Pet therapy

How love and cancer changed me from a Dog Guy to a Cat Dad

Photo by Niklas Hamann via Unsplash

Welcome new subscribers! I was really pulling for a lighthearted romp about catsitting this week, but here we are eulogizing lost pets. So it goes in love and sickness… But as always, Good Marrow is a reader-supported newsletter so thanks for reading, supporting, and sharing.

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My parents found an ad for puppies in the classified section of a newspaper. I don’t remember the finer details, but my brothers and I had been on the edge of our seats in a game of would-we or won’t-we get a dog, and suddenly, as we piled into our minivan, a longer drive than usual seemed to confirm our growing enthusiasm. Arriving to a yard full of dogs, her white fur stood out like a thawing winter’s last clump of snow.

An all-white, fluffball of a puppy, the owner said she was a Samoyed, one of those snowy tundra sled dogs that are cute but certainly out of of their original habitat in the humid flatlands of Illinois. And soon she was in our backseat, bewildered but content as we brought her home and gave her the only name that felt fitting— Snowflake.

Snowflake took to our house quickly. With three boys to rile her up, she matched our energy as she fired out of our back door like a white hot cannonball when we played hide and seek in our well-manicured yard. By the time her namesake snow blanketed the ground for our first winter together, she was family— and made it into our Christmas card photo on the first go around.

As I grew up and moved away to college and some larger adult life beyond her purview, coming home to see family would mean coming home to see Snowflake. She seemed to age when I didn’t, myself still too young to see the passage of time on myself but quick to spot the browning of her fur, the slow in her step, and the grey skies that began to creep into her eyes.

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In 2015, I chartered a surprise return to Snowflake in her season of winter, my own fur having fallen off of my head as I was shuttled into my childhood home a shell of myself. I had been diagnosed with leukemia just a month prior and had returned home to lick my wounds after a good but not MRD-negative induction round of chemo (minimal residual disease, think of being on the five yard line for a touchdown).

I was sick and I wondered if she knew it. If she did, she never gave on, following the unspoken rules to treat cancerous Elliott more or less how you would have treated him prior.

We spent a lot of time on the floor, head to head, myself trying to understand her concept of time, learning not to count days or hours, only rotations from one spot to another. As she eased onto her side, I knew what was coming and asked if she could stay until I knew what was going to happen to me.

But I saw and felt it all. The weariness. The promise of life that demands an ending. And the impossible ask we make of those that we love to never leave us.

On her last day, Snowflake lay drooped across my lap, me remembering when she used to fit inside it. I carried her into a different minivan and brought her to the vet where we went behind heavy doors and said goodbye. The vet tried to comfort us and tell us that “it was her time”. And while I didn’t disagree, I was in my own personal spat with Father Time and the curation of his selection process.

Like most people with beloved family pets, between tears and sniffles it was resolved— there would never be another like Snowflake.

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I met Maynard the first day that I met Emily outside of the hospital (cute origin story here). He was her childhood pet, the furry creature that had held her hand through childhood, high school, and a surely bewildering stint of college years. It had only been a couple months since Snowflake had left me, and I was holding firm on my promise that she would never be replaced. So thankfully life decided to throw me a workaround— because Maynard was a cat. A fancy little man cat.

I never thought that I would be a cat guy. But love will make you do crazy things and in a war of attrition, I proved winsome enough for him to allow my continued presence. At first suspicious of a new male interloper, I knew Maynard was warming up to me the first time he curled up and took a nap on the couch with me. I was still living with my parents and just recovered enough from my bone marrow transplant to begin to strech my wings. I was jobless and very much unsure of my future so it was nice to have company with a fellow freeloader (though I doubt he worried about such things).

And just like that, I became a cat dad.

It is and was another reminder of life’s many change ups. From healthy to sick, from dog guy to cat dad, predisposition to one state or another is laughably temporary— the ability to redefine oneself as easy as doing nothing or as all encompassing as falling in love. The versions of ourselves that we imagine to be set in stone are as strong as we believe they are until something unknowable casually wipes it all out.

Maynard looking dapper.

In a way, “Why would I ever get cancer?” was once as easily espoused as “Why would I ever get a cat?”

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One year ago Maynard gave me a familiar look. It was a long sigh as I ran a hand over his side and felt the hollow xylophone ring of his rib cage protruding from his skinny body. Somehow time had won again and I had grown old with another furry companion.

Maynard had seen me through my second two bouts of leukemia. The first time we were told to send him away to live at Emily’s parents’ with (gasp) another cat due to transplant restrictions that had something to do with infections from litter boxes. But the second go around we decided against boarding the old man, feeling that any risk was surely worth the reward. I can’t point to any peer reviewed studies, but I have anecdotal evidence that nothing beats the health benefits of a cat sleeping soundly on your chest.

Now I know that life has a dark sense of humor because when we took Maynard to the Emergency Vet and his bloodwork returned, Emily and I needed no help interpreting them. A plunging hemoglobin and an exploding WBC looked all too familiar. In the end, Maynard would take the leukemia bullet for me, sating the impossible hunger of that bitch-ass blood cancer, a feline sacrifice that, as a pact between him and I— would hopefully allow me to stick around a while longer and look after the Emily that he had finally entrusted me with.

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All of this rear-view mirror gazing has been brought about because this week we’ve been catsitting my brother's two youthful cats. Three years old and full of mischief, they have rattled our hallways and laid adolescent waste to any shelved trinket that we had the hubris to leave aloft. But as older human friends have children and younger human friends get new pets, it is nice to see the circle of life spin onwards.

Someone somewhere once said that pets teach us how to say goodbye to loved ones when they go, as if the relative lifespan of a dog or cat was engineered as a trial run for human loss. It is a fair guess, owed to some mix of mammalian evolution and Chicken Soup for the Soul philosophizing, though I want to save space for the fish lovers, gerbil owners, and turtle parents among us— whose lifespans and orders of grief surely must fluctuate wildly.

But much in the way that “dog person” and “cat person” have been set up as a false binary, age has taught me that sickness and health inevitably squeeze that Venn diagram, the big hug of the middle welcoming us all in the end. Rather than push polarity, I am trying to embrace that we are everything we are not, and can easily become something we never thought we could.

Who knows, after the dust and dander settle from catsitting… Maybe we’ll get a dog. Feel free to eulogize your own favorite pets in the comments or convince me what kind of pet I should or should not get.

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Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week

In keeping with the spirit of looking back, we went to the Just Like Heaven music festival in Pasadena last weekend which booked the early aughts’ biggest indie bands. As someone who came of musical-age during that time, it was a delight to watch Sleigh Bells, Passion Pit, The War on Drugs, Death Cab, The Postal Service, and Phoenix rip through formative tracks circa 2009. It took me right back to my summer in New York City; sweaty, poor, and headphones always on.

Everything sounds better loud, but it was Alvvays swirling, dream pop that sounded album-perfect with the volume and distortion cranked to 11.

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