Just the seventeen of us sixteen years ago. Ebony is the cat in Meredith’s arms, top-left.
She was born the runt of her litter. She never got enough milk, and then she was weaned too young. Still worse, she got herself knocked-up in her first heat by a much bigger tom and her own kittens were so big they almost suckled her dry. When they were rescued, she was barely half-an-inch across at the belly.
She was adopted by a lady who thought she was over her cat allergies but wasn’t, so she came to us as a foster cat until her forever family could find her – but that never happened because her forever family turned out to be us.
We called her Ebony because she was so very black, with just a hint of smoke in her undercoat. She was slight and lean always, even after she got some weight on her, and we always thought of her as the Audrey Hepburn of our cats – always beautiful, always elegant, always distant with the other cats.
We kept her because people can be so stupid about black cats. And because she was born most-likely-to-be-tormented anyway. And because our daughter Meredith, holding Ebony in the top-left in the photo, taken for our Christmas card in the year 2000, fell in love with her. It was with Meri that Ebony perfected her claws-out splayed repose, as comfortable as she ever got in a world that would not hold still. She glommed onto me when Meri was away, eventually glomming onto me in perpetuity.
And her crazy was so complete that, had she been human, I could not have kept her at bay with a restraining order and a revolver. She was the closer of all closers when she wanted something, and what Ebony wanted most in the world was to be on top of me – ideally splayed out on my chest.
She would jump on me and I would throw her off. So she would jump on me and I would throw her off. So, then, she would jump on me and I would have to throw her off yet again. If I threw her off of me six times, she would jump on me seven times, never giving up, just waiting for her next strategic opportunity. She loved it when I made or took a phone call, because then she could take advantage of my distraction to jump on me yet again.
And, my, the girl could jump. Her preferred place to be was on top of me, on my lap or my chest or, as a fallback, splayed across one of my thighs. Second best was next to me or near me, and you can see her on the sofa-top behind me in dozens of the videos at the SelfAdoration.com Youtube channel. And third best, when I was away or too near the other cats, was the highest, most inaccessible place she could find.
Her bed, when she used it, was a tiny mock-picnic basket, built as a centerpiece ornament, situated at the highest spot in the kitchen. She could get to it in one perfect leap, a parabolic arc nine-feet high and nine-inches across. Onyx, another of our black cats, can’t jump reliably from the coffee table to the sofa, but Ebony could jump from a desk to my shoulders as I walked by one way to my wife Cathleen’s shoulders as she walked by the other way to the highest point in the room, all before anyone could have time even to react. If robotic science ever builds a machine that can do that, the on-the-fly ballistics will require a million man-hours of programming.
She was never all-the-way well, not from the womb, and she threw up her food at least once a day. She had been waning for at least the past year; you can watch her turning into skin and bones week-by-week in those videos. Last summer we had to put a step stool in the kitchen so she could jump to the counter, from there to jump to her picnic basket on top of the fridge. In the end, she couldn’t even manage those small, staged jumps, relying on us to elevate her up to her high perch.
And how much can you love a crazy cat? Enough to clean up her endless vomit, enough to engineer prosthetics to indulge her fearful obsessions, enough to lift her up, again and again, to make sure she has a chance to eat in a wary solitude. This much is all Cathleen; I would have done none of it without her. But with pets if not always with people, we can take things as they come, and as crazy-making as her crazy was, it was endearing, too.
Ebony loved like a love-struck teenage girl, like a stalker, even, but her love was complete – and unrelenting. She loved Meri and me and Cathleen and our niece Maddie – with whom she got to live, just for a while, in her ideal situation, as an only-cat. She hated the other cats and she tolerated the dogs. She reconciled herself to my raucous guitar, crouching beside me with her tiny head tucked into the lower cutaway. But what she loved best was to be splayed on top of me, and she got to love me that way to the end of her life.
Ebony died yesterday morning in my arms – in my hands really. She had wasted away, day by day, until she was barely a double-handful of cat. She laid for hours on my chest as I watched her breathing, each breath smaller and more labored than the last. She was so still at the end that I didn’t even know she was dead until I felt her body start to cool.
I wanted it that way. She hated to go out, she hated the cat-carrier, she hated the vet’s office. She wasn’t in pain at the end, but she was slowly, steadily done with being alive. I wanted for her to be at home and at peace when the endless peace came to take her, and in the end I got what I wanted most – for her to die with me holding her, her claws out to the very end.
Too many dogs I’ve loved have gone from my life, and I have wooden boxes of their ashes tucked in a cubby in my desk. But only one cat has loved me the way dogs almost always do, and that cat was Ebony. Sleek and sickly, lithe and aloof, always around me, always looking for her next chance to occupy me like an invading force.
I looked for her, on the sofa-top and on the fridge, when I got up this morning, even despite myself. I’ll be looking for her every day from now on.
