Layla
My cat died recently. This is going to be one of those posts. It’ll be messy, jarring, and with abrupt tonal shifts. Thematically congruent with the subject matter, in other words.
Everyone says their cat is special. It’s been a literary genre since the ancient Egyptians turned their enamoration into religious worship. My favorite historical example comes from Japanese emperor Uda’s diary from the year 889:
When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It’s as if it were circular Bi disk. When it stands, its cry expresses profound loneliness, like a black dragon floating above the clouds. By nature, it likes to stalk birds. It lowers its head and works its tail. It can extend its spine to raise its height by at least 2 sun. Its color allows it to disappear at night. I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.
It is not simply that I am impressed by the cat’s many talents; I have felt particularly keen to lavish the utmost care upon him, however insignificant such a creature may really be, because he was given to me by the former emperor. I once said to the cat, “You possess the forces of yin and yang and have a body that is the way it should be. I suspect that in your heart you may even know all about me!” The cat heaved a sigh, raised his head, and stared fixedly at my face, seeming so choked with emotion, his heart so full of feeling, that he could not say a thing in reply.
Yes, everyone thinks their cat is special but in my case, it was true. Layla was irrefutably special.
I don’t just say this to all the girls. I’ve taken care of many of my friend’s cats over the years, and with apologies to their parents, my heart did not soar for them. It soared for Layla though, because Layla was special.
All the more impressive that I met her late in her life. I was the step-dad. The interloper. The outsider. My wife Lauren spent 14 wonderful years with Layla, took her from a feral street kitten with an eye herpes infection, and raised her into the regal Layla we all became enamored with, and I swooped in afterwards. An easy trap for those around her to fall into, because Layla was special.
At first, I was annoyed with Layla. When Lauren and I started dating, Layla was always the bookend to our trysts. “I have to go home and feed Layla her dinner” was the recurring parting refrain from Lauren. Her devotion to Layla was borderline pathological, but I was a mercenary about it and accepted that if I was to have any chances with Lauren, I had to win Layla over. She was the gatekeeper I had to deal with. It took about a month before I finally met her in person but I was so nervous about making a good impression that I ended up just awkwardly towering behind her. She scattered away.
I didn’t know what I was doing, but I instinctively figured it out. The secret that unlocked my relationship with Layla were butt taps. I had no idea this was a thing before (there’s a whole subreddit about Cat Bongos), but holy hell Layla absolutely adored having me just whale on her ass with an open palm.
Her addiction became a huge problem, because Layla would get possessed anytime there was any inkling of receiving butt taps from me. She learned all the triggers. Bed? Butt taps. Couch? Butt taps. 5PM? Butt taps time. 8AM? Butt taps time.
Layla would watch me intently — her whole body tilted forward, ready to move. If she saw me heading towards the bedroom, she’d sprint ahead, bound up on top of the mattress, assume the position, and just stare at me with impatience.
Over time, entire portions of my home became verboten to me, unless I was ready to commit to a lengthy butt taps session. I couldn’t even sit anywhere on my couches with her around, because she’d get it in her walnut brain that it was butt tap time and then beeline for my lap, obstacles be damned. She moved with such a ferocity in this state that we had to construct elaborate procedures of cordoning her off with a blanket wall just to give me time to get settled. I felt like a bullfighter dangling a red cloth as a distraction. Because I knew once I sat down, Layla would have me pinned down and I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. Layla was special like that.
If I sat down while Layla was already snuggling with Lauren, Layla would brusquely and shamelessly somersault off of her to land onto my lap instead. If Lauren started petting her during this time, Layla would furiously kick her hands away. Layla was so rude in how she showed affection.
Once I started, Layla would enter a trance and her tiny little wedge skull would rattle up and down. If I stopped at any point, she’d glare at me with a side eye first. If that didn’t work, she’d get up, circle around, readjust her position, and emit tiny little panther roar of impatience. Anything to keep going, and I regularly did, no matter how sore my arms might get after an hour or more, because Layla was special.
And she was so funny.
