Nonfiction: Requiem For A Feline Overlord

‍I got my second shingles vaccination last week. As expected, my body responded by screaming "WHAT THE HELL, MAN?!" and kicking me into the fever pit, just like last time (though last time felt more severe, probably because the pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine was administered in the same visit.) 

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‍While I was laying in bed at four in the morning, blowing close to 102 on the thermometer, cold compress on my head and worrying wife to my side, for a moment I thought the cat had curled up against me. It was just an echo of a previous reaction — a ghost of another fever where I spent hours on the couch or on the guest bed and Buster, perhaps thinking I'd finally come to understand the Way of the Feline, had curled up beside me to enjoy my successful conversion to cat-kind, napping the day away. But Buster has left the building; and while my heat-addled brain was trying to comfort me, it was as cool a comfort as the wet washcloth on my head.   

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‍On March 26, Peggy and I said goodbye to Buster, our feline overlord. He was the third corner of our little triad and imbued with more personality than some people I've met along the way. He'd been holding his own for three years against hyperthyroid but had become increasingly weak in his back legs. The weakness prompted a vet visit revealing how much silent suffering he'd been doing. Dehydration, kidney disease, pancreatitis — in the end, his body ganged up on him and there was no way forward with anything approaching quality of life. He'd already done the 'just about dead' thing in the pet hospital once before circa 2015, when congestive heart failure almost got him. I'm pretty sure he used two of his nine lives on that particular level of the game. The last one got him to age 19.

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‍Given the diagnosis, we opted for realism. For the record, realism blows. The vet made him comfortable and we sat with him; Peggy put on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue — Buster was a jazz cat who preferred brass (mostly saxophone), though in the last year of his life he broadened his palate to include jazz guitar (I suspect Prestige's 1963's Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane album was the gateway drug) and Miles and Trane and the rest of the quintet did their thing. We gave Buster pets and scritches and brushing, spoke soft words of love and appreciation as the vet pushed the dose that brought him his peace.

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‍We'd been mentally preparing for issues for a while before that morning in March. Cats suffering from hyperthyroid generally last about five years after being diagnosed, and he was into year three. But we had no expectation when we left that morning to check on his decreased mobility that we'd be coming home without him. He'd hidden the severity of his issues well. We spent the balance of that day gathering his things, sorting what to donate, to keep, to dispose. The last thing we wanted was the constant visual reminders or, worse, the sudden heart punch of something like his automatic feeder turning as scheduled when he wasn't going to come running. It was efficient and heartbreaking; it gave us focus and prevented more tears than it evoked. None of this has stopped me from occasionally glancing about for him, noting the absence of the things he used, missing his presence curled up against me on the couch.

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‍He and I met when he was two years old. He was a rescue Peggy and her ex-husband adopted, and when they split up, Buster stayed with Peggy. I missed the kitten phase entirely, though photos suggest he was a handsome boy from the start. He came to appreciate me with time, presence, and the occasional nut-shot when leaping onto the bed at night. When Peggy and I spent a month living together to see if we could, at the same time her back was wrecking merry havoc with her mobility, I did some cat tending. When we all moved into the house on Walling Street, I suspect Buster took me for part of the new digs. For all I know, he may have thought that's where I always was when I left the condo Peggy was renting.

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‍He wound up being my constant companion at home for the next fifteen years. I continued to work at home for my Virginia employer when I moved to Houston in 2010. When I got downsized in that company's acquisition in 2013, I became a house husband working on home renovations and my writing. Buster wasn't much for power tool noise, but when I sat to write, he was often nearby napping, if not on the desk... or occasionally on the computer. All that time together probably laid the groundwork for the imaginary buddy private investigator series with us a cat and a human at its core, unspooled over five years on Facebook. If you don't know the story of CATNEY AND LANEY, the whole thing was a fun pastime and kept me on a creative schedule through a great deal of personal change. (It's neatly chronicled in THE CATNEY AND LANEY COMPANION, still available on the STORE page). In one installment, Catney discovered he had become King of the Cats. I'm fairly certain Buster took that notion to heart.

