Rememberings: Broken Hearted

I'll tell you about my special alien cat, you tell me about yours.

Nov 09, 2023

**Peanut, the butterflies and distant planet Bibula.** **Art by Jean-Paul Beck.**

In the mythology of Peanut, she was dropped off on Earth to study our way of life, light enough to be transported by butterflies from the faraway planet where she was born, protected from burning as she entered Earth's atmosphere by a generous slather of heat-repelling goo.

Like all mythologies, ours hoped to explain the inexplicable: why we'd found this strange thing, utterly alone, in the church parking lot across the street from our house in Indianapolis—tiny creature, sea of asphalt—and at first mistook her for a charred, dead bird; why she climbed so readily into my lap the minute I sat down on the ground; why she was so alarmingly underweight, every bone delineated as if she were no more than skin stretched over a biology-class skeleton; why her fur—what little there was—was slicked with a mystery substance that made it stand up in a kind of sparse alien mohawk. The only alternative to imagining her the victim of some dark cruelty was believing she'd come from across the universe.

We found her on the weekend of July 4, 2000. We already had a cat and weren't looking for another. We took her in just to get rid of her—to make her presentable enough so we could foist her on someone else. Or, we took her in because we knew that if we didn't, she would die. In the end, less than four years later, she died anyway. Though the doctors had their explanation, we would need a myth for that too.

No one wanted her. Neighbors, coworkers—everyone politely declined. My husband was surprised. I wasn't, at all; what was there to recommend her? She was a misbegotten little calico with a skinny rat-tail, a bald and bony Frankenkitten whose face was half dark brown, half tawny tan, split down the center as though she'd been patched together from scraps. The fur that met her nose was exactly the color of her nose, so that it looked as if someone had skinned her there. She weighed 14 ounces. Her poop was the consistency of warm pudding, and though she understood the litter box, she didn't always make it there fast enough. I exiled her to nights on our back porch.

In Pups, our year-old cat who, with us, wanted nothing more than to love and be loved, she brought out a brutal instinct to kill the weak. He hunted her without mercy, cornered her and attacked, clamping his jaws around her neck in a death grip. She'd cry out, desperately, and wriggle free just in time. As if we knew even then that we wouldn't be getting rid of her, we told Pups to be nicer or she'd pay him back someday.

At the vet’s, we learned that she was six to eight weeks old and that her loud, strange purr was just a loud, strange purr—not the sound of a fatal respiratory ailment or a loose part rattling around inside her. It was a two-layer purr, one song on top of another, sung at the same time, like the throat singers of Tannu Tuva.

Coming from a normal cat, that purr would have been merely noteworthy; coming from Peanut, it was yet more proof of her alien origins. The signs were everywhere: her intense visual acuity (when we watched basketball, she'd sit on top of the TV and bat the ball up and down the length of the court); her second, beyond-our-frequency language (she liked to open her mouth and speak while making no perceptible sound); her foil obsession. If it was Christmas, say, and you had a bowl of Hershey's miniatures sitting around, and you opened one as quietly as possible in the corner of the kitchen while Peanut was fast asleep on a bed upstairs, just like that she'd be there at your feet—must have foil, must have foil. If you balled it up when she wasn’t watching and set it high and out of sight, she'd come back again and again to sit below it and wait.

And so the mythology grew. On the trip to Earth, it wasn't only the goo that had protected her; she'd also been swaddled in a special heat-resistant foil. And her home planet was full of musically purring cats, a tribe of bards who sang the ancient cat songs. And when we finally trusted her not to have a pudding accident on our bed, we decided that where she came from, cats didn't need oxygen. All night long she would sleep completely under the covers, curled up against my husband's legs. He’d lift the comforter and into the cave she'd go, purring her heart out. The noise drove me crazy.

My husband says I didn't start being nice to Peanut until she came home after being spayed. Pups wanted to kill the weak, and to my surprise, I stood up for her. She did, after all, have some things to recommend her. She was a prettily shaped cat, slender and petite. When she sat up, she kept her front paws together, tidy and demure. When you held a piece of foil just out of her reach, she balanced on her haunches like a bear cub. Her dining habits were distinctive; she was a social eater, not willing to take the first bite unless Pups was eating too or you knelt down to give her a firm little petting. And unlike Pups, who wolfed his food like the former desperate stray he was, she chewed daintily, one tiny kibble at a time. As my husband had argued all along, she had her own Peanut beauty, part of which was her magnificently whiter-than-white bib. We decided that such bibs must be the norm on her planet—the planet Bibula. She was our Preenie. Preenella. Penuchka. Our cave girl from outer space.

