“I don’t feel well,” she said. “You don’t understand.”
Barbara figured, in time, her mother would adjust. Harry. Amber. Gracie. Smoky. She had always found a way to survive; she had always discovered a purpose. But she called one morning and told Barbara, “I can’t take it anymore, sweetie. Death has been sitting in the apartment with me.”
Barbara rushed over. Her mother was in severe pain. She had been awake all night. “Why didn’t you call me?” Barbara kept asking as they rushed to the emergency room. “Why didn’t you call me in the middle of the night?”
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
It was breast cancer, untreated for years, and it had metastasized into her spine and legs. There was nothing they could do but ease the pain, which Barbara realized her mother had been secretly carrying for years. The doctors gave her medicine and sent her home, but the suffering was too much, the cancer too ferocious, the damage too severe. Within a month, she was back in the hospital.
“How’s Bonkers?” she asked Barbara as she struggled for breath. She was so weak, she could barely form the words.
Barbara swept a piece of her mother’s gray hair from her forehead. “Bonkers is fine,” she lied, fighting tears. The truth was that Bonkers was gone. Barbara had spent the previous evening looking for her, but the cat was nowhere to be found.
Barbara’s mother nodded, smiled weakly, and closed her eyes. “Bonkers,” she muttered under her breath. The next day, no longer conscious or able to breathe on her own, she was placed on a ventilator. She had told Barbara repeatedly that she didn’t want to survive like that, with a machine keeping her alive. But she didn’t have a living will. She hadn’t given her written consent. After a vehement argument, which hurt Barbara as much as anything in her life ever had, the doctors agreed to remove the ventilator. The morphine would keep her comfortable, but it wouldn’t prolong her life. She had only a few days to live. Barbara sat on the bed for the rest of the day, watching her mother die.
That night, Barbara Lajiness had a dream. Her mother and Bonkers were together, waving at her from the distance. They were in some vague, undefined place, but her mother was mouthing the words, Everything’s fine, don’t worry, everything’s fine.
The next morning, Barbara walked onto her porch to retrieve the morning paper and glanced into the neighbor’s driveway. There, in the shadow under a pickup truck that never moved, was Bonkers. Barbara didn’t need to step any closer to know that Bonkers had gone off to die, and that she had passed away peacefully in her sleep. She stood on her porch in the cold morning sun, looking at Bonkers and bawling, her coffee cup steaming in her hands.
Finally, she called James. They buried Bonkers in the backyard, under a lilac bush Barbara’s mother had helped her return to life with fertilizer and eggshells.
The next day, Evelyn Lambert passed away. She was only sixty-six years old.
It’s not easy for Barbara Lajiness to talk about her mother. Even eight years later, with a loving husband and a wonderful daughter and the hilarious companionship of Ninja, now known as Mr. Sir Bob Kittens, she has to stop every sentence or two to wipe away the tears.
“I admire her,” Barbara says. “There are a lot of things I could criticize about her life, but having done that, having put other lives ahead of her own, kitty’s lives . . . that’s pretty admirable. No matter what anyone can say about her and the choices she made, she cared about everyone and everything else to a fault.”
“Do you think she cared too much?”
“Sometimes I think so but, you know, I’m not sure if you can ever really care too much. She really cared about everything that didn’t have a voice. She really cared. When I was a kid, the town decided to do this mosquito spraying, and these trucks would drive around with orange lights on top and spray something that was supposed to kill the mosquitoes. A few weeks into it, my mom said to me, ‘Do you hear that?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t hear anything.’ She said, ‘That’s because it’s killing more than just the mosquitoes. It’s killing all the bugs. That’s why you don’t hear the birds anymore.’”
Barbara pauses to compose herself. “My mom, she was pretty smart, you know?”
Barbara knows she bottles things up, that she doesn’t confront her feelings, that she still has an overwhelming fear of those she loves leaving her behind. For two years after her mother and Bonkers died, she couldn’t bring herself to adopt another cat. She had a strong marriage, a wonderful daughter, a steady job, and a nice house. The simple things, some people might call them, the things you don’t cherish enough unless you’ve lived without them. The family had several fish, a few hamsters, and a turtle, but they didn’t have a cat. Barbara was happy, comfortable, loved, but she didn’t want to risk a cat. She didn’t want to lose another one. She didn’t want to open herself to another cat only to have it die on her. But nine-year-old Amanda really wanted a cat, and how can a mother refuse?
So they adopted a kitten named Max. He was wonderfully loving, with an endearing habit of sleeping on top of the refrigerator with his tail hanging over the side. But two years later, when he was four years old, Max collapsed. He was walking across the kitchen when, suddenly, he fell over and started trembling wildly, racked with the tremors of a grand mal seizure. Barbara saw it happen and started to panic. Max was so young, so healthy, and he was dying in front of her. It was her nightmare come true. As James frantically made telephone calls, Barbara held her writhing cat. His eyes were glazing over, his eyelids fluttering, his heart pounding wildly. Before she thought about what she was doing, she yelled to her daughter.
Amanda came running. She saw Max shaking and bleeding from the mouth. She started to scream and cry. It was a lot for an eleven-year-old, but when James and Barbara came home an hour later with the news that Max had died, Amanda rushed to her mother.
“Thank you, Mom,” she said. “I got to say good-bye to Max while he was alive.” She was a strong girl, Barbara realized, seeing for the first time in her well-adjusted daughter the frightened little girl she herself had once been, the one who had struggled so long and so quietly in a broken home.
It took only a month, and three protracted visits to see him at the humane society, before Barbara adopted Ninja. She wasn’t ready, but her family, especially her husband, was lost without a furry companion. Maybe, she thought, I can just live with him in the house. For Amanda and James. Maybe I can just treat Ninja like so many other people treat their cats: like animals who happen to share their space.
Her husband, James, was head over heels for Ninja. He would carry him into the kitchen in the morning, cradling him like a baby. He would ask if Barbara wanted to pet him, and she’d say, “No. Not yet. I like him, but we haven’t created a bond.” She just kept pushing Ninja away, over and over.
When he contracted a virus at twelve weeks old, Barbara rushed him to the vet. She was standing in the office, watching the doctor examine him, when she suddenly broke into tears, just as she had all those years ago when the camper pulled away from her house and she suddenly became convinced her mother would disappear while she was gone.
“I just lost a cat,” she sobbed. “I can’t lose this one, too. I just can’t. You have to help him.”
The veterinarian put her arm around Barbara’s shoulders. “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s only a cold.”
Barbara had discovered why her cat was named Ninja on the first or second day, when she opened a door and discovered him crouching at the end of the hall. Completely startled, the kitten sprang up onto his hind legs with his front legs straight out in front of him like an off-balance zombie. He stood like that for a few seconds, watching her. Then he started jumping sideways toward her, waving his arms from side to side in a sort of demented karate move. He jumped all the way down the hall, his neck cocked crazily to the side, his front paws never touching the ground. It was the strangest thing she had ever seen, and it was no accident. Ninja, Barbara soon realized, did his bizarre karate dance whenever he was startled . . . or scared . . . or annoyed . . . or excited. Amanda’s teenager drama, in particular, got his ninja juices flowing. Whenever Barbara heard her daughter yell, “Oh my god, Ninja,” she knew exactly what was happening. The cat was doing his demented jumping moves on her.