For Stephen, The Amputee Cat

There’s something special about going back to your childhood home during the holidays, to settle back into well trodden routines with the pets you grew up with. The whiskered companions still greet you as an old friend, beckoning you to again become part of the routines that have shaped the landscape of their lives. You find yourself re-filling their designated drinking glass on the landing, chatting to them in the pet voice- the only voice that can bridge the person and animal language divide, and gritting your teeth together on the sofa as they march little needle paws into your thighs until ready to curl up on you. Each visit reminds you of the passage of time. Each visit they seem a little older, a little wobblier and a little grumpier.

Each visit they seem a little older, a little wobblier and a little grumpier. And each visit you assume there’ll be a few more visits and a few more Christmases together. You are never quite ready for when it ends.

[Boxing Day, 2024] 

Last year was the first Christmas I had spent away from my family, breaking tradition to be part of another and to make space for something new as a couple. My partner and I travelled to my parents on Boxing Day and on arrival were greeted in the hallway by a familiar three legged menace named Stephen. In years past he would zip in and out of doorways jabbing at exposed ankles with his claws, and later when fully grown would bound toward you for a head rub if you crouched down, but now had settled on chirping at you and hopping over to press against your leg. Always a small cat prone to mischief he had become very chatty in his 14th year. Stephen had always been more of a quiet cat- a chirper and a squeaker rather than a meower, but now it seemed as if you could have full blown conversations with him. 

Stephen was a classic Postman Pat black and white cat, with a pocketful of nicknames that all pets seem to acquire over their lives, the origins of which never quite make sense. He was Stephen, but he was also a Stevie and a Weevie, a Boysington Stanley, a Boysie, a Steville and a Buoy. The top half of his head was a black mask, his mouth and chin white with a little black smudge on the snout forever giving the impression he’d been nosing about in a sooty chimney. White fur spread across his chest, splotching into uneven patches on his stomach like a dairy cow and trailing off to form uneven paths down his front legs. He enjoyed being with people, always inhabited the room you were in, or follow you about if you were pottering in the garden. He was affectionate, on his terms and possessed no hesitation in giving you a bite or a swipe if he’d had enough of you. He wasn’t interested in approaching strangers. He did not stray far from our garden and was never outside for particularly long stints either. He didn’t like it if it was too windy, too rainy or too hot. He did manage to find time in his schedule however, for getting into scrapes with other neighbourhood cats and was no stranger to visiting the vet for treatment of scratches that had gotten infected. Once, a piece of grass lodged in his throat had to be removed by the vet and someone mounted it on the fridge as an odd souvenir next to the shopping lists and busy magnets. 

[Post vet trip] 

Stevie was an amputee from around the age of 3 or 4. We never found out precisely what had happened to him. He had turned up at the back door one evening, dragging himself up the steps into the house. Mum rang me whilst I was in my second year of university to assure me everything was okay, but that Stephen had had to get his back leg amputated. The vet surmised he had gotten himself trapped in a garage door, no bone had broken through the skin which wasn’t indicative of having been hit by a car. Now, having cashed in one of his nine lives, he adapted extremely well to three-legged life. Three legs suited him, he had never been able to run in a straight line when he had four. The missing limb he didn’t seem to notice and would continue to scratch himself with its phantom. 

[Little menace, 2022]

Stephen wasn’t an only cat. We also had a beautiful tortoiseshell named Penny who we had gotten the year before - the fruition of a long ‘we should get a cat’ campaign from my sister, which fair play to her, had been running relentlessly for years. Stephen loved Penny and Penny tolerated Stevie boy. He would divide his time between irritating Pen, roaming the garden and then popping over to torment our next door neighbour’s cat Tilley, who was also the sibling and in the same litter as our Penny. So, from the age of 16 and my sister 14, we passed into our formative years in close proximity to 3 very loved and very uniquely different cats. 

[Sitting as close together as Penny would tolerate, 2018]

I’m 32 now. I read a piece recently discussing the peculiar pain of pet loss and it said that losing a long lived pet you’ve had since you were young is like losing a tether to your childhood. I really feel that. I am persistently placing a marker from when the cats arrived, tracing their lives through all that time and seeing how much things have changed. I’ve grown up and moved away. Crossed over from my adolescence into my most formative years. My personality, my worldly wisdom, my opinions and interests have developed and changed over time. Different clothes and styles graced and departed my wardrobes. I lived in three different cities. My brain finished growing. I had to start wearing contact lenses. I got two degrees. I’ve had numerous jobs. I dropped out of a training course. I am yet to pass my driving test.

During all that time there was always a cat waiting at home for your return. A silent witness to all the things you’ve been through, all the milestones you passed, all the achievements and all the failures. 

The loss of that pet devastates you in a way that’s hard to articulate. The fellow pet owner knows the gap that their absence leaves you with, but to the person who’s never had a pet, they dismiss your grief in a way that feels so cruel - it was just a cat right? You alter your way of telling people and the information you provide based on how much you can bear to share, and whatever you say still feels like you’ve undermined their existence and how much they meant to you. The moment they come to live with you can be surprising, seemingly random. They can jump out of a hedge one day during your sister’s walk and she brings him home in a hat box, all grubby with ears full of tiny bugs. We assume his stay with us will be temporary at first, someone will surely claim this 10 week old kitten, someone is surely missing him. But no one ever came looking, no one answered the ‘FOUND’ notice we left at the vets and we never saw any ‘MISSING’ posters. He became ours.

This is the start of your life together and one day in the hazy future that stretches out for miles and miles you know this story will end, but you don’t really give it much thought.

