It wasn’t that long ago that we were living in Kaaawa, and our answering machine message went something like this: “Hi. You’ve reached Ian, Meda, and nine cats in Kaaawa. Please leave a message for any one of us after the beep.”

We no longer live in Kaaawa. And now we live with just one cat.

This morning, around 9:20 a.m., we said goodbye to Duke, 18-1/2 years after he was born on a sofa bed in the office I had set up in a small studio apartment on the edge of Waikiki, and which we used on those nights when we didn’t want to drink and take the long drive all the way back to Kaaawa.

Ann Sakamoto, who has been our regular vet for many years, had examined him carefully while we waited in the parking lot due to Covid restrictions. Duke had lost another pound just in the last month, continuing a trend going back several months. Like before, there was no obvious cause. His blood test results last month were, as she put it, “remarkably good.” She could not feel any internal masses, although cancer could be hidden around his organs. We could, she said, do some imaging. I guess that means x-rays or ultrasounds. But would that lead to treatment options? Very unlikely, given his age and condition. At 18-1/2 years, he had lived a full life.

I thought of my dad’s death certificate which listed two causes of death–cardiac arrest, and “failure to thrive”. I’m not sure what the technicalities of that second one are, but I took it to mean something like “just very old and finally worn out.”

I think it was the same with Duke. He most likely inherited diabetes from his mother, but wasn’t diagnosed until somewhere around August 2010, when he started getting insulin shots twice daily. Later, he developed a chronic respiratory or sinus infection that resisted repeated attempts at treatment over the years. And then, a few years ago, he developed cataracts, which took most of his vision, and started showing signs of feline dementia.

In the end, like my dad, there was a simple failure to thrive.

So we said a teary goodby to Duke. We will celebrate him this evening. For now, we grieve.

I recall an evening, probably 20 years ago, when we were visiting William and Paula Merwin at their home in Haiku, Maui. It was after dinner, we were sitting around just talking. Meda and I were mourning the loss of one of our cats from an earlier generation. William, who was partial to his beautiful and very protective chow chows, listened to us, stood and walked to a nearby bookshelf, pulled down a volume, then sat back down and read us the first part of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Section 32.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Then we sat in shared silence for a while. Embraced. And poured another glass of wine.

Here’s a short dance with Mr. Duke when he was a happy and healthy kitten. It’s nice to remember him like this.