Claudia died on January 31, 2005. Buttercup died two weeks later. The vet told me she died of grief, and I did not know cats could do that. I do now.
That is the whole reason this book exists, and it is also the reason it took me almost twenty years to write it. I knew for a long time that I wanted to write about those years, the twelve and a half years I was married to Claudia, the long illness, the small apartment we built around her body and her breathing. I started it more than once as a straight memoir. Every time, I stopped.
Why couldn’t I write this as a straight memoir?
Told head-on, from my own point of view, it came out as a catalog of hard things. The asthma, the daily Kenalog shots, the water her body held until she was over three hundred pounds and left wet footprints when she walked, the marriage that had real problems underneath all of it. Written that way it was true, and it was unbearable, and nobody would want to read it. I did not want to write it.
The book only worked once I stopped telling it and let Buttercup tell it. She was there for all of it, and she was the animal paying the most attention in every room we lived in.
Why give the story to the cat?
Someone pulled Buttercup out of a river when she was two weeks old, thrown in a sack with her littermates, and she washed up on a bank where a stranger happened to be walking. He gave her CPR. She bit him. Then she let him carry her to the shelter, where she climbed the wire of her cage and demanded I stop walking past her. She was right. I was the one. For the next fourteen years she watched everything.
That is what made her the right narrator. Not a gimmick, and not a way to make the material cute. A cat does not editorialize. She does not know the medical words. She does not stand outside the marriage and judge it. She reads the apartment through smell and warmth and the exact sound of Claudia’s breathing, and she knows something is wrong before I do, and she runs down the hallway when the breathing changes. When you take away the human vocabulary for illness and grief, what is left is the thing itself, happening in the rooms, witnessed by someone who has no reason to soften it or explain it. Buttercup could tell the truth about those years precisely because she could not comment on it.
The book on this: Buttercup is the memoir of ten years in a small apartment, told by the cat who witnessed all of it.
It also let me write about Claudia the way she deserved. She was funny, sharply and specifically funny, with opinions about everything and no interest in keeping them to herself. She cooked food that took all afternoon. She named a snail Dexter and cried for days when he died, and neither of us thought that was excessive. Through Buttercup’s eyes she is not a patient. She is the warm center of a small territory, the one who talks while she cooks, the person a cat organizes her whole day around. The illness is in the book, all of it, but it is not what the book is about. The book is about a household, seen by the one member of it who never looked away.
How do you write from inside a body that has no words?
The hardest craft problem was staying honest to what a cat knows. The book opens with her near-death in the river, and I had to write that from inside a two-week-old kitten who does not yet have the word afraid. She has the smell of fear flooding in through her mother, and her body responding before she understands anything. No metaphors she could not reach. No feelings she could not have. Every chapter had to pass that test. If Buttercup could not smell it, hear it, feel it in her paws, or want it, it did not go on the page.
That constraint freed the book instead of limiting it. A person narrating grief reaches for abstraction, because we have a lifetime of words for it. A cat has none. She has the door Claudia is behind, and she sits outside it in the long afternoons and thinks at the wood. She has the morning Claudia died, when I could not stop moving from room to room, and she followed me the whole time and did not try to make me stop, because she understood that keeping busy was all I had. She could not say any of that. She could only do it, and let the reader feel what it meant. The restriction forced the emotion into action and detail.
What did the two weeks after teach me?
When Claudia was gone, Buttercup did not know what to do with herself. She had spent ten years calibrated to one person, and when that person was gone she could not recalibrate. I was keeping her alive with daily IVs by then, and she let me, because I needed her to still be there. Two weeks later she was not. The vet said her kidneys failed, and he also said that cats feel loss in their bodies, that the absence of someone central can do to a cat what it cannot easily do to most other animals.
They grieved each other. That is the truest sentence I know about both of them, and it is the sentence the whole book is built to earn. I could not have written it as my own grief on the page. It would have collapsed into me, into my guilt, into everything I did and did not do across those years. Given to Buttercup, it becomes simpler and more honest. Two creatures who loved the same person, lost her, and could not stay in a world she had left.
I have written a lot of books. This is the one I could not write for almost twenty years, and it only came out once I handed it to the cat on the windowsill. She saw everything and judged none of it. So I gave her the book. It is hers and Claudia’s, not mine, though I am in it.
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