Goodbye, Miichan

Miichan passed away early on the Sunday morning of January 15. We are really sad about it.

It was hard to decide how to go about writing this, but it also felt wrong to let life and other blog posts and whatnot go on without writing about it.

For the last few weeks, she had been steadily losing weight and weakening. On Christmas, she was walking around with unsteady legs. At the end of December we took her to the vet for claw trimming and to get generally looked at. Mostly the diagnosis was that she was old. She had kidney and thyroid problems, as we knew since last year, and the treatment of either of these would have negative effects on the other.

She was probably around 17 years old. I am told that is like being 84 or so as a human.

Around January 5 she stopped eating much at all, but did drink some water. We took her to the vet again, and he gave her vitamin and fluid IVs in the back to bolster her hydration. She had gone from 2.8kg to 2.1kg in the 10 or so intervening days. The vet said we could probably keep giving her IVs at home if she wouldn't eat. We felt like she was sort of shutting things down after a good long life. We gave her water and "Chuuru" liquid treat sticks whenever she wanted, but decided not to do the home IVs and let nature take its course.

The last few days she would only drink some water, but stopped eating or even getting up toward the end. We covered all but her head in blankets to keep her warm. When she was only lying there breathing for the last two days, we basically sat petting her the entire time.

My father in-law always said that cats try to die alone, away from prying eyes. On the last day, Saturday, we awoke to her lying on the floor below the sofa where she had been lying. She probably tried to go to the bathroom. She was breathing and her eyes were alert but she was not moving. We put her back on the sofa and warmed her with blankets. She refused water or Chuuru. The kids and I sat with her all day. My wife was with her until 12:30 AM. After that she probably saw her chance to pass the way her adorable walnut brain told her a cat should, and did.

That Sunday morning we found her there on the sofa—for her, perhaps alone at last. We all cried. I went and dug a grave for her in the field where she and my father in-law and then she and I spent summers tending vegetables, just a few meters away from where we are pretty sure she was born as a stray near a small bamboo grove. She would always walk in that grove—we think as a kind of satogaeri.

one of her favorite places to get a drink, a few steps from her birthplace

Miichan started to become our cat beginning in 2006, just a year and a half or so after my wife and I came to live in Uratakao. She would skulk around the house. One day I lured her to me over the course of an hour or so with the temptation of a piece of leftover kakuni pork. She finally trusted me enough to sneak near me and grab it away. Eventually she was "our cat" by virtue of us feeding her, but the in-laws wouldn't let her in the house yet. Of course she eventually owned the place inside and out.

On New Year's Day 2007, after I had given her a few morsels from time to time but before she really became our cat, we sat in the washitsu having our traditional morning meal of o-sechi when she appeared in the window, meowed a bit, and then went away. We were elated, and very impressed at her manners to give us a New Year's greeting.

Each moment's current Ranking of Humans by Miichan was a constant subject of family debate. Usually the man she was in contact with most got top billing, meaning it was my father in-law, then my brother in-law when he came back to stay for a few years after we had moved out, then my father in-law again, then me when we brought her to our house after my father in-law passed away and my mother in-law wasn't up to taking care of her.

So every stage of my life since I was 25 included memories of Miichan. All the family gatherings at the in-laws' home were ultimately Miichan lovefests. Every New Year's. Every hina matsuri. Every summer barbecue and visit to say hi. She provided the personality leaven that kept my in-laws sane with just the two of them living there. In her they had a constant subject to discuss. Anytime we visited we were regaled with accounts of her lizard or rodent conquests and consumption, and fights with other cats, some of whom were suspected of being her siblings. There were also accounts of her tangling with larger foes, including a large tanuki who nearly ended her back around 2019. For that she received a chest injury and wore the ubiquitous cone of shame.

sporting the cone of shame after tangling with a large tanuki

Miichan was very friendly. Maybe it was because she started out alone and trying to survive and then found us, giving humans a decent reputation with her.

When Miichan was in our house this past year and a half, any of us could come home and not be alone. She was immediately the idol of the family and constantly fawned over, except when on the forbidden dining table or kitchen counters. She took over our sofa. We could sit on it if we wanted, but we would get covered in white hair, so none of us did. Miichan of course went beyond her sovereign sofa territory to also sit on any lap she pleased. My wife is pretty fastidious about keeping the place clean, so letting Miichan live with us and shed hair and sit on all of us was a generous accomodation.

