Catalytic

My hospitalized wife's cat I've cared for this past year needs adoping before it unwittingly drives me to hospital as I age.

I'm a dog man and cats, I've learned, are needy. Its needs are now outweighing my physical ability to provide them.

My solution is to find someone to adopt her, a speyed female with all the necessary vetinary credentials, before I go full time in a wheelchair.

I've put the word out among friends, neighbors, and acquaintances without success.

An adoption agency is next.  

Is Letty - this cat's name -  "Creation's supreme invention?" as my late friend and fellow journalist, Jan Morris, surmised about all cats in her book, Allegorizing. 

I think not since I know at least one human who does needy better, I imagine, than a Siberian tiger, reputed by zoo keepers to be ravenously needy.

Letty's needs are the usual "activities of daily living" (or ADLs), as the insurance pros say: feeding, sleeping, transitioning, washing, toileting, etc. And there's more; she's an indoor cat and craves attention following me wherever I go inside until I sit or lie down and here she is below me, or beside me or on me, face-to-face, or upturned, wide, unblinking green eyes, whiskers and a plaintive miaow for attention. It gets so intrusive.

My problem is that I'm soft-hearted over indoor cats who don't get to enjoy the wide-open spaces, the hunting and killing, the risks of  crossing the road, the joys of chasing squirrels, the rise of the sun and moon, the feel of breezes, the changing seasons, the birds on the wing or in the trees or at the feeder. I feel Letty's frustrations as she takes them out daily or more frequently on the indoot cat clawer like Mike Tyson training head-to-head at the punching bag before the next fight.

And as my own ability to perform ADLs are coming into question, it is clear we are at a fork in the cat's litter.

In fact, I've triggered my Long Term Care insurance, which they tell me will take 90 days to kick in, assuming all the paperwork works, and I don't succumb to a heart attack while trying to comply with all that's required.

Getting old, clearly, is a test. It is not to be taken lightly. Letty, with all of her nine lives intact, is not aware of this. I, on the other hand, am deeply involved with no physical way out. 

I'll miss Letty, of course, when she leaves -- but not the responsibility of maintaining a living entity --and, more to the point, I'll get my life back as it ebbs. That will be a pleasure.