Claudia died on January 31, 2005. Buttercup died two weeks later. The vet told me she died of grief, and I didn’t know cats could do that. I do now.
That’s the reason this book exists, and it’s 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 is Buttercup not 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 didn’t 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.
How did Buttercup’s life begin?
Somebody threw Buttercup into a river in a sack with her littermates when she was two weeks old.
She washed up on a bank where a stranger happened to be walking, and he pulled her out. 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’s what made her the right narrator. Not a gimmick, and not a way to make the material cute. A cat doesn’t editorialize, doesn’t know the medical words, doesn’t 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’s 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 because she couldn’t comment on it.
I’m prouder of that choice than of almost any structural decision I’ve made, and I only found it by failing at the obvious version more than once. I think a lot of memoirs that feel impossible to tell straight are waiting for a different witness, and I’d hate for writers to give up on them the way I nearly gave up on this one.
| Aspect | Told as my own memoir | Told by Buttercup |
|---|---|---|
| What it became | A catalog of hard things, true and unbearable. | A household, seen by the one member who never looked away. |
| Language | Human vocabulary for illness and grief; reaches for abstraction. | Smell, warmth, and the sound of Claudia’s breathing. |
| Judgment | Told head-on, from my own point of view. | Doesn’t editorialize or judge the marriage. |
| Claudia | Mostly a catalog of her illness. | The warm center of a small territory, funny and full of opinions. |
| The grief | Would have collapsed into me and my guilt. | Simpler and more honest: two creatures who loved the same person. |
The book on this: Buttercup is the memoir of ten years in a small apartment, told by the cat who witnessed all of it.
The moment Buttercup knows something a cat can’t know, the reader stops trusting her, and everything in the book depends on that trust.
It also let me write about Claudia the way she deserved. She was funny, sharply 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’s 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 isn’t 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 doesn’t yet have the word afraid. She’s the smell of fear flooding in through her mother, and her body responding before she understands anything. No metaphors she couldn’t reach. No feelings she couldn’t have. Every chapter had to pass that test.
If Buttercup couldn’t smell it, hear it, feel it in her paws, or want it, it didn’t go on the page. I think that rule is the reason the book works. The moment Buttercup knows something a cat can’t know, the reader stops trusting her, and everything in the book depends on that trust. 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’s the door Claudia is behind, and she sits outside it in the long afternoons and thinks at the wood.
She’s the morning Claudia died, when I couldn’t stop moving from room to room, and she followed me the whole time and didn’t try to make me stop, because she understood that keeping busy was all I had. She couldn’t 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.
My take
Some stories can’t be told head on, and this was one of them. For almost twenty years I couldn’t write about my marriage to Claudia without it turning into a catalog of illness and grief. Buttercup could tell it because she couldn’t comment on it. If a story hurts too much to tell, find the witness who never looked away and let them tell it. Buttercup is how this book finally got written.
How do pets grieve after losing an owner?
When Claudia was gone, Buttercup didn’t know what to do with herself. She’d spent ten years calibrated to one person, and when that person was gone she couldn’t 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 wasn’t.
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 can’t easily do to most other animals.
They grieved each other. That’s the truest sentence I know about both of them, and it’s the sentence the whole book is built to earn. I couldn’t have written it as my own grief on the page. It would have collapsed into me, into my guilt, into everything I did and didn’t do across those years. Given to Buttercup, it becomes simpler and more honest. Two creatures who loved the same person, lost her, and couldn’t stay in a world she’d left.
I’ve written a lot of books. This is the one I couldn’t 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’s hers and Claudia’s, not mine, though I’m in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Do cats experience grief? New research suggests they might, NPR (via WUSF)