When I would run at 4:00 AM in the morning during the summer, she would be there blinking and then meowing at me for breakfast as I entered the room. If no one awoke by around 6:00, she would meow the lament of the starving in a voice and frequency calculated to travel effortlessly through the ceiling and into each bedroom of the house.

My morning routine could not commence without first feeding and watering Miichan. And once that was underway, I would make coffee and go get the paper and return to the living room and immediately have Miichan on my lap, not liking but tolerating the movements and sounds of Nikkei broadsheets above her tiny head.

Miichan hated riding in cars like the keitora

Miichan was not allowed on the dining table

Long before her recent decline, she perpetrated several death scares, mostly on my mother in-law. The phone rang one time around midnight: Miichan had gotten stuck in the attic and died. We hurried over and discovered Miichan in the attic alright, but in rude health and asking to be let back down the nearly-ladder-angle stairway up.

Another time she disappeared for a few days during a typhoon. We expected the worst, but she came back. Yet another time she fell 3 meters down into the dry-at-the-time waterway next to the garden. My father in-law got her out by going down to the river and back up the concrete channel to where she was. And since she spent her 16 or so outdoor years in Uratakao, she almost certainly encountered civets, rabbits, boars, and monkeys at some point.

looking outside at the blooming peach tree

We created an entire unfounded mythology about her life: She attended preschool at Takeyabu Yochien; this is the highest level of education attainable for a cat. The students there would wear adorable smocks. Her surname at birth was Mineo, in keeping with that of most Uratakao residents. She spoke Uratakao dialect and was suspicious of the inferior fluffy fancy cats on TV. She used to perform as an otokoyaku in the Takarazuka Revue—hence her short-cropped hairstyle. She despised, then tolerated, then became friends with Hana-chan, the collie who barked incessantly next door for many years.

I loved her scratchy meow. It was not smooth like the usual meow, but rather the kind you would imagine a pub proprietress would have.

I loved her warm and soft little head, the back of which featured orange hair the same color as my own.

I loved her springy little mixed beans of pink and black.

I loved her droopy belly. When she first came around it was already droopy. She was maybe a year old, and we worried she was about to drop a litter of kittens on us. When we took her to the vet to get sterilized, there were luckily no kittens. But that tummy—her famous tappun—always drooped. I also loved her way of establishing a presence near where you were. Eating dinner and looking down to see her perilously underfoot was always a joy.

I loved her tiny jaw. We called it the ichiendama no ago—her dainty one-yen-coin-sized jaw.

I loved the way her teeth stuck out just a tiny bit when her mouth was in resting position.

I loved the way she would cover her eyes while sleeping.

I loved the way she would follow me around the garden.

I loved the way she would play catch with me using a ping pong ball.

Of course we are reminded of her in so many little moments. Every time I enter the living room in the morning. Every cat food commercial. Every walk in the yard on the currently brown grass, which in summer I would let grow long in one place so she could have a nice salad bar during outside time.

We are so sad, but through the death of my father in-law and now Miichan, our family mourning dynamic has developed into one that reveres and deeply misses the person while making a lot of humorous, loving comments about them. In that spirit, it is comforting to know that she for sure vomited somewhere that we missed cleaning up, for example. All of us who remain would surely like the family to see any available humor in our respective demises, I think.

That morning, we brought her wrapped in a blanket to the house where she lived most of her life, and where my mother in-law now lives alone. We presented her before the butsudan altar of my father in-law—surmising that if there is a hereafter she and he were already puttering around a garden together—and then took her to the grave I had dug. My wife and mother in-law and kids watched while I shoveled garden dirt over her. We all said goodbye. For now the grave is marked with a stone and a big piece of plywood that I hope will keep anything from digging her up, but I am trying to think of a good way to do the gravestone and gravesite.

She made our lives so much better. I think we made hers better too.

At the end all I could really do was kiss her little head and say "Arigatou, Miichan."

Olypic Street

Brompton