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‍Peggy, Buster, and I all had our routines. His first order of business in Houston was beginning the day by insisting on patrolling the yard as close to sunrise as possible, unfairly forced to wait until after Peggy left for work; and then curling up for a post-sleep nap. He enjoyed his 'cat yoga studio' on the deck, but napped in about a dozen places in the yard. Most nights, we found our way to the couch, where he'd lay against (and later on) one or both of us while we watched TV; couch time flowed naturally into bed time. He developed a particular early morning habit over time, in which he'd climb on me and tap my chin with his paw until I woke up enough to pet him; after a bit I'd ask him, "You want me to follow you? Let's go." I'd tip my head to my side of the bed, and he'd step off me and go to the end of the bed to wait for me to follow him to the kitchen. It would occasionally rankle me — he was perfectly capable of finding his way around in the dark and some nights you just want to sleep — but if I'm being honest, I'd give almost anything for one more set of chin taps or, as occasionally happened, a nose boop.

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‍When we relocated to Oregon, I wound up working fully remote again and Peggy was retired, which gave Buster more people to persuade into a daily regimen of scritches, walks, and attention; but I think the cross-country drive, the two changes of address in three years, his thyroid beginning to hassle him, and the strangeness of new surroundings, smells, and weather took their toll. He began to vocalize more, but never acted like he was in pain — it came off more as complaint to the two foolish, untrainable, hairless cats he lived with. He began to badger us at couch time. He'd come to the kitchen and yell at us... stand by the couch and yell at us... stand ON the couch and yell, until one of us came to sit with him. On occasion, he'd get fed up waiting and go sleep in the guest bedroom. And every time it seemed like we'd figured out the right cattitude, like the aforementioned fever-sleeping all-day curl-up (HALLELUJAH! They've seen the light!), we'd revert. It's hard to NOT read frustration in those cries. Towards the end, he insisted on sleeping in my desk chair while I was working. It was easier to pull up a folding chair and let him have his few hours keeping me company at the desk. 

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‍I'm more a cat guy than a dog guy, even though I grew up with both. But despite fifty-plus years of pet presence, Buster was the first for whom I had some primary care responsibility. And I wasn't perfect, but if I take solace in anything it's that Buster was lucky as cats go, given the number of rescues that don't necessarily make it past the first couple of medical checks, who don't find good homes, who don't get their unconditional love returned to them in kind. He got lucky with Peggy, and his luck held with me, and in the end while he didn't understand any of that, he came with affection and humor and that certain... Busterness, with indelible marks that only occasionally came from tooth or claw.    

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‍I miss my buddy. Catney my Catney. Like most loss, the pain will fade with time, leaving the blessings of memory of all that he was. There will probably be another cat someday. There will never be another Buster. And for now, even when the music is loud and Coltrane is blowing up a storm front, it's still too gorram quiet in my office.

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‍Buster was predeceased by a brother, who died from complications with feline diabetes sometime in 2018. We only know this because during a visit to Buster's primary vet in Houston a few years earlier, a vet technician there overheard the desk admin say his name and mention he was a rescue. The vet tech in question introduced himself and revealed that he had adopted Buster's brother, a tan and black stripe-y American shorthair of whom the man shared a picture. The family resemblance in his brother's face was uncanny. 

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‍POSTSCRIPT 1: CATNEY AND LANEY - THE FINAL SESSION

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‍Unbeknownst to either of us, the day before he died was the last time Buster and I did a CATNEY AND LANEY session. I’d never really stopped taking the occasional runs of photos. I had no real plan for them. There was the occasional reunion movie notion, or a ‘Lost Episodes’ bit, but both ideas had a whole Coy and Vance Duke smell to them (ask your parents). I guess as he was growing older and more challenged, it felt like holding on to the good. In any case, the light was solid and so was his mood, so we did a nostalgic half-dozen, of which one stood above the others; and twenty-four hours later, my partner was gone. So here it is, the last hurrah. If it was going to have an episode title, it would be “‘Nine’ Is Theoretical If You Can’t Count”. 

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‍Goodbye, sweet boy. And thank you.

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‍POSTSCRIPT 2: A Selection of Other Favorite Images (click to enlarge)

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‍© 2025 by Doug Lane