This is an ode to Mr. Puddy, the world’s most constipated cat.
Mr. Puddy passed away on July 31 at the age of 17. He was a beloved pet, a good mouse-catcher and a role model for elderly, incontinent cats everywhere.
Puddy is survived by his parents, a Jack Russell, a cocker spaniel, a girl cat and a boy cat. His absence has lowered the pet-to-room ratio from an admirable 5:6 to a dismal 2:3. The magnitude of his loss cannot be overstated.
My wife and I loved Mr. Puddy to the utmost degree, or at least to the utmost degree you can love a cat that pees on your pillows. There were times when we wished for his death, and there were times when we wanted to kill him ourselves, but as more and more of our friends have children, I’m realizing that this is really the norm.
Mr. Puddy was our firstborn. My wife and I got him nine years ago on our first Christmas together from a friend who worked in a vet’s office. Peanut, as he was called then, had been brought in to be euthanized due to what his previous owners called a “bad disposition,” which is a euphemism for “he’s crotchety and pees everywhere.” We didn’t know that at the time.
All we knew was that a seemingly innocent cat was about to be put to death, and his name was Peanut. If there is one rule to live by in this world, it’s that you just don’t kill anything named Peanut.
We could tell right away that he was a dignified cat, the kind you could easily imagine in a top hat and monocle. But not, as we found out later, the kind that would actually wear a top hat if you put one on him. He would wear fake reindeer antlers at Christmastime, but that might say more about the Velcro chinstrap than Mr. Puddy’s yuletide spirit.
Mr. Puddy began peeing on our stuff the instant he touched ground in our house. Rugs, mats, recliners, couches, slippers – nothing was sacred. Some our friends were quick to judge, especially when he would pee on, say, their coats, or maybe their children. But those kinds of things really shouldn’t be left lying around our house anyway.
The truth was, we loved Mr. Puddy immediately, even if he was sort of an a-hole. He was ours, the first thing that was really, truly ours. Sure, he had his problems, but I could say the same thing about our friends’ kids. At least Mr. Puddy never peed his own pants.
Mr. Puddy’s other problem was that he ate obsessively. Eventually, he got so fat that he couldn’t even clean himself, resulting in a greasy, dandery stripe of hair running down his back that ranked just below Gary Busey’s teeth on the grossness scale. His fatness also made him lose the ability to meow like a normal cat. Instead, he emitted something closer to an “ech,” which we thought was hilarious. We would use it as a party trick, and people loved it. “Go get that cat,” they’d say. “Make him do that thing that’s funny!”
“Ech,” Mr. Puddy would say, and the room would erupt.
This became less funny the day that we realized that the “ech” was happening because, while Puddy had ballooned in size, we had never thought to loosen his collar. Underneath it was a perfectly bald ring that ran completely around his neck. We felt appropriately terrible, although it did make him look like clergy, which was sort of funny.
Years went by, and Puddy continued in his ways, peeing on our most valuable belongings with quiet, haughty pride. Then one day last July, he stopped eating. Just stopped. We were concerned, and took him to the vet’s office, where the doctor conducted a series of blood tests and x-rays. The conclusion was that Mr. Puddy was fantastically, colossally constipated, literally the most constipated cat the doctor had ever seen. This called for an overnight stay at the veterinary’s “feline resort,” which is like a human resort, except that instead of being pampered with massages and chocolates, Mr. Puddy was given a nonstop series of enemas.
We brought him home the following day, full of optimism that our now substantially lighter cat would resume eating. And he did. There was joy all around. The next day, however, the doctor called me at work to deliver some bad news: Some post-cat-enema testing revealed a tumor. It was cancer that was blocking Mr. Puddy’s intestines. Cancer that would require an operation that a 17-year-old cat just wouldn’t survive.
Within a few days, Puddy stopped eating again, stopped drinking and started bleeding out of his nose. By the time we took him back to the vet just a few days later, he was sunken and emaciated. The vet encouraged us to put him down.
Mr. Puddy was 8 years old when we’d adopted him, meaning we had ultimately more than doubled his time on earth. He’d had a good run. There was nothing else we could do. Plus, there wasn’t that much left in our house for him to pee on anyway.
Putting Mr. Puddy to sleep was far worse than I had imagined. We wept openly and cradled his little
body, warm and limp in the towel. His little chest was as still as an empty cradle. It wasn’t even real. Eventually, we signaled to the nurse that we were ready to let him go. We said a final, tearful goodbye and handed him over.
That’s when we saw it, a little yellow puddle glistening on the leather couch between us. It was pee. Mr. Puddy’s last pee. His final protest against the indignities of the world. One last hurrah, one last middle finger in the air, like a punctuation mark on his life.
“Farewell, cruel world!” he said. “Ech!”
One more ruined couch, one more notch in his belt. We laughed like hell. And somewhere up in kitty heaven, so did Mr. Puddy.
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