Dewey's Nine Lives

A minute later, Dewey came around the corner and walked slowly toward her. Every time he had seen her, for at least the last few years, Dewey had meowed and run to the women’s bathroom door. Yvonne would open the door, and Dewey would jump on the sink and meow until she turned on the water. After staring at the column of water for half a minute, he’d bat it with his paw, jump back in shock, then creep forward and repeat the process again. And again. And again. It was their special game, a ritual that had developed over a hundred mornings spent together. And Dewey did it every single time.

But not this time. This time, Dewey stopped, cocked his head, and stared at her. Then he sprang into her lap, nuzzled her softly with his head, and curled up in her arms. She stroked him gently, occasionally wiping away a tear, until his breathing became gentle and relaxed. Within minutes, he was asleep.

She kept petting him, slowly and gently. After a while, the weight of her sadness seemed to lighten, and then lift, until, finally, it felt as if it were floating away. It wasn’t just that Dewey realized how much she hurt. It wasn’t just that he knew her, or that he was a friend. As she watched Dewey sleeping, she felt her guilt disappear. She had done her best for Tobi, she realized. She had loved her little cat. She wasn’t required to spend every minute proving that. There was nothing wrong with having a life of her own. It was time, for both of their sakes, to let Tobi go.

My friend Bret Witter, who helps me with these books, has a pet peeve (pun intended). He hates when people ask him, “So why was Dewey so special?”

“Vicki spent two hundred eighty-eight pages trying to explain that,” he says. “If I could summarize it for you in a sentence, she would have written a greeting card instead.”

He thought that was clever. Then he realized the question always made him think of something that happened in his own life, something that didn’t involve cats or libraries or even Iowa but that might provide a short answer nonetheless. So he’d crack about the greeting card, then tell a story about growing up with a severely mentally and physically handicapped kid in his hometown of Huntsville, Alabama. The boy went to his school and his church, so by the time the incident happened in seventh grade, Bret had spent time with him six days a week, nine months a year, for seven years. In that whole time, the boy, who was too handicapped to speak, had never gotten emotional, never expressed happiness or frustration, never brought attention to himself in any way.

Then one day, in the middle of Sunday school, he started screaming. He pushed over a chair, picked up a container of pencils, and, with an exaggerated motion, began throwing them wildly around the room. The other kids sat at the table, staring. The Sunday school teacher, after some initial hesitation, began yelling at him to settle down, to be careful, to stop disrupting the class. The boy kept screaming. The teacher was about to throw him out of the room when, all of a sudden, a kid named Tim stood up, walked over, put his arm around the boy “like he was a human being,” as Bret always tells it, and said, “It’s all right, Kyle. Everything is okay.”

And Kyle calmed down. He stopped flailing, dropped the pencils, and started crying. And Bret thought, I wish I had done that. I wish I had understood what Kyle needed.

That’s Dewey. He always seemed to understand, and he always knew what to do. I’m not suggesting Dewey was the same as the boy who reached out—Dewey was a cat, after all—but he had an empathy that was rare. He sensed the moment, and he responded. That’s what makes people, and animals, special. Seeing. Caring. Loving. Doing.

It’s not easy. Most of the time, we are so busy and distracted that we don’t even realize we missed the opportunity. I can look back now and see that the first ritual Yvonne developed with Dewey, before the bathroom-water-swatting, was catnip. Every day, she clipped fresh catnip out of her yard and placed it on the library carpet. Dewey always rushed over to sniff it. After a few deep snorts, he plowed his head into it, chewing wildly, his mouth flapping and his tongue lapping at the air. He rubbed his back on the floor so the little green leaves stuck in his fur. He rolled onto his stomach and pushed his chin against the carpet, slithering like the Grinch stealing Christmas presents. Yvonne always knelt beside him, laughing and whispering, “You really love that catnip, Dewey. You really love that catnip, don’t you?” as he flailed his legs in a series of wild kicks until, finally, he collapsed exhausted onto the floor, his legs spread out in every direction and his belly pointed toward the sky.