**Tidy paws and a magnificently white bib.**

The more I liked her, of course, the more I wanted to pet her, but, notwithstanding her pre-meal ritual, she didn't really know how to take a petting, and I came to regret having made her sleep on the porch her first few weeks with us. In hindsight, I believed those weeks were a window of opportunity for socialization; if she'd spent those nights cuddled close to us, maybe now she wouldn't be shrugging us off and slinking from beneath our hands.

But with Pups it was a whole different story. She and Pups fell in love. They played with each other, groomed each other, slept in each other’s arms. It was an attraction of opposites: he round, she slim; he a klutz who routinely missed when trying to jump, she the picture of grace and athleticism. They still fought, epic battles, but now Peanut nearly always prevailed, with a wild gleam in her eye and a crazy cock of her head before she pounced.

On April 25, 2002, we left home in the middle of the night; three days later we came back with a newborn baby. The house shrank. Sleeping stopped. All the old routines were shattered, and in their place a horrible new one took shape: Almost every evening, beginning at dusk and lasting two unbearable hours, the baby had a complete and total meltdown, screaming inconsolably for no reason we could discern, while my husband and I lost our minds.

Pups accepted the baby because he wanted to be the baby. The crib, the changing table, the bassinet—all the soft warm baby places were the places he must have been dreaming of his whole life.

Peanut, though, was terrorized. For several months, she stopped sleeping with us. She stayed as far from the volatile intruder as she could. If we’d brought the car seat in from the car and Pups was napping in it, she might join him in a cozy embrace, but that's as close as she was willing to get.

Though I wasn't aware of it happening, the cats became invisible. To me, the baby was everything and everything was the baby. The coworker who'd scoffed when I'd vowed, during a pets-versus-kids debate, “If the baby is mean to the cat, the baby's out,” now delighted in saying I told you so.

We bought a beautiful big old house downtown and spent three months living with the disarray that attends any move. First the packing of the old house, then unpacking at the new house. Of course, the payoff for weeks of life among boxes was that everyone now had vastly more room to spread out. If I thought at all about the cats, it was only to think how happy they'd be with so many new places to be cats in.

And during that time, while I forgot about her, Peanut’s heart was breaking.

I was at my office the day she almost died. My husband, who worked from home, called after lunch: “Something's wrong with Peanut. I'm taking her to the vet.”

“I'll come home,” I said, so he wouldn’t have to take the baby. “You can go as soon as I get there.”

A few minutes later he called again. “You need to get here now. She's been lying on the floor breathing with her mouth open, and now she's crying in pain.”

It was as bad as it could be. We didn't yet have a vet near our new house, so my husband sped more than six miles to our old one. Pulling into the parking lot, he believed she was dead, but he rushed her in, and while the staff looked on with tears in their eyes and hands clasped over their mouths, the vet plunged a needle into her chest to draw off the fluid that was making her suffocate. Once, twice, three times he repeated the process as my husband, pressed into service, held Peanut on the table.

This was a Friday, and because the vet had limited weekend hours, we took her, when she was stable, to the emergency clinic, where they put her in an oxygen tent, gave her sedatives to combat her extreme anxiety, administered diuretics and other drugs and took X-rays that showed her chest cavity almost completely filled with fluid. Diagnosis: congestive heart failure—not something you usually find in three-year-old cats. Prognosis: a month or two to a year.

I cried at the vet’s. I cried at home that night. Maybe we had noticed that she wasn't playing like she used to. Maybe Pups had been unusually kill-the-weak. Maybe Peanut’s decline had begun the day we brought the baby home from the hospital—all that disruption and upset and constant stress—and maybe it had only worsened as we packed up everything we owned and moved into a strange new house. Maybe if we hadn't been so lazy, we wouldn't have been letting her eat Pups's food, a special extra-sodium blend for cats with urinary-tract issues. Extra sodium! For a cat in Peanut’s condition!

