The day before we traveled for Thanksgiving, we had to say goodbye to our dear Kepler.
Last winter, she had declined quite a bit – I said that she lost one of her nine lives but she still had a few left. We didn’t think she would make it through the kitchen renovation. With her main living space disrupted for months and a rotating cast of characters coming in and out of the house making loud noises (which she couldn’t hear since she had lost her hearing some time ago – though she could feel some vibrations), she lost quite a bit of weight, even though we sometimes did things like this for her.
She stopped grooming herself, and she also started peeing and leaving turds in the construction areas. We saw this out-of-the-litter-box activity as a form of protest rather than a decline in health. But the other thing is – she turned around once we settled back into the new kitchen and dining room. She put on weight. She intermittently started grooming again. Em said she had recommitted to life a few months later when Myron was born. When we took her to the vet, she said that she didn’t expect to see Kepler again, so she impressed her. Kepler dutifully started guarding Myron. She would sit by him and face him or face the door or the hallway to make sure to intercept any potential intruders. When Myron was starting to learn how arms and hands work, she patiently let him try to pet her and tolerated the flailing. She would even reciprocate by rubbing her nose on Myron, gifting him Kepler bacon (Jeanne’s term for the scabs that flaked off from Kepler’s nose). Perhaps because of her old age, she never got hostile with him. The most she would do is flinch a bit and pull her head back from a flailing hand, but then she would stick her head back out again. Once, she made a very deliberate point to come visit Myron upstairs and even jumped up on the futon to greet him. Myron got excited and tried to eat her face.
Kepler saw herself as a caretaker for us as much as we were caretakers for her. The first of many times Kepler puzzled me, I was at Em’s apartment working on a project from my laptop late at night. Kepler insistently meowed at me, which I later realized was her telling me it was time for bed. One time early in my relationship with Em, Kepler chewed through the tubing of my insulin pump. I attributed this to pure curiosity, but Em thinks she might have been trying to protect her by sabotaging me. Nancy made Kepler a toy mouse out of corduroy, and it became like a teddy bear for her. We kept it in her bed, and sometimes she would use it as a pillow. One time, when Em was sick, Kepler picked up her mouse and brought it to Em on the bed.
One of Kepler’s most notorious peculiar behaviors was that she made us watch her eat. She meowed at us until we walked over and stood over her at her food dish. When we ate, she would reciprocate by standing guard at the edge of the rug under the dining table, just to make sure no one else came and stole our food.
After another decline that seemed as though it wasn’t going to reverse, Em made the decision and the vet was able to squeeze us in to put her down. Em held her in the car rather than putting her in the carrier, and I brought along her mouse and put it in front of her on the cushion on the vet’s examination table. We both stood with her and petted her to make sure she knew we were there, guarding her as she went to sleep for the last time.
She meows very loudly in our memory.