Lemonade (August 21, 2011 – December 5, 2024)

Our beloved cat, Lemonade, who turned thirteen this past August, collapsed the other night in clear distress. I rushed him to the Emergency Vet Clinic not ten minutes away, but he passed within five or six minutes of landing. What the hell happened? I was still filling out paperwork. At home and throughout the car ride he was howling, howled, in a way that seemed frightening; collapsed on our bedroom floor and drooling, unable to move.

Not even enough time for the Veterinary assistant to bring me into the room. It was the suddenness, more than anything else. An emotional whiplash. He’s actively dying, they said. His heart or a clot, although they were able to medicate him for a bit of relief. Do you want to go in with him, even as a further interrupted, saying it was already too late. I signed my name to a form. Christine, still at home, attempted to comfort our distraught children, upending their bedtime. Aoife, who chose to remain home from school the next day, as she couldn’t stop crying. Rose, who chose to go, so she could talk it out with her friends.

It was somewhere in the fall of 2011 that Christine told me that she wanted either a baby or a dog or a cat or a flower. It was a list I found startling, as we were neither married nor engaged at that point (nor had any of that been discussed), a year into living together in a third-storey walk-up in Centretown. God sakes: a baby? In that moment, I had no idea if she was serious. A cat, I thought, seemed easy enough. A flower might be the wrong answer, although she did list it. Heading over to the Humane Society off Hunt Club Road, we chanced upon a kitten on a high perch, amusing himself by startling his peers by dropping down on them. This is the one. We selected this rakish black-and-white bundle known to the staff as “Pepe,” so named as he reminded the staff of the cartoon skunk from Warner Bros. cartoons. Beyond the cultural implications, we didn’t think he looked like a Pepé.

Lemonade. He looked, I thought, like a Lemonade. Four months old, we officially fostered for a bit until he had run through some medication for a stomach issue, before we could fully adopt him. His stomach issue persisted, providing a variety of medicated food attempts before one would settle, and then, re-settle. Lemonade: the kitten who pounced on us in the middle of the night, later scratch at the closed bedroom door at all hours, pulling up carpet. We eventually placed a plastic car liner underneath the door, to protect the floor of our McLeod Street apartment. He was an indoor cat, unable to be out without leash (which he barely tolerated). We watched him fall off the couch, we certainly weren’t about to let him roam around outside by himself. We allowed him to wander (accompanied) a bit at Sainte-Adèle, preferring the comfort of bushes than the open space of the yard.

He was a polydactyl, attending extra toes on every foot, the way his paws attempting flies looked like two catcher’s mitts on either side of any errant black speck. He caught the rare fly that snuck into the house, which we appreciated, but he ate them, which we thought was quite gross. You’re gross, Lemonade. Soon after he arrived, I composed a short sequence of poems that appeared in my Centretown collection, A halt, which is empty (2019): “Lemonade, polydactyl (or, / the cat with twenty-two toes,),” a title that played off Michael Ondaatje’s classic The Man with Seven Toes (1971). They told us that to declaw a cat would be inhumane, and it eventually meant we had to take him to the vet for trimming, otherwise his nails would catch on our carpet, and we were too likely to be scratched. As my piece begins:

this new kitten;                        bone-cleave,
            hindrance; to de-claw

 

is to pick out bone; inhumane,

they tell us,

                        [see the full poem here]

Can one of you feed your brother, I would ask our young ladies. With three daughters, he was my only boy. Aoife used to argue, pointing out that he wasn’t really their brother, and he was adopted. I would point out that I, too, was adopted. Does that make me any less family to my parents, my sister? The idea eventually took root, Aoife announcing to teachers and classmates that she had three siblings, including a brother, who was actually a cat. It counts, certainly. Aoife, who would lay her head on Lemonade’s back as he rested on our bed. Rose would regularly come through and pet him, attempting to get him to pay her attention as well.

During pandemic, as he required tooth extraction, I sat in a parking lot in Ottawa’s east end awaiting the results of his follow-up appointment. He and I were the same age, then. His extraction cost enough that we began to refer to him as our second car, and the poem I sketched out in that parking lot became “Summer, pandemic,” a piece forthcoming in the book of sentences (2025): “This body as a means // to dialogue, and his teeth held / in synaptic space. From this lone parking lot // in Ottawa’s east end, veterinarian staff report his outbursts, frustrated // at their prodding. He is such / a mood.” [see the full poem here]

He was temperamental, skittish. Always acting as though, if we were both walking within the same room, I was clearly there to murder him, somehow. He’d scatter. He wished to remain in our orbit, but often too far for us to reach or to pet. Kitten Lemonade, who would jump up and set his head and front paws on my shoulder whenever I sat down, something he outgrew by the time we were on Alta Vista, but he was never a lap-cat. He would sit near, often on his own blanket-space on the couch, or, eventually, in the bedroom with Christine, held there through two different maternity leaves, or through her recovery stretch since her 2019 stroke. He kept good company. Lemonade attended her days, often complaining when she wasn’t home, attempting to herd anyone else into that empty space. “I know a little language of my cat,” Robert Duncan wrote, to open “A little language,” a poem that rests in Ground Work: Before the War (1984), “though Dante says / that animals have no need of speech and Nature / abhors the superfluous.” He communicated what he needed, the past few years more vocal in his requirements for attention, food. Cats, they say, who predominantly speak aloud to communicate with humans, and less so with each other.

He was our constant, between Christine and I; one of our first marks or measures of permanence, more important to our household than I could have first imagined. Our young ladies had known him their whole lives, this meandering cat who sniffed around during their baby and toddler stretches, remaining just out of reach. Marge Piercy, as part of her poem “The cat’s song” from Mars & Her Children (1992), wrote: “My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.” Lemonade, on his part, required us, but he required his distance, offering our young ladies a patience far more than with us, although there was the rare time he would snap if they crossed him. Never a scratch but a warning. He understood, it would seem, their difference.

Responding to my social media notification on his passing, someone offered the poem “from Jubilate Agno” by English poet Christopher Smart (1722-1771), a link from the Poetry Foundation website. The excerpt, at least, composed for his “Cat Jeoffry,” filled with reverence and Christian ardor, and this small couplet that makes the point perfectly:

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.