The Wildest of All the Wild Animals
Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild… .
But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.
—“The Cat that Walked by Himself,” by Rudyard Kipling
“I’m getting another cat,” my father said as I drove him home from having his cat euthanized.
Not, “I’d like to adopt another cat,” or, “Do you think it would be a good idea?” or even, “Would you help me get a cat?”—because the many small intricacies of acquiring a pet, of caring for one, were beyond him.
Despite my father’s worsening dementia, his cat Olivia had made a decent life for herself. We’d ensured she was fed regularly, although that hadn’t prevented her pilfering the occasional half loaf of bread—or anything, really, that wasn’t fully secured—from Dad’s kitchen counters and table.
To my father’s delight and wonder, Olivia had become more affectionate over the years, curling up in his lap and purring while they watched television together. But in her last few months, she’d grown suddenly scrawny. Worms, I thought, and then a test revealed a more serious problem: diabetes.
My dad couldn’t give the required injections at all, let alone at precisely the same time twice a day. And there were no guarantees even with the medications. Under similar circumstances, the veterinarian told us, she’d probably choose euthanasia for her own cat.
We made Olivia’s final appointment for the following day, New Year’s Eve 2021.
The vet was kind and gentle with the cat, and also with my father, who held Olivia while the drugs were being administered. Dad and I stroked her as she fell into a deep sleep, and, after a second injection, as she died.
The vet waited a bit and then looked at us, nodding slowly. “She’s gone now,” she said. We held Olivia a minute or two, and then, as we handed the still-soft body to an assistant, my dad asked, “She’s still alive, isn’t she?”
We walked out of the office and got into the car, and he asked again, “So, is the cat alive?” When I said no, he asked, “What did she have?” and, one more time, I went over the diabetes diagnosis, her lost weight, her pain and discomfort.
I was pulling out of the vet’s parking lot when he said it: “I’m going to get another cat.”
“I think we need a period of mourning,” I said.
Eight months later, I was seething. I’d try to write, only to be interrupted by another of my father’s mini-crises. There was a persistent buzzing at the back of my mind—what were we forgetting, what had we failed to schedule, what important financial or medical detail had we overlooked?
Dad can afford paid caregivers, and I knew my burden was light compared to that of most people caring for a dementia patient. My family is supportive and engaged; my father has remained, for the most part, caring and loving. He’s not angry or violent or mean, not yet, maybe not ever. He hasn’t forgotten who we are.
Still…
I’d spent hours searching the files in my dad’s closet and garage trying to find answers for a new accountant. A tenant sent a frustrated email asking why Dad hadn’t returned her call about a ceiling leak. My sister and I discovered unpaid bills on his desk.
My dad’s furnace needed to be fixed, a packrat had moved into his garage, the neighbor said he’d no longer plow the snow from the driveway, the dog was peeing on the bedroom carpet.
And, now that the cat was gone, mice were appearing in the kitchen cabinets and pantry. When we spent the night, we could hear them scrabbling in the library walls.
I was frustrated. And I was grieving.
One Monday in August, Dad couldn’t remember my brother’s middle name. He suddenly couldn’t understand the concept of a bank account—he held out his hands and asked where the money was.
At lunch, he kept trying to make jokes: He’d say “Roger Hecten!” or “Alabama!” and look at my brother and me expectantly, waiting for a laugh. The caregiver told us he’d been slurring his words, that he’d slept most of the day for two days in a row.
That was when I began writing “Mr. D’s Wild Ride.”
“I’ve always had cats,” says my father, who doesn’t remember the ten or twenty years of his cat-less existence in adulthood, who’s forgotten that his family had no cats while he was growing up.
But he has had cats for the past fourteen years or so. The first ones, P.J. and Alex, were brothers, adopted from someone offering them in a box outside a store. P.J. disappeared after a couple of years. Alex stuck around for what seemed like a long time, but gradually ventured out in the evening more and more often, until he found an open door one night and disappeared, the victim of an owl, or a mountain lion, or a passing vehicle.
“I’m going to get a cat,” my father announced again, the week after Olivia died. She’d been adopted between PJ’s and Alex’s disappearances, and I think she made it to age eleven.
“Let’s wait until your birthday,” my brother said. That was still six months away, so we were pleasantly surprised when Dad agreed.
The birthday came and went. Dad didn’t remember the cat, and we didn’t remind him.
For days, I’d burrow down rabbit holes, following threads of research about dementia, about the brain, about the issues affecting old people. It was as if writing about my father’s condition let me hold his dementia and its implications out away from myself. And instead of wallowing in despair and frustration, I was soaking in the pleasure of learning.
I was writing for myself. I had an outlet I hadn’t had before, and my family’s suffering had meaning in a way it hadn’t before: Through sharing the stories of our experience and what we’d discovered, I’d be helping other people. Our trials, our grief, would be useful.
I was also writing for my father, or at least for my idea of him. People would say, “Oh, I know what you’re going through—my mother/father was like that,” and I wanted to respond, “No, my father is different.”
His uniqueness felt crucial. My father, with his extroversion and effervescence, his boundless curiosity about other people and the world, was not just another-person-with-dementia. Nobody is.
Just as importantly, I’d found a way back to my writing. My father’s condition and his needs were no longer obstacles to my work, my art. They were a way in.
I settled on Substack as my platform, and I taught myself how to make a rudimentary video so I’d be able to cross-market my work. I spent months thinking about the whole project, and writing and polishing my first few essays.
I was ready.
The count was up to three (dead) mice in my dad’s library, reported my sister, who doesn’t like trapping mice any more than I do.
My sister and father have a sort of super-power, an awareness of other sentient beings that the rest of us don’t have, at least not to the same degree. I think my dad connects with animals even better than he does with people; I believe my sister excels at both.
