Nero died at 4.30pm today. He wasn't fiddling, nor was he in Rome at the time. In fact, I have no idea why I called him Nero at all. Except it is a cool name, you have to admit. But he was a big cat. Had he been svelte I might have called him Mark Anthony. This was one gorgeous animal. A snowshow Siamese who would have been so damn cute at birth, I might have died just ogling him. But he wasn't that attractive when we first met.
My lesbian neighbors had a couple of dogs who I guess didn't like the fact this unnamed abandoned cat spent an hour or two grooming himself in their driveway. One day, unaware that he was doing his daily wash out front, my neighbours didn't have complete control of their leashed dogs - LEASHED dogs, for all you controlling Berkeleyites who can't handle seeing a happy offleash dog anywhere except in a dog kennel - and the two dogs rushed the cat, tearing him between them, snatching his face in their jaws and leaving him fighting for his life under the deck of an old abandoned building nearby, unreachable and alone.
The girls knocked at my door. Do you have a Siamese cat, they asked, because our dogs might just have knocked him senseless. They didn't say that exactly. I'm paraphrasing. I couldn't reach him, though from the blood spattered, it seemed to me he would just die under this lonely building. I called animal control, and at the end of the evening tried to sleep, and couldn't. The next day I went back, and the cat had disappeared.
A week later, the cat, soon to be named Nero, turned up in my yard. His mouth hung, blood drooling, his skin had flaps waving where the dogs had slashed him, his eyes were hollow, his fur matted with blood and dirt. Turning up in my yard took a certain bold nerve. I have four dogs. This seemed not to matter to Nero who came into the kitchen and began to eat from the dish of my most passive dog.
That was five years ago. To cut one of my lengthy blogs short, Nero was never exactly the picture of health. Even after surgery and a dental treatment, his tongue poked from his mouth, and his vision deteriorated to the point where I never moved anything in my yard so that he could still climb in and out of my house and up and down the various little ladders I have built so my cats can pretend they are on a jungle gym at playschool. His skin never recovered, and often clumps of fur would fall off and grow back slowly, and worst of all he developed a chronic ear condition which meant that progressively worse tumours grew in one ear. Which is why, today, as he clearly was struggling with pain and infection, as he was lying on a clean yellow towel, I asked the vet to end his life.
Nero was never 'mine' as some of my animals are. He never cared for me much. But he had a beating heart, a handsome face, and a mind that probably flashed back to the days before the attack when his movement was fluid and his mouth able to savour the treats of the day with a smack of his lips and a glow of satisfied
catness.
And killing an animal, no matter how often you order it done, or how humane the reason, is an act of power I despise.
Nero will be missed, as they all are. But the most enduring memory of Nero will be his relationship with Jasper, one of my rescued feral cats from the Albany Landfill. Two large adult male cats who met when both were in their serious middle age, began to love each other in the most intense way. Nero would sleep on a little bed on my kitchen counter, next to an open window where he could make a fast exit should he feel the need to. Jasper would only come in at night and then I could watch them in the half light - head butting and making out and then Jasper would gently clean Nero's terribly infected ear. Nero's purring would sound like the strumming of a gentle fiddle. But not in Rome.
I'm sorry about Nero but glad he had some good times with you and your crew.
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On another note, can I hire you to write my epitaph?
Posted by: Molly Kenefick | February 04, 2007 at 12:27 AM