Sometimes I’d be cooking dinner instead of in the living room like she expected me to be in the evenings. I’d be chopping up an onion and she’d stroll down the hallway to the kitchen and then stop mid-strut to stare me down. I’d pause my chopping and we’d have a tense stand-off. The slightest furtive movement on my end would send her u-turning into a speeding gallop, and I felt the compulsion to chase after her. She loved playing chase, at least as much as her little ailing heart could handle. She’d run to a pre-determined spot — always the exact same spot — and then pretend to be cornered and Sphinx onto the ground, feigning capitulation. I’d grab her, taunt her with jeers of “You got caught! You got caught!!” and pet her and butt tap her.
I’d walk away back to tend to my onions, and she’d eventually follow me and start the whole cycle again. Food prep took way longer all because of her, and we loved her for it.
Layla also changed me.
I know this is going to sound trite and totally naive, but she made me realize how much I want to be a dad. Through Layla, I got acquainted with peripheral aspects of the father role.
She was the first thing I thought of when I got up in the morning. I might desperately need to pee upon waking up, but I’d still hold it in to check on where she ended up sleeping first. She had her favorite window, where she kept tabs on everyone in the neighborhood and where she’d curl up into a ball after her shift was over. She’d usually hear me approaching, at which point her head would jolt up and she’d utter her signature prrrt greeting — a mix of a purr and a pigeon’s coo. My bladder could hold a bit longer just so I could savor saying good morning.
She was the last thing I checked on at night. She loved being outside and I’d flick the backyard lights on and she’d appear out of thin air, blinking away from night-vision mode. Sometimes she’d come back inside willingly, sometimes I had to entice her with her favorite treats. We installed security cameras exclusively just to keep tabs on her and her antics. Those were our baby monitors; we’d be out of the house and invariably think “I wonder what Layla is up to right now.”
There was an array of cat furniture to assemble in addition to various other household projects. I’d be constantly monitoring for environmental hazards, or small holes she could crawl through, exactly like human babies. I spent so many brain cycles trying to figure out a backyard entrance for her in our rental. I became the dude that sketched out plans on paper and then spends a couple of fruitless hours wandering the aisles at Home Depot. I ended up installing a whole ass door just for her, something I’ve never dreamt of doing before. This was full-on Dad Mode.
Dealing with her mounting health problems was its own challenge. With a lot of humans, the signs of ailment tend to be obvious, namely because humans can talk and whine. But with cats, they really do indeed hide their ailments. We knew from blood tests and diagnostic imaging that Layla’s heart wasn’t pumping as much as it should. Eventually, the cardiac cycle that sustains all of us would lead to an unpumped fluid backlog for her. The fluid would slowly seep out into her chest cavity and smother her heart, further weakening it and prompting a relentless degenerative loop. There is no cure for congestive heart disease. All we can do is count her respiratory rate, and watch her run around, and maybe delude ourselves into believing that all the interventions we were plying on are moving the needle somehow, squeezing out however much trickle of additional days of life.
Her eleven point three pound ass required miniscule doses of medication, and tiny pills had to be split up in half and then again for half of that half. At one point I bought a miniature mortar and pestle and a high-grade tiny measuring scale so I could compound all her medications myself. The array of dubious white powder within individual packaging on our kitchen table would have raised very reasonable suspicion if any cops had seen it.
And we made up so many songs about her, Layla was my muse. Almost every song was a repurposed cover song about some aspect of her health, like Beach Boys - Kokomo and the specialized food she needed (Weruva, for Layla, ooh I wanna feed you…), or acknowledging my full-time job as butt tapper to the tune of Amber - This is Your Night (This is my life, tapping Layla’s butt until the morning light…), or cataloguing all the daily medications she needed along the Spider-Man theme song:
Medicine, Medicine, Time to give Layla her medicine
Furosemide, Vetmedin, Amlodipine, Clopidogrel
Look out! Here comes a fifth medicine…
When Udio hit the scene, almost every song I generated ended up being about Layla. Bird Bonanza is a veritable banger (weird mix of Devo, Madness, and who knows what else) detailing Layla’s frenemy relationships with our backyard wildlife.
The one I find most difficult to listen to right now without bawling is Eat and Forget, because it’s all about the small gestures of protest Layla made as we tried to throw multiple gelcaps down her throat.
Your paw goes up, just a slight resist,
We hold your head gently, it's hard to persist.
We whisper softly, “It’s okay, sweet girl,”
Then place treats in front, hoping you’ll unfurl.
The end was a series of health cascades within cascades, and it happened so fast.