But no matter how awful it was to think that our tidy little girl was doomed, we were grateful—hugely grateful—that at least we weren't going to lose her without warning, that we wouldn't have to suffer what we'd suffered when my husband's dog of 10 years had up and died at the kennel while we were vacationing. With Peanut, we'd have a chance to say goodbye. She was so weak, so changed, that we believed she wouldn't outlive the worst-case scenario. In our shock, we accepted that she'd be gone within a month. And with life not an option, the thing that mattered most to us was managing her death. We didn't want her to have another near-suffocation and be rushed to a place she dreaded, only to die in crisis. We didn't want crisis. We wanted her to go peacefully, at home, on a familiar sofa, a familiar lap. We got the names of a few vets who did in-home euthanasia. My husband sat at his computer every day with Peanut on his lap, so he'd know when disaster was approaching. We waited.

Meanwhile, our house became a pharmacy. Benazepril, she took once a day, first thing in the morning. Diltiazem, she took twice a day, as near to 12 hours apart as possible. Lasix, she took three times a day. The pills, tiny though they were, had to be cut into halves, quarters and eighths. It was okay if the sizes weren't exact, except for the Benazepril, which had to be quartered precisely. Unfortunately, those pills weren't even scored, and they were brittle and prone to pulverization—on average, we threw away three-quarters of each to get a single usable dose. My husband would sit at the dining room table, bent over the pill cutter, cursing. This may be when the baby learned to say, with feeling, “Goddammit!”

Monday, Wednesday and Friday we had to smear a nitroglycerin ointment inside Peanut’s ear, making sure that Pups didn't lick any and that we got none on our skin, or excruciating headaches would result. To stay on top of it all, we kept a complicated chart on the refrigerator. The final column of the chart was for bpm—breaths per minute. Tracking Peanut’s breathing, we were taught, was the best way to gauge her heart health: We should count for a minute once each day, preferably at the same time each day, preferably when she was sleeping or at least relaxed. A healthy cat would take no more than 30 breaths per minute. A cat in heart failure, whose lungs were able to expand only partially, could go multiples higher. One breath per second, and it was time to call the vet.

We lived by bpm. Many, many days she was in the teens or low 20s, and we—so proud! good girl!—imagined that somehow her heart was healing itself. Then one day she'd have an attack, skyrocketing to 90 bpm, and we'd have to decide whether it was better to rush her to the vet, knowing that that trip was the most terrifying thing we could do to her, or dose her up on Lasix and try to wait it out.

Our schedules revolved around Peanut. We juggled our travel plans so that one of us was always home with her. It was inconvenient, sure, but what was inconvenience if it meant we had more time to let her know she was loved? And all our doting had some happy side effects: Peanut learned to take a petting. She began sleeping with us again. The baby learned to say Preenie, and Preenie became the name for every cat there was.

Peanut went from eight pounds to seven pounds to six. For days at a stretch she'd eat well, and then suddenly lose her appetite. When that happened, she had to be coaxed from the seductive clutches of starvation. If I could have given her Pups’s salty food, she would have gobbled it—she was always making a break for his bowl if we left it out by mistake—but her cardiac-patient diet had no appeal. I lay on the floor to feed her from a spoon, from my finger, one half-hearted lick at a time. Still, even when it seemed that she might never eat again, there was comfort in knowing she'd beaten the worst-case prognosis—surviving first one month, then two months, then three, then four. Over time, yes, the medicines would lose their efficacy. For now, though, she was alive.

Yet the longer she lived, the more at a loss we were to come up with a plan for her death. Back when we believed she'd be gone in a matter of weeks, we'd been told we'd have to schedule in-home euthanasia in advance, and it had seemed that we'd clearly know when to make the call. Now, though, we couldn't decide where to draw the line. At one point we'd said we wanted to do it before she couldn't make it to the litter box. But now it seemed acceptable that she no longer even tried to pee in the box but instead went on the floor nearby. It seemed acceptable that she had to stop and rest every time she went upstairs. It seemed acceptable that we had a supply of syringes and injectable Lasix to give her during an attack, when time was too tight to wait for a pill to work.

