Sparky
I am sad to announce that our dear cat Sparky died on Thursday, May 15, 2008, after a brief but traumatic illness. Sparky was far too young, only eight years old, and we miss him terribly. A house full of cats and dogs seems empty without him.
It seems impossible that he is not here somewhere, sleeping on the stairs or curled up on the sun porch. This morning I saw his pawprint in the dust on my desk. I cannot bear to move the paper bag he chose to lie on, in the sun by the door, during his final days with us.
It is impossible. Sparky was my pal, my buddy, my dear, dear friend. He cannot be gone.
Sparky came to us in the autumn of 1999. I had stumbled across several kittens living at the edge of our northern field, and that evening I brought them some leftover pizza. The next morning I went out to check on them. The pizza box was empty, but but the kittens were nowhere to be found.
Suddenly a tiny kitten, looking like a black puffball with legs, marched out of the undergrowth, meowing imperiously at me.
Winter was coming. Of course I took him inside. I remember, to this day, how tiny, soft and warm he felt as I carried him toward the house.
Kathy’s mother had recently come to live with us and was not fond of cats, so I stashed Sparky in the cellar for the day and smuggled him upstairs to my office that night. There he spent the next few weeks, sitting on my desk or curled in my lap. Occasionally he escaped the office, sneaking downstairs and appearing suddenly on the table at my mother-in-law’s side, just staring at her face with intense curiosity as she sat in her recliner. She called him “that bad little cat,” but eventually she got used to him.
From then on, whenever we wanted to tease Sparky, we’d say, “Don’t you bite me, you bad little cat.” Sparky did nip once in a while when he was very annoyed (when I tried to get him to play patty-cake, for example), but he was always careful not to bite hard enough to hurt. It was his way of making an editorial comment on whatever was going on at the time.
Perhaps because of those first few weeks in my office, Sparky became an intensely people-centered cat. He hated being left in a room alone, and preferred throughout his life to be sitting in your lap, kneading your stomach with his big furry paws and purring loudly. Early on he discovered that the buttons on my shirt were fun to chew, and if I was wearing a t-shirt or sweatshirt he was visibly disappointed. In both my office and Kathy’s, he spent hours sitting in our laps as we wrote, occasionally reaching out to pull our arms away from the keyboard when he wanted to be hugged or petted.
In photographs, Sparky often looks owlishly angry, but he was almost never cranky. When we brought other kittens that turned up in the yard into the house to live, he never hissed at them or tried to bully them. He regarded them with a dignified detachment, clearly regarding them as little hooligans when they raced through the house knocking things over. When the kittens became grown cats, occasionally one would try to pick a fight with him, but Sparky never had to fight. He simply marched toward the provocateur with a look of determination on his face, and the little squirt invariably backed down and fled the room.
Most of the other kittens we brought in came as two complete litters, and as they grew they tended to hang out with their littermates. Sparky preferred to hang out with us, and we, in turn, found ourselves making sure he knew he had special status. I cooked him his beloved turkeyburger, I snuck bits of chicken to him at dinner, and if the cats got a special treat of canned tuna, Sparky got his own plate. He was Number One Cat, and he knew it.
While Sparky did his best to ignore the other cats, he did forge an unlikely friendship with Brownie the Dog. In the evenings, while Brownie would sprawl on the floor of the living room, Sparky would approach her and begin gently but thoroughly cleaning the top of her head. He seemed intent at first on grooming the entire 70-pound dog. But invariably, after a few minutes, he would tire of the task, get an annoyed expression on his face (perhaps because Brownie usually needed a real bath and tasted bad), and haul off and swat Brownie on the nose with his paw, whereupon Brownie would bolt the room. It got to the point that whenever Sparky approached her Brownie became clearly nervous, hoping for the best but ready to flee. The flip side was that Brownie liked to taunt Sparky by lunging at him in mock attack until Sparky had had enough and chased Brownie, visibly laughing at having gotten her friend’s goat, from the room.
It’s impossible to capture in words how deep our relationship with Sparky was. He was never a clingy cat, demanding attention or food. If you had to get up, he gracefully exited your lap without resentment. He wanted to be there because you wanted him there. If we were out for the day, he was first in line to greet us when we returned. When we took the dogs for a walk, it would be Sparky’s silhouette we saw in the doorway when we returned. If we took naps in the afternoon, Sparky slept next to us. He let us carry him around the house like a baby and tolerated countless silly trips to visit the Kitty in the Mirror. I usually get up first in the morning and go downstairs to make coffee; Sparky always waited by the bedroom door for me to open it on my return, whereupon he would make a beeline for Kathy to say good morning to her. It was a ritual enacted a thousand times, but he never seemed happier.
He loved it when we kissed the top of his head and told him he smelled good. Sparky always smelled good, like a cross between fresh bread and clean laundry.
I make a point of saying good morning and good night to all the cats and dogs (which takes a while the past few years), but Sparky was the only one of the cats who clearly understood my gesture. Though he is not there in the darkened kitchen, I still say goodnight to Sparky.
A few days before he died, in the midst of ten hellish days of feeding him with a dropper and consulting vets who offered no real hope, I took Sparky outside on his little leash and halter. It was a sunny spring afternoon, and he led me to the tall grass by the dooryard, where he rubbed his face against the grass and watched the birds fly by. I snapped a dandelion gone to seed and blew it for him so he could see the flurry of fluff.
We buried Sparky near the lilac bushes behind the bird feeder, near the graves of Rufus, our wonderful cat who came to Ohio with us from New York, and Puff, who came with the house when we bought it and had lived to be twenty. Rufus and Puff had been the resident cats when Sparky joined our family.
Sparky was a person, an individual with a distinct personality, memories, likes and dislikes, and, most of all, love.
We have had (and have) other cats that we love, but there has never been another cat that we felt so attached to in a truly reciprocal sense. Sparky knew we loved him, and he loved us. And, at the end, I could see in his eyes that he knew we were trying to help him. He never fought when I was feeding him, only raising a paw gently to push away my hand when it became too much. In his last days we petted him and scratched him under the chin as he lay on the floor of my office, and he purred just as he always had in a thousand hours on our laps.
I have recited all the consolations to myself. If I had not brought him in that day, he would surely have died in our field within a week. Instead he got two people (and a dog) who loved him for eight years in a home where he was safe and secure.
He was lucky, but we were luckier. It was an honor to have known Sparky, and my regret is only that our time together was so painfully brief. I will miss him for the rest of my life. He was the most extraordinary cat I have ever known. Neither of us really knew how happy Sparky made us until he was gone. It is as if the lights have gone off in our house.
And, having written all this, all I want is for Sparky to somehow come back. I want him to sit in my lap again and reach up to snag a button on my shirt, and look into my eyes with love and trust. I want my friend back.
They say that the passage of time is an illusion, that the past still exists and that all that has come before still lives as it did. I hope that something like that is true, and that the life Sparky lived with us, and the love we had with him, still somehow awaits us all as a tiny black kitten steps out of the bushes on a bright October morning.
Thank you, my friend. We will always love you, Sparky.
Last updated on Saturday, June 7, 2008