But before that mad rush to the emergency vet that was the beginning of this finale, Layla was her typical summer sponge self. We barely saw her during these months, because she would spend as much time as possible soaking up every stray ray of sunshine. Our closed backyard was her uncontested domain, where she’d sniff the breeze, eyes closed and head tilted back. She’d readjust lounging spots periodically, tracing the sun’s path like a sentient sundial, and we’d idly wonder whether cats can get heat strokes.
She’d remain outside our backdoor late into the evening, sitting motionless and staring intently at something somewhere beyond the gloom. We’d mock her nighttime sentry devotion (“I am the sentinel of the night”, “I am the protector of the moss”, “I am the defender of the realm”, and so on) and dismiss her fixations as the by-product of senility. It wasn’t until after she was gone that we realized the parade of trespassing rats and racoons that suddenly felt emboldened to intrude. You were indeed protecting us, and I’m sorry for ever making fun of you Layla.
We knew how territorial she could get about her space. If any other cat had the misfortune of stepping into our yard, she’d launch into an inconsolable frenzy, yowling with rage and even momentarily turning on us when we’d try to hold her back. The one partial exception was this tufty neighborhood stray whom we started referring to as Layla’s boyfriend, or Felix. One night I caught her calmly transfixed on a corner, and she uncharacteristically refused to even look at me as I tried to get her attention. When I shined a light on where she was staring, I spotted Felix nervously perched on top of our fence. Layla had previously yowled at him many times before, but so long as he stayed up there and off the ground, she was cool with him.
In her last week at home, Layla had unprecedented panache. She got random bouts of the zoomies during the day and scurried through piles of leaves on her own. Layla was normally averse to heights, but she made several spontaneous tree climbing attempts. She got about two feet off the ground before deciding it was more fun to scratch the bark than climb it. My mom happened to be visiting that week and noticed Layla’s bon vivant nature. After Layla’s death, my mom remarked “She was saying good bye to life.”
But the most impressive act that week was how she managed to catch two baby rats, two days in a row. Layla had functionally retired from predation ages ago. Though the basic instinct remained, her general clumsiness coupled with the goofy loud bell around her neck rendered all her pouncing attempts comedic. The neighborhood squirrels and chickadees got very comfortable near her, because they learned to expect that any of her approaches would be telegraphed with a loud RING-A-LING klaxon.
And despite all those handicaps, she did it. Twice. One day I noticed her attention curiously fixated on something near the door, not one of her typical peeping spots. There was a quick flurry of action as soon as I opened the door, and when the dust had settled Layla had a squirming rat between her jaws. I knew I was supposed to intervene but I was frozen, and couldn’t help but gaze at her and her achievement with genuine admiration.
The next day, again in my presence, I saw her fixated on something under a bush, and I recognized the tiny breathing mass desperately trying to camouflage from Layla as yet another baby rat. She chased the rat underneath a stone ledge. Despite her wedge-shaped face, she couldn’t fit far into it. I grabbed a small pry bar and lifted the entire slab, at which point the rat darted out past Layla and dove into a pile of leaves. This geriatric bitch pirouetted in place and her claws homed in after her mark. She held the leaves down, the rat hiding somewhere underneath, but she didn’t know where. I took the same pry bar and started scraping the pile of leaves, and Layla’s head darted around, looking for any reaction, and then dove for her final coup de grâce.
At that moment I felt like I was standing on a fulcrum of the universe. I wasn’t just myself, but rather, I was a figurative ambassador for all of mankind and throughout all of history. Layla wasn’t just a cat, but the avatar of all tiny felines everywhere and across eons. We joined at that particular moment to mirror the progeny of our species’ enduring symbiotic relationship. No matter what year or what place, a human and a cat had a parallel interaction like this everywhere and everywhen. A coil wrapped around a central pillar that commemorates our durable and transcendental pact; each turn of the coil revisiting the same interaction but with different avatars and set dressing, an interaction which impressed on both parties that holy shit this partnership could work. We both realized we brought complimentary skills to the table: She brought tenacity, reflexes, and heightened auditory and visual capabilities to the task at hand, and I brought an ancestral accumulation of tool use. I can only assume this is what Olympic athletes feel like when serving as the athletic ambassadors of an entire nation.