It all seemed acceptable because she pulled out of every attack. She still purred. Still loved Pups. Still slept with us. Still leaned in hard for a petting. On many days she still perched on the back of the sofa to watch the world outside the window. She still played—not seeking out games, no, but eager to pounce on a dangled ribbon. On a few occasions she even charged down the stairs like a kitten. She had, it seemed, enough to make life worth living, and who would willingly put an end to that?

The final attack came, as the first had, on a Friday.

Her bpm numbers that morning were 80, 120, 90, 128. Before lunch my husband drove her to the vet. They told him it was probably the end of the line; they could keep her overnight and see if they could get her stable, but all signs were bleak.

We had waited too long to schedule the at-home end we wanted. We decided we'd bring her home and give her one more night; if nothing improved, we'd have her put to sleep at the vet’s the next day. The vet did not approve of our plan. The discharge notes strongly recommended “humane euthanasia”—in a tone that suggested he thought we would likely prove inhumane by insisting on keeping her alive until a grisly death was the only option.

Knowing how much she feared going to the vet, they gave us an injectable tranquilizer, with instructions to use it only when we had absolutely decided to put her down. We were to administer the injection 30 minutes before leaving home; it had the power to shut down her kidneys and could be fatal in itself.

That night, she did not purr. She did not want to be on our bed, so my husband slept with her downstairs. In the morning she didn't drink the milk we offered. She didn't eat the last meal we offered, Pups's salty food. She didn't respond when Pups sniffed her. It was so clearly time for her to die, and once we finally knew that, we were full of dread that she wouldn't die soon enough—that she'd suffocate in pain and terror before we could let her go gently.

We gave her the shot.

On the way to the vet, I drove, and my husband held her on his lap. It was a sun-dappled morning in May, and we had the windows down, and I pretended that the breezes meant something to her. We’d been told that, with the tranquilizer, she wouldn't know what was going on, that she'd be in a virtual coma, but when we got to the vet’s and got out of the car, we held her up to feel the wind on her face and the sun on her back, to let her smell the outdoor smells cats love.

We were bent over her crying and whispering to her while they tried to find the vein in her leg. I thought they were putting in a line, some kind of catheter into which they would inject the fatal solution. But what they injected was the solution itself, and she died before I knew it.

We held her. She weighed five pounds more or less, probably less. “She's so flopsy,” I managed to say. Like a soft little rag doll.

When I went to pay, I couldn't find my wallet in my purse. I realized right away that it must be in the exam room, having fallen out when I was fumbling for tissues, but before I could explain, the receptionist looked at me with concern and asked if maybe I'd fainted.

Because my husband saves receipts, I was able to crunch the numbers of what it cost to have Peanut with us on Earth. Before she was ill, her vet bills totaled $769, most of which paid for flea medicine and vaccinations. Then, in a single weekend, the weekend of her first heart failure, we shelled out $1800. Over the next seven months, we spent another $2,536. So, $769 pre-attack + $4336 post-attack = $5,105.

I know people who would call this ridiculous. Who would say that all that money could have helped human beings in all kinds of need. Who would roll their eyes at the idea that for seven months we’d let a pet rule our lives. Who would think we were cruel to Peanut and should have let her die at the first sign of doom. But I don't think we went overboard, or ever lost perspective. If we'd believed she could have lived 10 more years, of course we wouldn't have put our lives on hold—it was the finitude of the time left to her that made us willing. And though her care was expensive, it wasn't what I'd call extreme; assuming it had been an option, for example, we wouldn't have subjected her to invasive surgery. All along we were weighing, as best we could, her pain against her remaining pleasure.

For her lifetime with us, Peanut cost about $3.60 per day. Add the incidental cost of food and litter, plus medicine and special food after she got sick, and it was maybe another 52 cents per day. The numbers—along with observations about human babies, Hershey's miniatures, televised basketball, petting instruction, cozy beds and Earthling cats—are no doubt in the report Peanut made to her supervisors on Bibula after the butterflies carried her back across the heavens. 🦋

This essay was originally published, in slightly different form, in the October 2004 issue of Indianapolis Monthly. Reprinted with permission from Cincinnati Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Hour Media, LLC.

Your turn: Have you ever had a pet from outer space? Or one who had to break you down and win you over? Please tell me about them in the comments ❤️