Normally the sing-along song at Rotary that follows America the Beautiful is a light-hearted old-timey song, usually with a verse rewritten to fit about the ideals of service and fellowship of Rotary. Today it was oddly poignant and timely for me, and it hit me out of left field. I almost started to cry halfway through it. It was an old standard I used to love and played often on a collection of 19th and 20th century folk songs, called Grandfather's Clock, about a clock that was intricately tied to the life of an old man. The second verse started, "It rang an alarm, in the dead of the night, An alarm that for years had been dumb; And we knew that his spirit was pluming for flight, That his hour for departure had come."
In 2002, we adopted three kittens: two sisters at first, and then a wild boy who was a few weeks younger than the girls. The sisters were Georgia and Stone, who came to be known as Cricket and Smacky as nicknames settled in. The boy was Rio, and no matter how hard we tried to make nicknames stick to him, the only one that stuck was boy, or rather "boi." Together they came to be known as "Godzilla's Kittens," a trio so naughty that we said these would be the perfect pets for the famous destroyer of Tokyo. When my daughters each grew up and moved out of the house, they took "their" cats with them. Older daughter took Smacky, younger daughter took Rio, and I kept Cricket. Four years ago I wrote at length about the heartbreaking rapid decline that Cricket took, and her death at age twelve crushed me. I started worrying about the other two immediately after, thinking that I'd be losing them in short order. They surprised and impressed me, proving to be more hardy as old farts than I could have expected. Smacky is all but toothless now, but she is still the queen of my older daughter's household.
Rio has been cuddled and coddled and loved to pieces by my younger daughter. He always was a skinny, raggedy boy, but over the last year, he started being noticeably frail and deaf. He slept a lot more. In the last month, he has slowed down even more. And this week, it has become apparent that his race is just about run. He made it to 16 years old, which ties the record set by his uncle Torden, who died two months before Cricket did. (Although technically the record-holder is now Smacky, who is slightly older than Rio.)
I went to visit Rio this afternoon. He is resting on a sheepskin and a pee-pee pad, with a blanket over the top of him, on the desk by the window in my daughter's office. He is dehydrated and breathing shallowly--or at least he was at 5 this evening. I told him I loved him, and I thanked him for being such a good companion to my daughter. And then I told him not to be afraid, and that it was okay to let go as soon as he was ready. He was still with us when I left the house. I don't think it will be long now though. I keep checking my phone for a message, and there hasn't been one yet. I'm very sad that it's time to go through this again, but I am so glad that he gave us so many good years, and that we put all that effort into calming down the wild child stray kitten who came to us as a surprise, at a time when we thought we were full up with Crickie and Smacky. He was worth everything. I hope he understands how lucky we were to have him.
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