It’s still a transactional covenant no matter how you dress it up. I’m aware of the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing everything animals do, but you should also know that we anthropomorphize other humans. Pain is simply a severe signal used by your body to tell you “figure out how to stop whatever is causing this now!” It’s an alarm system that can be found in any simple appliance, but we dress it up and romanticize its impact, its weight, and its flavor. We do the same with the mythology and lore we’ve built up around sex, a ubiquitous act which is the minimum possible criteria for any sexual species’ survival.
But I don’t care if it can be deconstructed into bare transactional elements; she brought joy into my life, and I hope I brought joy to hers. A continuation of a long ancestral tradition.
One day she was fine. The next day she wasn’t.
She couldn’t close her jaw anymore, which could’ve been a dental disease infection or possibly even lymphoma. It was a serious situation that required serious interventions, but the steroids we had to give her to deal with her jaw sent her heart rate skyrocketing, and I broke innumerable traffic laws rushing her back to the vet a second night. The vitals were concerning but stable, but she wasn’t herself and still loopy from the med cocktail. Back at home, she was incapable of sleep and developed an unprecedented obsession with water, spending hours and hours sitting in front of her water bowl, unable to drink. She’d whine at us to let her into the bath tub — a place she never had any interest in — so she could sit in front of the water stream and purr loudly to herself.
She ended up at a specialty animal hospital and we camped out at nondescript hotels off the highway nearby just so we could be a stone throw’s away during a crisis. Lauren and I could pretend that were just on vacation somewhere, finally going on the honeymoon that would’ve previously been impractical given our daily and inescapable obligations to Layla. We could, during brief momentary lapses, pretend none of this was real. And yet, we’d immediately segue into crying fits as soon as we woke up, somehow unaffected by the common disorientation of rousing in unfamiliar environments.
From the standpoint of universally applicable ethical principles, I cannot justify the amount of resources we devoted to her care, but nor do I care or feel obligated to. Layla stayed in the pet ICU where she was monitored constantly. Someone out there decided to devote years of their life studying veterinary science, staying up late chowing down on shitty college food, just to be rewarded with the honor of working the Saturday overnight shift at an animal hospital where the nearest notable landmark is a decomposing outlet shopping mall. I couldn’t possibly be more grateful to my fellow humans and the baffling life decisions they made.
Every remedy had to navigate a precarious balance. Inflammation required steroids, but steroids risked heart failure, but not dealing with the jaw inflammation meant she wasn’t drinking enough, which risked kidney failure, but drinking too much risked congesting her ailing heart, and on top of all this her blood pressure was falling behind. Euthanasia was recommended within the first day but we refused to accept that conclusion. We were different after all, we had high-limit credit cards, we had pet health insurance (holy shit please get it). We weren’t constrained by typical material realities, and my heart broke for those who faced a similar situation without our luxuries. And we, unlike some other people out there, were fully devoted to our Layla.
The staff pushed on and tried everything possible, but Layla’s options and our optimism eventually ran out and had to face reality. We absolutely did not want her to continue suffering, but how the fuck do you expect us to just fucking give up? The siren call of delusional hope can be so irresistible in the moment. As much as we wanted her to keep fighting, we had to accept that the inevitable was approaching, faster than we were ready for. Even during the final phone call with a vet, after a week of god knows how many specialists doted on Layla’s every lab result and vital measurement, Lauren’s plea was choked with sobs: “Are you sure we tried everything? Are you really sure?”
It was a question with a painfully obvious answer, but we needed to ask it again and again. Just in case.
Writing out Layla’s final day is an exercise in physical agony. I cannot document what transpired without reliving it all.
There’s a certain class of professions whose primary benefit to society is dealing with the macabre so that others don’t have to be reminded of it. I would have assumed that the staff at an animal hospital would be saturated with nihilism after seeing thousands of agonized families euthanizing their animal, but I never caught a whiff of that cynicism. They were patient, somber, and earnest. They gave us a comfortable room with a couch and an indefinite amount of time with Layla, as much as we could drink our fill.
We brought her favorite toys, her favorite treats, her favorite blankets, and this shitty alarm clock knockoff from China whose bird sounds were the soundtrack to so many tranquil mornings with just the three of us. Layla was now gaunt and weak, but her big personality was still there and shone through. We offered her the same treats we used to entice her back in from the yard. She started purring loudly and made valiant efforts of chowing down, but she just couldn’t close her jaw and grasp what she was after. As soon as I sat down on the couch next to Lauren, Layla gesticulated wildly and forced her way onto my lap for butt taps. As insulting as the display was to Lauren, I was so grateful to see Layla’s sassy energy manifest itself one last time. I tapped Layla’s butt like there was no tomorrow, because there wasn’t going to be.
