my first babies

{ed. note: today's post has nothing to do with bebe marie. check back tomorrow for bebe-related updates, and feel free to skip this one if you are not an animal lover.}

when i was twenty years old, and living in san francisco with my then-boyfriend, i got a kitten. he was a sweet and playful orange tabby and i named him cassius. he seemed very lonely -- i'd arrive home in the evening from my nanny job to find him waiting at the door, and as soon as i walked in he'd claw his way up my clothes to my shoulder where he'd sit licking my ear and purring -- so i soon went back to the SPCA for another kitten. by this point it was no longer "kitten season" and the pickings were slim. i went home with a sickly, runty little black kitten with a goopy eye and a terrible cold. i figured no one else would want him and he was so pathetic, he made my heart hurt. i named him caesar.

after a period of getting to know each other, in which cassius tried repeatedly to eat caesar (who before long was known as "tiny" because he was so small, especially relative to cassius), they quickly became acclimated to one another's presence and grew very fond of each other. they played together and napped together. cassius, very much the big brother, disciplined tiny for misbehaving and loved to bathe him. they spent many, many hours snuggling together and purring.

i had had the cats for less than a year when i moved back home. we lived together just the three of us for several years, during most of which time josh and i were dating. as we began to spend more time together, josh's presence in our family shook up our dynamic, with cassius, who thought he was my boyfriend, getting very jealous and possessive of me. during our early sleepovers, josh would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to find cassius glaring at him in the dark, like "that's my spot, buddy" -- and once or twice he awoke with cassius sleeping on his face, in an apparent attempt to suffocate him. tiny and josh, on the other hand, were drawn to each other from the start. josh and i sometimes joked that i was merely a vehicle to bring the two of them together. josh called tiny a little black piece of his soul.

we were total cat nerds, taking millions of pictures of them and talking about them when we weren't home, wondering what they were doing while we were gone. we called them "the boys" and it was a rare moment when one of us didn't have a cat in our lap.

at age 8, cassius was diagnosed with kidney disease. we managed it with prescription food and subcutaneous fluids for close to a year, and he seemed to be just fine, the same old playful, vocal, loving, rambunctious, energetic cat. then one morning in july of 2005 he was clearly sick. i took him to the vet, and she ran some bloodwork and called me a few hours later to tell me that he was dying and the only thing we could do was to make it as painless for him as possible. josh and i went to the office after work and held him as they put him to sleep.

losing cassius was heartbreaking. he was my first "baby" and it took many months before i stopped expecting him to be waiting at the door for me at the end of the day. i still miss him.

the unexpected silver lining in cassius's death was that tiny really blossomed, once out of the shadow cast by his dominant brother. he and i rekindled our relationship, which had been difficult to maintain ever since josh and i moved in together, as cassius had become increasingly possessive of me. tiny got tons of attention every day and one of his favorite things to do was to crawl inside my sweatshirt and curl up against my belly, purring.

we were nervous about how tiny would react to a new baby, but he was surprisingly nonplussed in the early days and, after some initial trepidation when bebe became mobile, grew to enjoy her attention. he has had so many names over his twelve years of life -- tiny, deek, minners, the B, patches o'droolibran, just-a-little-guy, and weezy, just to name a few -- and over the last few months we had been calling him EGC, short for "extremely good cat." we just couldn't believe how well he adapted to such a major change.

when we learned about bebe's cat allergy, we never really questioned what we should do. we love our pets dearly, but the health of our human child comes first. as josh put it, it wasn't a hard choice to make, but it was such a hard choice to execute. we found him a new home where i am sure he will receive a lot of love, but bringing him there yesterday morning was one of the most difficult things i've ever done.

i can't believe that he's gone. it just feels so wrong that i won't get to love him and care for him for the entirety of his little feline life. a piece of me will always feel incomplete now.

_