The Thousand-Dollar Haircut
Because she's worth it.
This cat in this picture is twenty-one years old. That’s like one hundred and four in human years.
Have you ever known anyone who made it to one hundred and four? What was behind such extraordinary longevity?
Let me tell you about Mini.
She was a barn cat. The runt of the litter, rejected by her mother. She survived. Was rescued. Fostered. Loved. Let go, many times, for many reasons: a boyfriend’s allergies, anti-feline rental covenants, her habit of purring and hissing simultaneously if a human couldn’t be trusted. When my daughter was in college, she inherited Mini through someone’s complicated separation agreement. When she moved to another state, Mini moved in with us. Other cats came and went, burning through some or all of their nine lives. Mini stayed. My husband died of lung cancer in April. Mini and I are now the sole occupants of a three-bedroom house built in 1913.
I mention the age of the house because Mini is a hunter. When cold weather comes, so do mice. In this part of the Upper Midwest, temperatures can fall to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Leaky old house with cracks in the foundation? Food and warmth? Mini welcomes you.
She is, based on every unnecessary search I’ve done, a Siberian. She checks all the boxes: sweet, loving, smart, beautiful, vocal, agile, adorable. Her coat is composed of three layers. The inner fur lies against her skin like a silk slip. Next is the insulating layer, each strand of which marries the texture of a dandelion seed with a fine grade of goose down. The glossy top coat elegantly defies the elements. Her markings — she is of the storied Neva Masquerade family — carry the subtle camouflage tones of the taiga.
Until two years ago, she took great care of this coat. I never brushed her. She never needed brushing. I tried, once, to carelessly unravel a knot I thought I’d found. I took a curry paddle, something more suited to a German shorthaired pointer than to Russian aristocracy, and went after it. She embedded her incisors in my flesh.
But at age twenty — ninety-six in human years — she was not quite as limber as before. The mats appeared overnight. They grew thicker each day. Each time I approached her with the new miracle comb or brush I’d ordered from Amazon, I learned that her memory was as sharp as her teeth. I tried working the mats apart with my fingers. Massaging them with cornstarch. With coconut oil. I plied her with treats, hiding my scissors.
Imagine a length of live electrical wire. Form it into the shape of a cat. Watch YouTube videos. Try everything you think might not get you killed. Finally, admitting defeat, bring it to a pet groomer that gets okay reviews on Yelp. On a cold night in May, 2022, that’s what I did.
For seventy-five dollars, the groomer shaved off enough fluff to fill one and a half grocery sacks. She removed the mats, leaving enough fur to give her an edgy, leonine profile. Hacked, uneven, but blessedly free of lumps.
‘What do you think?”
The groomer was sleeved with tattoos. Left arm, dogs; right arm, cats.
“Cool,” I said. “Love the crest. And the puffy boots.”
I wrapped my shivering, silent kitty in a bath towel. Opening the carrier on the kitchen floor, I expected to find her motionless and traumatized. She walked out, looked around, went downstairs, came back with a mouse.
A toy mouse. The real mice were cowering elsewhere, terrified.
In May, we sat close together, sweaty hands locked, as the oncologist pulled up the PET scan. An angry red tumor had devoured half of his left lung. Inoperable, the doctor said. Terminal.
As we lay stunned in bed that night, we heard Mini. Siberian cats are, as I said, vocal. Mini is, in that respect, off-the-charts loud.
Trills, chirps, wails. Yowls. She boasts, celebrates, extols. There are times I want to get up and close the windows, for fear that the neighbors will think we’re torturing her. But she’s not suffering. She’s not calling for a mate, or crying to be fed. She has a message for the universe.
Come. See. It is I, Mini, the Magnificent. I have slain the mighty beast. Come. Admire. For I have brought you . . . DINNER!
After a few questioning, disappointed meows, she was quiet. She landed on the comforter and curled up between us. I reached down to stroke her choppy fur. I don’t remember whether or not we slept. In the morning, I stumbled over the stuffed panda, unicorn, and hedgehog she had left for us on the floor near the foot of the bed.
Undeterred by a bad haircut, Mini provides for her family. (August, 2022)
I kept journals. I took photos. I wanted to document the time I spent with my husband, not knowing how much time that would be.
It was just under a year.
The photos give an incomplete timeline. He was a passionate gardener. I circled the yard, carrying my phone as a counterbalance to my sadness. In May, tulips. April: lilacs, irises, bleeding hearts. June: roses, clematis, mock orange. July: bursts of Asiatic lilies. A family of robins had nested in the arbor he’d built. I filmed their growth from our kitchen window. On June 29th, one fuzzy yellow head emerged. On the 30th, there were three ravenous beaks. And on the 11th of July, I took a picture of the last chick to leave the nest, sitting uncertainly on a fence.
He built that fence.
Fewer pictures. His cancer was progressing. Chemo helped with the pain, but did not stop the metastases to his clavicle and ribs. Radiation failed, as did immunotherapy.
In August, the vine threaded through another of his fences produced small clumps of tiny, sweet grapes. In early September, we took our final trip to Lake Superior’s north shore. It’s a sacred place, a liminal space. Gooseberry Falls, formed from some of the oldest rocks on earth. Sumac, goldenrod.
I don’t have many pictures after that. He slept a lot. I took care of him, until it became too hard.
And Mini? She took care of him as well.
We moved him to the hospice on March 9th, 2023.
I hesitate to share this picture. I expect thunder and possibly brimstone from that liminal space. He hated to be photographed; I had to do it on the sly. But there is so much tenderness there. And it leads to the next part of my story.
Mini’s mats were far worse than last year’s. But her outer coat hid them from view as they grew thick as cotton ropes. All winter, I’d fed and petted and ignored her. After two days of visiting the hospice, I came home to find her walking oddly. She was stumbling in a circle, her head fixed and immobile, facing to her left.
“Mini. Oh my God. What happened?”
I searched her fur. She mewed pitifully. Horrified, I realized that in tugging at her fur, she’d caught one tooth under her skin. It was stuck like a fish hook. Her head was pinned to her shoulder.
Shocked, sobbing, I managed to work it loose. It took nearly an hour.
“Poor sweetie,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.” I carried her to bed. She pressed her fierce little body against mine.
“We’ll fix this,” the vet said. “You’ve got enough on your plate.”
A cleaned wound, a cute knit onesie, antibiotics, and something called a “soft Elizabethan collar” instead of the pejorative cone-of-shame, set me back two hundred and sixty-six dollars.
“There goes my liquor money for the week,” I told the receptionist. She laughed, thinking it was a joke. I brought Mini home and tucked the collar down so that she could eat her Fancy Feast, while I stroked her head in remorse.
The vet told me I could remove the collar after a week. Mini’s teeth went immediately to the wound. Another visit. A third. More than eight hundred dollars had now left my bank account.
On April 6th, I pushed a syringe of gabapentin into her mouth. I waited two hours for the sedative to take effect before taking her in for a proper grooming.
“Relax,” I murmured. “You’re going to love the way you look.”
“...the insulating layer, each strand of which marries the texture of a dandelion seed with a fine grade of goose down.” So much beauty in this essay, including its resistance to a tidy conclusion.
Being the quintessential cat person, this got me by the short hairs. Woven in so gracefully is the arc of losing your husband. There are poetic flourishes throughout.