[Taken not long after Stephen came to live with us, 2010]

The last time I saw Stephen was during the final few days of his life. Maybe there’s something poetic about him waiting for me to come home. Perhaps he wanted to say goodbye and feel satisfied he had spent time with everyone that he had grown up with and known. Maybe it was just coincidence, I don’t know- I only visit home a handful of times a year but does any of that really matter? I am just glad I was there. Cats are skilled at concealing when they’re unwell and ailing and you may not know about a genetic heart condition until it stops working, like an old generator finally giving out. In his last couple of days he seemed comfortable, sleeping and spending time with us, pensive- watching the world go by through the front room window. He had stopped going outside for anything other than the toilet. However, in his last couple of hours I was pottering about in the garage cleaning out a terrarium of insects that I keep in my old room that’s sustained by my dad. Stephen ventured out to inspect what I was doing, he had a roam about the garage interior, a steady lap of the garden and then appeared at the bottom of the back door step a little later, crouched over and meowing in a way that the cat owner knows isn’t right. The door was opened and he dragged himself inside in an alarming manner, the past returning to haunt us. I knew this meant we were approaching the end and with heavy hearts we tried to keep him as comfortable as possible as we took him to the emergency vet. 

[Watching the world go by. The last photo I took of Stephen]

Saddle thrombus happens very quickly and steals your animal before you are ready. As devastating as the end was, holding him against my chest as he sighed his last breaths into his final sleep I am thankful that I got to be with him in the end. I hadn’t been able to be there when Penny had to leave us.

We quietly encouraged him to go and find Penny, to go and torment her and we said that she was waiting for him.

He sighed and departed and left my parents, my partner and I at the room in the vets, to go wherever animals go afterward. Later, I imagine him floating out of his body, rising through the ceiling, into the sky and evaporating into the ether. 

This is my way of memorialising him and as my mum said on our way back to the car after we had left the vets, ‘they give you 13 years of joy but then you have to go through these moments too’. You have to accept the good and the bad. It has taken me a month to compose this and I hope it paints a good portrait of him. I loved that Boysie. He was loved too by my sister who was his favourite (he would change his favourites throughout his life - I had had my time being his favourite once). She was in America when we took him to the vets, leaving only a day earlier, so was unable to be present when he departed. The Buoy was loved by my mum and would sleep draped over her shoulder and no one else. Stephen was loved by my dad, who he would share every morning with, sprawling across him over the duvet until Dad’s legs went numb. Loved too by our next door neighbour who kept an eye on him and was the leader of Neighbourhood Cat Watch, by my Grandad who lives across the road and looked after him when we went on holiday and my Grandma in London who would ask after him on the phone and enjoy the pictures we periodically emailed. Loved also by my friends from school that remember him from post school hang outs and my uni friends when they came to stay in our early 20s, in the time before we had moved out of our family homes and will still ask after him all these years later. Finally, Stephen was loved by my partner, who always enjoyed playing with, chatting to and taking the most handsome photos of. 

[Stephen bunting I made from a Stephen stamp, given to me by my partner on my birthday] 

A few weeks later our neighbour came round with the news that Tilley had passed on as well, 16 years old. Now all the cats we loved and spent so much of our lives with have left us. An end of an era. 

[Tormenting Tilley who lived next door]

I dream I’m at my grandparents’ house, a place that only exists in memory and Stephen is there. He’s frail and bony, but he hasn’t died here so it’s a loophole for him to live a little longer. He climbs into my lap and he’s purring in that jittery way of an engine starting up. It seems to me like he’s smiling. He stretches upward, eyes half closed and rubs his head under my chin. I wake up, my neck sensitive as in the aftermath of someone running a cold, ticklish hand across it. 

[An extremely rare nose-kiss caught on camera between Pen and Stevie, 2011] 

Losing a long lived pet is a peculiar pain. You feel their absence even if you don’t live in the house they did anymore. You feel their absence in not being able to ask after them, to ask for picture updates in WhatsApp and you have to remind yourself that they aren’t at the house anymore. You feel their absence when you find a white strand of fur on the cardigan you were wearing at home over Christmas. You look at pictures on your phone and you feel their absence. Some of them aren’t even pictures of him, they’re places and events separate of him, but still I get sad because I think that when they were taken he was alive at home, roaming around the house and patrolling the garden. Everything has seemed to change but life hasn’t changed at all really, but you’re just walking around missing the animal you loved for so long.

[Ready for dinner. New Year’s Day, 2013]

I know this will dull over time, the pain isn’t as sharp as it was when first returning from the vets and the sight of that water glass on the landing brought me to tears. The feeling of absence will shift to warm thoughts of him, remembering what a great cat he was- a gremlin, a menace and a lovely boy in one. The glass on the landing is hibernating somewhere in a cupboard. I found a whisker on the floor in the back room and stored it in a jewellery box. I keep it in my bedside table and sometimes I take the box out and look at it, along with fur I collected from around the house before we left.

My phone regurgitates ‘on this day’ pictures of him regularly and they’re starting to feel nice to look at. I haven’t washed my cardigan yet, but I will. 

[Penny and Stephen drinking from their water glass on the landing]

Nearing the end of writing this, my sister tells me a work colleague has rescued a stray and that they’re coming to drop him off at our family home to see if he’ll settle in. So perhaps a new chapter is beginning and the house won’t feel so absent anymore. 

I dream again, about Stephen and Penny. This time they’re running through the front room, they’re showing off to the family, summersaulting around one another, zipping between our ankles and bounding across furniture. We watch and smile, we are laughing. I like to think that means they found each other.