Which is just to say that she fell into the Yes-to-a-New-Cat camp. On the other hand, she’s aware she’s the one who lives out of state. So, she was also diplomatic about her preference.
Very diplomatic.
On November 7th, I published my first online essay about dementia. Like many platforms, Substack makes it easy to examine your stats. How many subscribers you have and how many viewed a particular post, say. How many times it was shared.
There were five views.
“Why don’t you have a cat?” my father would ask me.
“Because I don’t like cleaning litter boxes,” I’d say. “Because I live where there are coyotes and owls and other predators that would probably kill it if I let it outside.”
I’d been firmly entrenched in the No-to-a-New-Cat camp. This was before my dad had around-the-clock caregivers, and I was concerned we were barely providing sufficient support for his dog, Maggie.
After the new mouse count, I began to waver.
“You need to advertise on Facebook,” my husband told me.
I taught myself the basics of another video software—discouraging, exasperating, exciting—and created a second video, and he helped me set up a Facebook ad. I was learning something about how networking sites operated behind the scenes, and I was thrilled.
“What’s nice is, I’m not part of the bad things social media does,” I told my husband. “I get to participate, but I’m not mining data from people.”
“How do you think they find out the marketing data you’re using?” he asked me.
Okay, I was benefiting from social media’s dark side.
“Ten more subscribers today!” I’d call out, running into my husband’s office. Another ten the following day, and the day after that. The next day, twenty.
“Mr. D” could go viral. And, I knew it wouldn’t happen, but I could picture it: Terry Gross’ assistant—from NPR’s Fresh Air—might call. Maybe even someone for Oprah.
In November, my dad had a ministroke, and then he fell. For the next few days, he could barely speak. He needed support just to walk from his bedroom to the kitchen. And for a few nights, he was completely irrational, trying to get outside, to escape his house.
My family spent intensive time with him over the next few weeks, and we changed his caregiver schedule so someone was with him 24 hours a day.
A cat was out of the question.
As my dad’s condition stabilized, we were able to cut back the days we were “on,” and I found a new, more even balance between Dad time and everything else. The buzzing worries dissipated.
It felt good to be writing regularly, and I knew the Substack essays were reaching people, even helping some. But the number of new subscribers was drying up, and then they disappeared almost completely.
Facebook offered me a free business consultation.
I scheduled a session but couldn’t even figure out whether I was signing up for Greenwich Mean Time—apparently, what’s used by the online cognoscenti—or Mountain Daylight Savings Time, so I missed two sessions. Meanwhile, through a different Facebook department, I lucked into an appointment with a techie, who couldn’t help me with marketing but was so personable and accessible that I started to believe it would all work out.
But when I finally talked to a Facebook marketing person, he was different. AI might have done a better job of following the flow chart of steps he seemed to be using to guide me through two useless steps and then summarize what we’d done. In our second session, he couldn’t figure out a basic follow-up measure.
It turns out, Facebook behind-the-scenes can be pretty arcane. And, despite the marketing, my number of new subscribers continued to drop.
Oprah wasn’t going to call.
“What are we going to name the cat?” my father would ask, and we’d spend the next ten minutes listing pet names that struck us as absurd.
“Adelaide? Esmeralda?” he’d ask.
“Ernestine. Henrietta. Cedric,” I’d say. “Petunia,” even though I’d once named a pet turtle just that.
My dad had mostly recovered from his setback, and we were so relieved that we’d said “yes” when he’d remembered the cat. So, we’d found a rescued cat that was going to be delivered in the next couple of weeks.
“Eloise, Mildred, …” my dad said. “Charlie!”
“Ariana,” I replied. “Winston.”
“Is Charlie a good name?” my dad asked. “I like Charlie.”
I thought it was a great name.
My dad would do the same playful lists for names for his great-granddaughter, my niece’s child, in the months before she was born, until the games flowed into each other, so I never quite knew whether we were talking about cat names or child names. Not that it mattered.
Maybe naming was a way for his brain to slowly grasp something new.
When Charlie arrived, he was an affectionate tabby with an intricately beautiful pattern inscribed on his back. He was quick to greet people, to leap into a lap, to purr. My father and he kept a wary distance between them. Charlie, only a year old, played a little too roughly. And my dad would pet him as if he were petting a labrador.
My dad loved the fact of the cat. He couldn’t remember the cat’s name or the word for “cat,” although even when he called Charlie a dog, he knew the difference. When Charlie napped during the day, my father would insist we search the house until we found him, under a chair or bed or in his crate. Dad would smile from several feet away.
Now, Charlie will even jump into my father'’s lap. When Dad is irritable, I can sometimes point to the cat, and my father’s face will relax and break into a grin.
From the start, I had an outline of things I had to write about, a sense of what needed to be said about the strangeness of it all, about the ways it kept returning me to age-old questions about self, about identity and meaning. About what it means to live in the world.
I was driven.
Even though there’s so much more, even though I think I found a bit of peace with each “Mr. D’s Wild Ride” essay, next week’s essay will be the last in the series.
It’s the end of the story I first envisioned.
After a couple of months, the word for cat came back for my dad.
“Isn’t he a great cat?” he says, carefully petting Charlie as he lies at the top of a scratching perch. “We’ve never had a cat like this.”
Jennie, it’s been an enlightening experience to read your weekly stories. It has heightened my awareness of the process you and your family are living as you care for your dad, as well as providing richness with your referenced material, side stories, and humor. I have learned about the effects of dementia on the entire family during the individual’s decline. I’m so glad you found your writing voice again and I look forward to what new writing awaits you!
Jennie,
Thank you for your insights, vulnerability and beautiful writing. I'll be sad to read your last "Mr D's Wild Ride", but hope to follow your next "art" endeavor . . . and to see you be "discovered" by Oprah!