R.I.P. Brûlée

After some 18 years with him, we knew the time was getting close, and it finally arrived a few days before Christmas, when Brûlée the cat collapsed on the living room carpet and died a short time later.

The calculation of a cat’s age in human years varies, depending on the veterinarian. One we know (not Brûlée’s doc) said that for the first two years, the animal gets the equivalent of 25 human years, and it’s four human years per cat year after that, which would have made Brulee 90, though his actual vet felt it was closer to 100.

My wife and I got Brûlée from the animal shelter in July of 2001, when he was said to be about nine months old. We had an early indication of what we were getting into when, on the way home in the car, we heard a scratching sound in the cardboard carrier they gave us at the shelter. As we crossed the railroad tracks, a white head popped through a new hole in the side of the carrier. He was male, though we used the feminine form of the name Brûlée for him after “crème brûlée,” which we thought was closer to his coloring. He was mostly what they call flame-point Siamese, cream-colored with orange ears and a tail with orange bands on it, reflecting another breed involved in his ancestry.

Anyway, we soon found that our house had a new supervisor, and we had to resign ourselves to our new roles as staff. Brûlée was not shy about making his demands known. Not shy about anything, really. When somebody rang at the front door, he answered it.

In his prime, Brûlée’s prodigious acrobatic talents entertained guests. Through the use of cat toys, we could get him to leap several feet into the air, even do 360-degree spins. This all happened well before social media and smartphone cameras. What we called “Cirque de Brûlée” would certainly have gone viral.

Now that he is gone, we are keenly aware of daily things we don’t have to do anymore, but still at least start to do out of long habit. Having a cat, as many of you know, can be like having a perpetual human toddler. Sometimes you have to close doors to keep the animal from harm or from causing trouble. Turning on hall lights at night so as not to trip over him in the dark, or step on his tail, was important. And then there was filling and cleaning litter boxes, more of which were needed around the house to accommodate an aging cat. I still can’t bring myself, at this writing, to throw out the last remaining box on the back porch. Finally, there are the daily rituals that have suddenly ended, like my lap time with him as I drank my morning coffee, turning up the heat in the house on cold days so he could sit next to his favorite furnace vent, or having him join us for dinner.

Though we have no children, a relative who’d had them tried to make us feel better by comparing the impact of Brûlée’s departure to an 18-year-old child’s heading off to college. No, not quite the same. Still, we take comfort in reporting to you that Brûlée remained Brûlée right up to the end, which I hope others can say about us when it’s our turn to go.