Dewey's Nine Lives

Unfortunately, the apartment complex didn’t allow pets. So Barbara and her husband, James, took in Bonkers, leaving Evelyn Lambert truly alone for the first time in her life. Almost every day, she came over to their house, but it wasn’t really to see her, Barbara knew. Evelyn Lambert wanted to spend time with Bonkers. She would sit on the porch or in the big living room chair, petting Bonkers and staring down at his back as if staring into the past. She told her daughter, “I’m sick, sweetie. You know I’m sick,” but Barbara figured it was depression. Evelyn missed the house she had struggled to keep through all the tough times. She missed her garden and her cat cemetery and her lifetime of memories. What could she see, when she looked back on her life, but a path carved out by heartbreak and disappointment? What could she possibly find in the future? Evelyn Lambert had moved from a house full of love, as well as struggle, to a lonely apartment in a new city where they wouldn’t even let her keep her beloved cat.

“I don’t feel well,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

Barbara figured, in time, her mother would adjust. Harry. Amber. Gracie. Smoky. She had always found a way to survive; she had always discovered a purpose. But she called one morning and told Barbara, “I can’t take it anymore, sweetie. Death has been sitting in the apartment with me.”

Barbara rushed over. Her mother was in severe pain. She had been awake all night. “Why didn’t you call me?” Barbara kept asking as they rushed to the emergency room. “Why didn’t you call me in the middle of the night?”

“I didn’t want to wake you.”

It was breast cancer, untreated for years, and it had metastasized into her spine and legs. There was nothing they could do but ease the pain, which Barbara realized her mother had been secretly carrying for years. The doctors gave her medicine and sent her home, but the suffering was too much, the cancer too ferocious, the damage too severe. Within a month, she was back in the hospital.

“How’s Bonkers?” she asked Barbara as she struggled for breath. She was so weak, she could barely form the words.

Barbara swept a piece of her mother’s gray hair from her forehead. “Bonkers is fine,” she lied, fighting tears. The truth was that Bonkers was gone. Barbara had spent the previous evening looking for her, but the cat was nowhere to be found.

Barbara’s mother nodded, smiled weakly, and closed her eyes. “Bonkers,” she muttered under her breath. The next day, no longer conscious or able to breathe on her own, she was placed on a ventilator. She had told Barbara repeatedly that she didn’t want to survive like that, with a machine keeping her alive. But she didn’t have a living will. She hadn’t given her written consent. After a vehement argument, which hurt Barbara as much as anything in her life ever had, the doctors agreed to remove the ventilator. The morphine would keep her comfortable, but it wouldn’t prolong her life. She had only a few days to live. Barbara sat on the bed for the rest of the day, watching her mother die.

That night, Barbara Lajiness had a dream. Her mother and Bonkers were together, waving at her from the distance. They were in some vague, undefined place, but her mother was mouthing the words, Everything’s fine, don’t worry, everything’s fine.

The next morning, Barbara walked onto her porch to retrieve the morning paper and glanced into the neighbor’s driveway. There, in the shadow under a pickup truck that never moved, was Bonkers. Barbara didn’t need to step any closer to know that Bonkers had gone off to die, and that she had passed away peacefully in her sleep. She stood on her porch in the cold morning sun, looking at Bonkers and bawling, her coffee cup steaming in her hands.

Finally, she called James. They buried Bonkers in the backyard, under a lilac bush Barbara’s mother had helped her return to life with fertilizer and eggshells.

The next day, Evelyn Lambert passed away. She was only sixty-six years old.

It’s not easy for Barbara Lajiness to talk about her mother. Even eight years later, with a loving husband and a wonderful daughter and the hilarious companionship of Ninja, now known as Mr. Sir Bob Kittens, she has to stop every sentence or two to wipe away the tears.

“I admire her,” Barbara says. “There are a lot of things I could criticize about her life, but having done that, having put other lives ahead of her own, kitty’s lives . . . that’s pretty admirable. No matter what anyone can say about her and the choices she made, she cared about everyone and everything else to a fault.”

“Do you think she cared too much?”