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Monjiro and Mosiac loved to fool around

●”He was such a sweet fella”
I wish I had happier things to write about this month. But sometimes life throws you a curve ball, and you just have to roll with your emotions. My dearest cat, Mosiac, passed away last week. I knew this day would come, but I guess I was never prepared to say good-bye — and thank you — so soon.

Mosiac came into my life ten years ago when I needed him most. I was nineteen, living alone, going to school, and still licking my wounds after my brother’s death a couple of years earlier. I guess you could say I was vulnerable then, unsure about so many things going on in my life. I happened upon Mosiac and his brother, Simon, at a humane society in Chicago. At just eight weeks and terribly sick, the two scared kitties cowered and shook in the corner of their cage. Paul, who was my boyfriend at the time, thought they looked like rats. Having worked at animal shelters before, I knew these guys barely had a chance of being adopted, let alone being kept alive for very much longer. Sick animals get the boot first, and fast, to make space for others.

Without hesitation I took the kitties home, and over the next two months blew my allowance and savings to nurse them back to health. They quickly grew to become awesome cats, great big balls of energy and totally unconditional lovers. They weren’t always attractive (they were obviously runts of the litter, and if I didn’t groom them enough they’d get pretty mangy). But they’d run to the door when they heard me come home, their long, black tails quivering in delight.

A playful jostle with Marsden

During the next decade, Mosiac and Simon shared some of my life’s greatest milestones – graduating from college, getting married, moving to three cities, and welcoming two kids. Along the way, I took in Monjiro, my grandmother’s cat, after she passed on. The three were instant pals, the three musketeers, always busy chasing each other around, or lovingly grooming each other in an interesting three-way.

But Mosiac was undoubtedly the head of the “welcoming committee,” as I called them, because they absolutely LOVED visitors. He was always the first to greet every pair of legs that walked through the door, be it family, friends, or the A/C repair man. He was definitely quirky. We had to enforce an “open door” policy with our bathroom, because he’d get upset and rip out the carpet if you didn’t let him in. All he wanted was your undivided attention while you sat on the can (or maybe he just liked the, uh… smell), purring non-stop and head-butting your legs. Some of my friends were wigged out by this, but eventually they, too, would just wait for him to come into the bathroom before they closed the door. Bathroom time meant Mosiac was coming along. That’s just the way it was at our house.

Mosiac was like a dog. If you made eye contact with him, he’d come skipping towards you, purring. He was also big (almost 20 pounds), but we never needed a fly swatter around the house, because he’d fly high and do the deed for us.

Total submission

When he and Simon turned ten this summer – about 60 in human years — I knew they were officially “geriatric,” and that their healthy years were numbered. But they were well-cared for, fed premium cat food, their shots all up-to-date, and I believed they had at least a few more good years ahead of them. They’d mellowed out in recent years for sure, and I noticed Mosiac couldn’t score that fly on his first couple of tries (which he had before). But his patience was simply beyond belief, for which I was always grateful. Ki-chan used to try to ride him. He’d usually collapse under her, but he’d just stay there for the cuddle. I don’t even know how many times Ki-chan and her friends pulled his tail. Even I’d get alarmed, but he never seemed to mind. Lately he had taken a special liking to Marsden, gently body slamming him while he practiced sitting up. Marsden would cackle, grab Mosiac’s head, roll over, and come away with a fistful of his fur. Somehow Mosiac, too, found this very entertaining. Purring like a motor — and maybe his glands were getting a bit lax from growing old — he’d drool on Marsden.

Our 20-pounde

But such happy moments were short-lived. I’d recently noticed him spending most of his day lying flat on the cold bathroom floor, not to hang out with us, but as if to keep his stomach cold. He was losing weight rapidly. The vet gave him antibiotics and a blood test. By the time the results came back, it was obvious his organs were failing. During the last few days I spent hours with him on the chilly tiled floor, force-feeding him and petting his bony body. He barely left the bathroom, but during what became his last night with us, he mustered enough energy to climb the stairs to our bedroom. In the morning, I found him by our bed. I honestly thought he was on the rebound, yet looking back, it kills me to think he used his final blast of energy to be near us. At the vet’s that day, while we waited for more test results to come back, he slipped in and out of consciousness until he took his last breath.

Later that evening, Ki-chan searched the house for Mosiac. “I think he’s in Mommy’s room,” she said, running in to the bedroom, only to find Mosiac wasn’t sleeping in his usual spot. The “he’s in heaven” concept hasn’t sunk in yet, so she still asks me when he’s coming home. Simon and Monjiro are definitely feeling a strange shift around the house, sometimes wailing sorrowfully in the middle of the night, and being generally clingy. As for me, I’ll be on the mend for a while. I’m only beginning to embrace the intensity of the love and joy this cat gave me over the last ten years. For the first time in a long time, I’m also feeling the preciousness and fragility of all living things. So I’m slowing down more these days, stopping to give my kids and kitties long and meaningful hugs, wishing they could have grown up to know what a sweet and special fella Mosiac was.