RIP - Dusty (and our Pets)

My cat, Dusty, died, apparently January 18, 2009. She was 13 years or so old.

We got her a few months before my wife and I separated at the end of 95, when my sons' babysitter's cat had kittens. We went to look at them, and her coloring was just beautiful, as far as I was concerned, especially in comparison with the other kittens in the litter. A few weeks later, we took her home.

We had a male cat that Mama Kitty, one that we'd brought with us from Indy to Lebanon in 92, Seymour (or Sup Sup - Most all of our cats had real names and names at the time!) Within a week or so, they were fast friends.

When my wife left with the kids, she took Seymour, and left me Dusty and Tubby, another cat we got from the babysitter. LOL

See, apparently, another cat in the neighborhood had some black kittens, and for some reason, a big black male cat in the neighborhood was killing the them. She'd gotten about three of them, and was nursing them with a toy baby bottle. My sons were fascinated with them. One had some physical problems, and we promised one of the boys that we would take it, kind of assuming it probably wouldn't make it (and having warned him of that). Well, it didn't make it too much longer, and since we'd promised him one of them, and she didn't have anyone else to take him, we did. Again, once we brought him home, Seymour and Dusty made fast friends with him. (Oh... He was called "Tubby" because, especially when he was little, when he'd eat, his stomach would get ... tubby. LOL)

Anyway, Dusty and Tubby were with me through the divorce and becoming a non-custodial (except every other weekend and a couple of weeks in the summer) divorced father. Through that time, I had a couple of years of being single, a couple years of a long-distance relationship, and for a few years after I met my wife and she moved in. We got a dog for my wife (she had had one before she divorced), and that dog (who was supposed to have been fixed) had five puppies. We gave away three of them, and kept two. The cats were suspicious of the puppies, but soon came to accept them, grudgingly. Then Tubby died. We're never figured out why, we just found him one day behind the couch.


Before my wife moved in (either just before or just after), my ex-wife moved to an apartment, and couldn't keep Seymour any more. Guess who got him. Actually, he had become an outdoor cat, despite being declawed. She gave me the option of letting him live - outdoors - with me, or taking him to have him put down. (One of the reasons he became an outdoor cat was because he wanted to, but he also had a problem of ... not using the litter box for urinating. No one would want him as an indoor cat, now.) So, she brought him one weekend when Chris (my wife) was here. He's been our "outdoor kitty" for the last eight years or so.

Sometime around when Tubby died, my wife's old dog (about 12 years old) had a 3-puppy litter. When she visited her kids one day, she came back with one of them. So, now we have four dogs - three black lab mixes, and a rat-terrier/spitz mix), Seymour (outside) and Dusty (inside). See pix of the dogs at http://www.orangefrogproductions.com/examples/bdcard/page1.htm . (I used them to make an HTML birthday card for a relative. You may have to allow it to redirect to another page... It stays on the site, but changes pictures.)

Dusty saw house change as my wife redid it, painting and papering every room, herself, saw us get engaged and married, saw the living room reorganized at least four times, and saw MANY boxes that she loved to get into come in and go out.

Recently, she saw a new cat come to the house. My wife works nights at a factory in town. A young cat (maybe older than a kitten, but not quite full-grown), was hanging around where she worked, and occasionally getting fed there. The cat loved being held and petted. Well, one day, I got up, and my wife was in the living room grinning. She pointed over to the table by the door, and I saw a cat laying there. I thought it was Seymour... It has pretty much the same coloring... Nope... It was the one from work. (Dusty never really liked being held. She liked being petted, but tended to walk around while you petted her.) After a week or so, this little loudmouth - (s)he meows quite a bit, and is LOUD, not like Dusty, who meows in a hoarse voice - was dubbed "Mauw" (pronounced Mao, as in Mao Tsi Tung - and I realized afterwords that even THAT could have been a play on words - Mousy Tongue? LOL). (S)he (we've not quite figured out which it is) and Dusty started getting along, about the time Dusty started slowing down.

Most of this is in hindsight:

For the past couple of weeks we'd noticed that she hasn't been hanging around the big dogs, as she did before, and she'd been getting thin (hard to tell under all that long hair, but when you petted her, you could feel her bones, especially in the last week). She'd been laying in strange places, sometimes in the way, sometimes just out of the way, but on the floor instead of the chair or couch. She also hadn't been coming to me to get petted when I went to bed. (I pet each of the dogs then, and she got jealous, and started demanding being petted, too.) She didn't seem in pain, so we didn't take her to the vet. (I'd rather think of it as Hospice for your pet.) She could get food (but didn't seem to when we were watching), she could drink (but, again, didn't seem to when we were watching), and wander the house. I petted her whenever I saw her, but hadn't since the day before.

My wife had to go down to Fort Branch, as her ex's sister had died, and they had the service at the funeral home, then. She was going to stay for a while, and if Kyndel, her two-year-old grandadaughter started getting fussy, was going to take her to her daughter's house, stay for a while, and go back to the funeral home. She was planning on spending the night, going to the burial, again to help with Kydel, and coming home Monday, to work Monday night. Since I can't walk out into the yard, and the dogs won't ... do their doody ... for me, we called my son, Matthew, and he came to spend the night after work. Chris had noticed that Dusty was breathing "funny", but I didn't really see anything, and was pretty sure that she'd be gone soon, too. Well, she was.

Matthew came and we talked for a while. Then he asked where Dusty was. I realized that I hadn't seen her all day, so he started looking, first in the places I knew Dusty had been hanging out recently (behind the couch, on the rug in the back room, behind the chair), and when she wasn't there, he started looking in the other rooms. She had gone into my wife's office, laid on the floor, between the treadmill and bookshelf, and that's where he found her.

As I said, she's been around here, mostly on the periphery, since about 1995. She only "bothered" us when she needed her food bowl filled or she wanted a quick pet. Even so, she will be missed.

RIP, Dusty.