It’s been a long, strange week since Tuck left us. It started with questions that we didn’t want to answer. Tuck’s box – leave it out for now or put it out in the garage? His pill bottles and syringes are still in the bathroom as I write this. It somehow seemed wrong to just come home and start clearing the house of the last of Tuck’s presence.
Echoes and shades surround us. Tuck always had an outsized personality, stubborn and willful, affectionate and troublemaking. On top of that, his medical care over recent years had required all sorts of accommodations and adjustments, adaptations that eventually became ingrained as habits that still persist. The house is full of Tucker ghosts.
I was fixing lunch in the kitchen the other day and heard a rattling behind me in the kitchen sink; I turned out of habit to tell Tuck to get the hell out of there and then caught myself. Kristi turns a corner into the bedroom and expects to see him curled on the bed. At night I still glance up at the bathroom shelf: I’m looking for the pills I set out earlier in the day, to make sure I remember to med him before bed. Everywhere we turn, there’s a memory or an expectation, and a brief surprise and heartcrash when we catch ourselves doing it.
And then there’s the cat dimension. That’s what I used to call Tuck’s ability to completely vanish, and then materialize out of thin air at the precise moment of impending panic. You’d lose track of him, look around the house, and he’s nowhere. You’ve looked in every corner and every hideyhole. Just as you’re ready to carry on the search outside – you don’t know how, but he must have gotten out – you turn and there he was, sitting in the middle of the floor. It was a Tuck trick that Ruca never mastered, and now I keep seeing Tuck out of the corner of my eye. Then turn to see that he’s not there.
Those echoes we were more or less prepared for. What we weren’t prepared for was seeing sudden shades of Tucker in our other cat, Ruca. She’s been adopting Tuck behaviors: sleeping in his spots, getting into things, seeking attention in precisely the way that Tuck would, crying and talking more often than usual. At first we thought we were imagining things. But when we started finding Ruca poop on our bed – something that Ruca never, ever does – we knew it wasn’t just our own grief messing with us.
We did some research and learned that yes, cats indeed have a grieving process, particularly when they’ve been together a long time. Ruca and Tuck had been together most of their lives. The death of one changes everything for the other, and the symptoms can include inappropriate defecation/urination, adopting the behaviors of the missing cat, and searching/crying. Ruca’s better now than she was a few days ago, but still the echoes and shades linger. (This is all yet another reason why pet experts recommend not adopting a new animal for at least a few months after the other’s death. Above and beyond the emotional impact to the owner, there are also the other pets to think about – adopting too soon can result in the surviving pet becoming withdrawn or aggressive.)
We’ve begun getting to a new normal. Tuck’s box, mat and carrier are hidden away in the garage. His corner of the living room has been cleaned. The other day we bought a small rug for the foyer, and that was certainly a melancholy experience; we could never have a rug of any kind in the house before, because Tuck would invariably use it as a litterbox. There’s a new quilt on the bed today. Tuck’s meds, however, are still in the bathroom. Getting to a new normal; haven’t quite gotten there yet.
On a shelf in the living room sits the ashes, collar and photo of Mel, Sam’s predecessor and beloved dog of Kristi. Tuck’s collar today sits there as well, waiting patiently for its own box and photo. We’ll have his ashes in a few weeks; that shelf is where they belong. The insides of each collar are coated in stray furs – “spirit hairs”, Kristi calls them. It makes me grateful to have collared him. He went uncollared for a long time, but soon after moving to California we both decided that the risk of him getting out was too great – we put a collar on him with a little brass tag etched with Kristi’s cell number and “Needs Meds”.
So we’re still getting to a new normal, and we’re still seeing ghosts. Tuck was always such a damned stubborn animal. It shouldn’t surprise either of us that he’s not in a rush to leave. We don’t mind his persistence. We miss him.