R and I have always been cat people. When we moved in together, I had three cats and he had one, which made for a fairly sizeable blended feline family. Within a year, however, we had lost two cats (one to old age, the other to a freak accident), and began to toy with the idea of getting a kitten. I mentioned this to my vet, and he made a proposition … Someone had recently found a pregnant stray, and dropped her off at his office. If we would foster the mama through her pregnancy, and the kittens until they were six weeks, we could have the pick of the litter and he would find homes for the rest. If he couldn’t find a foster home, he would have to abort the kittens and find a home for the mama immediately, due to his limited resources. He sighed and said that he couldn’t sleep for weeks after aborting kittens, and was desperate to avoid this outcome. Of course we signed on, and within the day, the mama cat was sequestered in our spare bedroom, and we settled in to enjoy her pregnancy and the impending birth.

Since no one knew when she got pregnant, her due date was rather uncertain. We watched her carefully, always going in to check on her when we had been out for a while. A little over nine years ago, we came home from a late night at the bar (yes, that was my old life), and peeked in on her before going to bed. We immediately knew something was up. She stared at us with wide eyes and moved about restlessly. We settled in to watch, and she didn’t disappoint. She soon began thrashing about in the box we’d prepared for her, wiggling around and doing somersaults. Before long a tiny kitten emerged, and then the placenta (which she promptly ate). She rested a short while, then repeated her gymnastics, and an hour later there were four adorable kittens in the box.

It was love at first sight, and we spent the following weeks in kitten heaven, watching as they progressed from blind, immobile, mouse-like creatures …

To stumbling, staggering balls of fuzz …

To skittering, prancing, jumping hell-raisers …

Hanging out, watching the kittens wrestle on the floor, flip-flopping all over the place, was the best way I could think of to spend my time.

I knew giving them up was going to be hard, and as such, we tried not to get too attached, and resisted naming them. But as the weeks went by, we found ourselves using descriptive nicknames to identify them. The grey calico became Callie, and was known for jumping and bounding wildly about the room. The tortoise shell with the white spot on her face was christened Gizmo, and developed into a bit of a nursing bully – always knocking the adjacent kitten off a nipple and stealing it. The short-haired black one was called Scruffy, because, well, he just looked scruffy compared to his brother and sisters. And the long-haired black one, who extended his shockingly pink tongue to explore whatever was put in front of him, was called Licky (also known for his Godzilla ways of stomping right down the middle of plates of food).

As the six week deadline loomed, we grappled with which kitten to keep. I couldn’t bear the thought of giving any of them up, but adding four kittens to our existing two cats was not an option. We finally compromised and decided to keep two … my favorite was Licky, and R chose Gizmo. It broke my heart to give the other two up, but they were shipped off to the vet along with their mama to be placed in someone else’s home. I still think about them and wonder how they’re doing.

Once we were down to the two we were going to keep, we cast about searching for suitable monikers. But despite the silliness of their nicknames, it was too late to imagine them as anything other than Gizmo and Licky. So the names stuck, although Licky was soon shortened to Lick. Over the years, I found myself struggling to explain their names – especially Lick’s – without feeling like a 3 year old. “You see, he would always lick everything, so we just named him LICKY!”

Before long, Gizmo became known for her incredible athleticism and agility. We would sit at opposite ends of a long hallway, and bounce a ball back and forth, sending it ricocheting off the walls. And that damn cat would follow it – running up the wall, rappelling off, always hot on the tail of the ball.

Lick, on the other hand, became famous for his klutzy ways. A long-haired cat, he had huge tufts of fur protruding between the pads of his feet. By chance, we’ve always lived in places with hardwood floors, and it was always cause for general merriment when Lick decided to run. He spent half the time running in place, and the other half with his feet sliding crazy sideways as he attempted to round corners. But his most infamous act came on the stairs. To this day, R and I have no idea how this happened, but we were bouncing a ball up to the landing halfway up the stairs, and Lick was frantically chasing it up and back down. On one of his descents, he lost his footing and slid – yes, slid – the rest of the way down the stairs. On his back. R and I laughed so hard that we flopped about on the floor like fish out of water, gasping for breath. Upon landing at the bottom of the stairs, Lick picked himself up, gave a little shake, looked at us as if to say “I meant to do that”, and stalked off.