I had my phone out and felt self-conscious about recording everything, like the army of dipshits at concerts that have their phones up the whole show. I wanted to drink and savor every second, gulp down the river of experience that was fleeting from my grasp. I wanted to hold. I did not want to let go. I wanted to anchor every sensual experience I could imprison and pin them down, imprint them into pixels that will beam across an international cloud backup infrastructure in the hopes that some day in the future, they will serve as a medium for me to astral project into the past. Projecting into a time and space that no longer exists, and never will again. Projecting into a rapidly fading hallucination. I wanted to trap the day into a jar. I wanted to freeze the hours into amber.
My desire to prolong the moment indefinitely was polluted by dreading the impending and inevitable end. We pressed the button that notified the staff that we were ready. Layla was wrapped in a blanket on my wife’s lap, and I gazed into her eyes, her bulbous inky spheres that have captured and relayed so much light for so long, and I just kept tapping her butt. I kept tapping, even after a licensed veterinary told me her heart has stopped beating. I kept tapping that ass. Just in case any part of her still felt something. Just in case.
There was no obvious moment that demarcated her death. Her heart may have stopped beating for sure, but her fur was just as soft, her nose was just as velvety, and she was — for a time — just as warm. What I saw was indistinguishable from what I had grown to recognize as Layla. Her corporeal form was still there, unchanged, but that invisible spark of life that animated her vital organs was the only thing missing. I understand why people believe in souls, because there’s no other marker that portends the inevitable decomposition.
Our home, previously the setting for so much carefree laughter, now felt a hollowed din. We brought her body home and cleaned and washed her, it, on our bathroom floor. We brought her out to the backyard on her favorite fuzzy bed, the realm she so zealously guarded on our behalf. Her fur was jostled by the breeze and warmed by the sun, a cruel pantomime of what once was, and an agonizing reminder of what is now lost.
No less than 45 minutes after we brought her back inside, we looked out and spotted none other than motherfucking Felix inside our backyard, staring right at us. Layla’s scorned boyfriend paid her one last visit.
He was full-on trespassing but Layla wasn’t around to tell him otherwise anymore. He would keep coming back around again and again, sniffing around Layla’s typical haunts and finding none of her. I don’t care what anyone else says, I’ve earned a lifelong entitlement to anthropomorphizing their relationship. Felix fucking misses his girl.
I look around and see nothing but reminders. I’m desperate to jettison silent monuments to Layla’s immense absence. I move her perch away and notice the dirt pattern it leaves on the floor, a symbol of what I previously assumed was her indefinite existence. I’m stuck with the dilemma that the mark her things leave behind feels far heavier than their presence. We couldn’t bear to be away from her body and slept next to her on the floor all night. The next day we took her to a pet funeral home, because of course modern capitalism provides such imaginably luxurious frivolities.
Misery from grief can be intoxicating. Not just the catharsis of pain, but the need to demonstrably affirm how much we loved those we lost. Any stray sentiment of happiness brings behind it a biblical flood of insurmountable guilt. Those feelings are anathema during this time, seen as a grave insult to our dearly departed, because it makes us doubt whether we ever cared. If we are not completely flattened, absolutely decimated, and overwhelmingly burdened by grief…isn’t that conclusive proof that we didn’t actually love as much as we claim? Marinating within that gloom is addicting.
The thought of never seeing Layla again fills me with aching dread. And yet, that same burning sensation counsels me with regard to a far grimmer reality — the possibility that I could have never met her. I am so grateful that I am in this reality, as grim as it is, with the aching sharpness of her absence.
I hurt so deeply that you’re gone Layla, and yet I’m also overcome with joy and gratitude that I got to know you. I will forever miss you.
This is beautifully written. I’m sorry for your loss.
I’m so sorry for your loss — I’m owned by three cats and they are all incredibly special, lovely beings and the thought of losing them one day scares me so much. But you’re right, it is important to savor the time spent with them and be glad you crossed paths with them at all. Thanks for sharing such a beautiful tribute.