Today I received news of the passing of Izzy, the cat I spent my teenage years growing up with. He made it to seventeen years old, and we first got him when I was thirteen, shortly after the death of Sundance. I decided in my bereft innocence that I wanted a replacement that looked just like him, and thus Izzy was chosen for his similar orange and white complexion.
Izzy turned out to be very little like Sundance. From kittenhood he was the grumpiest cat I’ve known, fiercely independent, extremely defensive and only ever playing or showing love on his own terms. He would attack frequently and heaven help you if you tried cradling him upside down (or holding him at all for more than brief periods of time). He was always such an old curmudgeon, and it was unusual that his body had to grow into his personality.
He was never the smartest cat, either. He used to charge at the other cat he saw in the mirror, for instance. It would sound like the galloping of a tiny horse as he got up speed and rammed that other cat with his head, causing the mirror to reverberate throughout the entire house. I think he grew out of that behaviour after a year or so, but I liked to joke that the damage was done by that point.
He was an indoor cat, and hated it. My parents used to tell me that indoor cats grew disinterested with the outside world, but I knew that was never the case for Izzy. He would constantly make mad dashes for freedom whenever a door was left open or if he felt he could claw his way through a screen (which he managed several times). Being the less-brainy type I described, though, he would always stop at the first flower he encountered in order to sniff it, giving us ample opportunity to retrieve him. There were only a few times he ever made it out unnoticed for any significant period of time, and he never went far. One evening he got out and the next morning my parents found him chasing after a terrified neighbourhood cat across our backyard.
We used to try taking him to my parents’ cottage, and that never went well: two hours of him sitting in his cat-carrier, meowing plaintively the entire trip. A lesser cat would have tired out or just given up five or ten minutes into the trip, but he would never stop for the entire two hour journey, constantly changing up his voice and pattern so we had no chance to grow accustomed to it.
He loved being at the cottage, though, exploring its nooks and crannies, and it was one of the places he would be most affectionate. I slept in the top half of a bunk-bed, and he would spend about ten minutes trying to figure out how to climb the ladder unsuccessfully until I finally helped him up, and he would sleep in the bed with me.
One story I like to tell is how I was napping on the couch at the cottage one time, when he suddenly jumped up on my chest and started nuzzling me. I was surprised by the unusual affection he was showing as I pulled myself out of my sleepy haze. I wrenched my eyes open only to have my gaze returned by a wide-eyed, terrified rodent that was barely centimetres from my face. Naturally I screamed like a little girl as my skeleton tried to leap outside the rest of my body, sending the two of them careening across the room. My dad heard this from the balcony where he was reading the newspaper, and as he opened the screen door all we heard was a furious galloping noise, and all we saw was a dark blur as the rodent darted out onto the porch and to freedom. My dad managed to slam the screen door shut just in the way of the cat that was hurtling after it in pursuit, separating the two.
After I went away to university I saw him a lot less, and my allergies made it difficult to spend huge amounts of time with him. He eventually moved in with my aunt, who took excellent care of him, and in his later years discovered other quirky things about him (such as one of his favourite foods being corn on the cob). I like to think he calmed down a lot in his elder years, although every time I visited he would be curmudgeonly as ever.
The last few months he apparently was having a harder time of things. My aunt had to feed him with a syringe and inject him with medications regularly. He seemed to improve recently and was even eating and enjoying food on his own, when he was hit with some kind of clot-related affliction that left him terribly weak and upset (my aunt thinks it was a stroke, but the vet isn’t sure). There was no reasonable choice other than to put him down and end his suffering at that point. I was woken up by the call from my parents this morning, and got the chance to talk to my aunt about it a little later on. It took a few hours for it to sink for me and I’ve been going back and forth between being shell-shocked and morose.
We are going to have him cremated, and bury his ashes up at the cottage, same as we did for Sundance over seventeen years ago. I like to think it’s where he would have chosen, if he could.
I knew about his declining health, and that it was unlikely I would get to see him before he died. I had still hoped he might make it through until March or so, when I have a wedding to attend on the east coast and might have been able to do a brief layover to see him in Toronto. I suppose it wasn’t meant to be, though. I am sad to have missed a final opportunity to see him, but seventeen years is a long life for any cat, and his was a good one, filled with people that loved and took care of him.
The brief time I visited back in 2008 and got to see him at the cottage, he chose this spot underneath an island table in the kitchen as the best location to keep an eye on foot traffic:
… of course, his vigilance had its limits.
So long, Izzy. I will miss you.
Dan.