Another favorite game took place in the claw-foot bathtub. When Lick saw that one of us was headed for the bathroom, he would scramble ahead and leap into the tub. He would wriggle and writhe from one end to the other, leaping up to swat at our fingers as we ran them along the rim. He loved when I tossed the catnip-filled dog in to join him. He would tumble about, wrestling with the dog, finally clamping it between his front paws, and kicking it furiously with his rear paws. And then complete stillness, perfect calm, just his tail twitching. And then the maelstrom would begin again.

Lick was an insanely huge cat. He weighed 17 pounds, and not much of that was fat. He had a massive frame, and his long fur only made him look bigger. His length was nearly doubled by the elegant, fluffy tail that trailed behind him. He had a giant head with enormous yellow eyes and the longest whiskers I’ve ever seen. Each leg ended in what were affectionately dubbed “meaty paws”. He was also incredibly beautiful – coal black with a tiny white spot on his chest. I often told him he was too pretty to be a boy.

When he wasn’t playing in the tub, he liked to be scratched there. He would flop on his side, stretch his huge frame, and fill the tub with his loud, resonating purr as I scratched and scratched his belly. He also spent ridiculous amounts of time on the bed … we often joked that he was doing us a service by holding it down.

He occasionally acted like a bully – giving Sebastian or Gizmo a swat and a nip as they passed by. But it was all an act … he was the biggest chicken in the house, and the first to dive under the bed when the doorbell rang.

He was the laziest cat I’ve ever known. His long fur often worked itself into dreadlocks, and R and I would hold him down and pick them out. This infuriated him, and after several minutes he would struggle to his feet, only to walk six inches and flop down again.

He was giant and goofy, gentle and klutzy – and a lover. Unfortunately, he was not a big fan of M, and I didn’t see much of him after she was born, although he would crawl into bed with R at night.

So when R mentioned late last week that he hadn’t seen much of Lick lately, I didn’t think anything of it, since I never saw much of him. But R went looking, and discovered him hiding in the basement – and he was clearly having trouble breathing. I rushed him to the emergency vet, and they drained 295 mL of fluid from his chest cavity. His lungs had literally been floating, unable to expand. As he had been previously diagnosed with a (supposedly innocuous) heart murmur, heart disease was considered the most likely culprit. We scheduled a heart ultrasound for Tuesday morning, and took him home.

I gave him medicine to help his heart and try to hold the fluid at bay. But despite being able to breathe easier, he refused to eat, and R had to syringe feed him. I kept him closed up in the bedroom with me, and while he didn’t seem to be in pain, he mostly just wanted to be left alone.

When the vet called Tuesday afternoon, he told me Lick’s heart was in fine condition so it wasn’t heart disease, but all the fluid had returned. Although they hadn’t found a tumor, cancer was the only possible explanation. We could draw some of the fluid and send it out for a definitive diagnosis, and have surgery, chemo, and radiation if we chose. But the rapid return of the fluid made it clear that Lick was very ill, and it didn’t seem fair to put him through that in the hopes that we would get a little more time with him.

R took off work early, and we went to the vet’s to spend some time with him. They put us in a quiet room and we sat with him and petted and loved him. He didn’t know what was coming, didn’t know this was our last goodbye, and preferred to lie quietly under a chair. I reached over to him, and he nuzzled my hand, once, twice, and my heart was filled with grief, but also gratitude. In his misery, he still found a way to express his love, to tell me it was okay. Then they put an IV in his leg and gave him an overdose of anesthesia, while R sat beside him stroking his fur, and I clung to R’s hand, holding M in my other arm, and wept.

It all seems so unfair, and I can’t help chastising myself for assuming he was just avoiding M, when really he was getting sicker and sicker, and I was totally oblivious to his suffering. But I can’t go back in time, and even if I could, I doubt I could have saved him. I just wish I had been more aware, less neglectful, and had made an effort to spend more time with him these last nine months.

Although it had been cloudy and rainy for over a week, the sky had cleared and the sun was shining when we brought Lick home. We buried him in our backyard, in a quiet spot where the trees open onto a small clearing, and birds are always busily flitting about.

Rest in peace, Lick. We will miss you.