experience the trauma of his carrier again. At least he can be home. I don’t kid myself that it won’t be awful; it very likely will be. But I try to tell myself that six good years of purring, yowling, belly-rubbing, dog-terrorizing, baby-protecting, fighting over body pillows, and turning me into a cat person will weigh against the acute moment he will die and the prolonged grief of his loss.
Because my heart will break clear in half, and he won’t be there to purr it back together.
