a tribute to Jackson
(aka Jackso-beast or Back Beast, and, more recently, Scrawnycat or Old Bones)
“…So we think you and Matt would be able to give this cat a great home,” concluded the voice on the other end of the phone.
Our colleague’s wife Linda had heard that we’d lost our cat Bocca earlier that month, at about the same time that she and her husband had decided they needed to find a different home for their cat Jackson. Adopted as a young adult stray, Jackson had been especially close to Linda and Roger’s youngest son, but that son was now away at college, and Linda and Roger themselves were starting to have more allergy troubles as they got older.
Politely but firmly, I resisted Linda’s sales pitch, saying that even without Bocca, we still had two other cats, and that was enough – plus, after Bocca’s loss, we were leery of taking in a cat who was thought to be twelve or thirteen years old, the same age Bokey had been: what if Jackson were to die within months of coming to live with us? We didn’t want to take the risk.
My refusal prompted Roger and Linda to cast their nets more widely by posting a large picture of Jackson on a bulletin board at school, along with a note supposedly from Jackson, asking someone to adopt him. Because the picture and note had been hung right by our school mailboxes, we saw Jackson’s plea on a daily basis – and every day, his beseeching eyes wore down a little more of our resistance, until one day we cracked, and said all right, yes, we’d take him.
In addition to being haunted by those beseeching eyes, we couldn’t miss the fact that Jackson looked almost exactly like our dearly departed Bocca. Was it a sign? Had we found a substitute that could fill the sweet-faced-tiger-cat void in our hearts?
Though the bulletin board picture showed us that Jackson resembled Bokey physically, it also showed us that he couldn’t have an identical temperament, because there was no way we could’ve taken Bokey to a professional photographer and gotten him to pose charmingly in a basket, since he was terrified of people in general. When we met Jackson, however, he greeted us with pleasant equanimity, and during the years that he was ours, he reacted with similar equanimity any time guests were over.
Unfortunately, while Jackson warmed up to us easily enough, he was less quick to warm up to our other two cats. I’m not sure whether it was the sweetness of his nature, the fact that he’d been declawed, or a combination of the two, but it was clear that he’d never be the alpha cat in our household. If feeling threatened, he might hiss, growl, and sputter, but his fight-or-flight instinct leaned strongly toward the latter. We rarely witnessed actual altercations, and when we did, we’d break them up; even so, we’d occasionally feel scabs on his head from where one of the others had taken a swipe (or multiple swipes) at him. And I’m fairly sure it was about six months before I ever saw him asleep. I mean, he must’ve slept at some point, because I don’t think he could’ve survived otherwise … but only after half a year or so did I see him relax enough to close his eyes and curl up on the couch. Up until then, he spent almost all of his time crouching warily on the entryway rug.
To our relief, Jackson eventually became more comfortable in our home, and began sleeping on my pillow, lounging on the sun-warmed window seat, and trotting downstairs to greet us when we’d walk through the door. Of course, he’d often then make a halfhearted attempt to get out through that same door, which prompted us to start hailing him with the words “Back, beast!” Thankfully, these escape attempts were never earnest enough to succeed, because we had no intention of letting this former stray get back out on the mean streets of Cuyahoga Falls. According to Linda, he’d gotten out once when he lived with them, but that had been an accident: he’d pushed against a screen in a second-story window, and the screen hadn’t been firmly in place, causing Jackson to fall to the ground and break his leg. Found and treated in time, he suffered no long-term effects from the injury. Linda had called him a survivor.
He’d not only survived but thrived. Roger and Linda had had him for over a decade, and he was already an adult when they adopted him; nonetheless, this senior citizen kitty seemed to show no signs of old age. We joked that he must have found the “one ring” that had kept Tolkien’s Bilbo the hobbit so well preserved; we joked, too, that he’d outlive us both – which seemed particularly likely when his love of winding around our ankles caught us off guard and threatened our balance, including on the stairs (“Jackson, you’re not on our insurance policy!” was Matthew’s frequent refrain).
Despite the tripping hazard Jackson sometimes presented, we enjoyed his youthful spirit and playful ways. Every morning during colder weather, when Matt would sit on the stairs to put on his boots, he’d call out, “Jackson – bootlaces!” Jackson would come running to spend a couple minutes batting at the dangling strings that Matt would wave above him. Besides enjoying playing with Jackson, Matt also liked to play him: when he’d pick Jackson up and put him over his shoulder, he’d then give Jackson a gentle squeeze; initially, this was just meant as a friendly hug, but since each squeeze would elicit a “mrrowww,” Matt would start squeezing him in the rhythm of a song, which made it sound as if Jackson were singing. We called this “playing the cat-pipes.”
In addition to his playfulness, another way in which Jackson didn’t act his age was that he certainly had the voracious appetite more commonly associated with youth, especially when it came to canned cat food, which we typically give the cats shortly before we eat dinner. However, Jackson’s internal clock seemed more of the twenty-two- or twenty-three-hour variety, because he usually started his vociferous yowling whenever anyone came home in the afternoon – a tendency that occasionally got him banished to an upstairs room for a spell, until it was feeding time. (Now that he’s gone, we haven’t always remembered to give the cats their canned food, so I guess his rather strident reminders were more needed than we realized!)
Perhaps one reason Jackson was always so hungry was that he wasn’t always able to keep the food down. Soon after we took him in, we heard him make a strange noise, kind of like “Mmwowwwowwwoww!” “What a funny sound,” we remarked – just before he vomited copiously on the window seat. The next time we heard it, or heard the more common “Huckahuckahucka” sound, we knew to move him off the furniture or area rug, stat.
Puking proclivities notwithstanding, Jackson seemed the picture of health otherwise, so we assumed he was getting his needed nutrients. About a year ago, though, Jackson must have taken off his “one ring” that had kept him ageless, because we started noticing that he’d gone from slim and trim to scrawny. Petting him, we could feel his spine. This past winter, he took up a new habit: hunkering by our heaters. We told ourselves, well, he’s old, and he doesn’t have a lot of fat to keep him warm, and it’s been a harsh winter, and it’s not as if he can go to Florida like the human elderly, so the heaters provide him with the comfort he craves. We folded up towels and placed them next to the heaters, so Jackson’s old bones could lie on something softer than the floor. Even so, he still came running at the call of “Bootlaces!” And he still kept clamoring for food to anyone unwise enough to come home before 5:00.
It was only a couple weeks before he died that his running and clamoring stopped, and we knew then that something more than old age was troubling him. Kidney disease, the vet said – the same thing that had claimed the life of his similarly striped predecessor, Bocca. Armed with an IV bag and a YouTube how-to video involving a Scottish Fold who’d been getting daily IV treatments for years, we hoped we might be able to preserve Jackson’s life for some months, at least. The first two or three days, Jackson’s response seemed promising, but by the end of the week, that promise was clearly not going to be fulfilled. His eyes had done what I remembered Bocca’s doing – and Macska’s, too, just a few months ago: they’d become smaller and more triangular, and appeared to be almost all black pupil.
I knew we might be nearing the end, but was alarmed nonetheless to come home from school on Friday afternoon to find my husband only partially succeeding in holding back tears as he told me he’d made Jackson’s final vet appointment for 5:15. Initially, I wondered if Matt was being unnecessarily hasty, but while I petted our kitty’s soft, stripy sides and wept, those stripes began trembling violently, and I realized that Matt had made the right decision.
When we agreed to let Jackson into our home and our hearts, we did so with some trepidation. Would this substitute kitty live long enough and be sweet enough to repay our emotional investment in him? Would the benefits of adopting an older cat be worth the pain of losing him? Six years later, the answer was a definite yes.