The cats are 16 now, which makes me—well I must have been quite young when I got them. Garp, in particular, is really slowing down. I can remember when he used to scare a mouse so badly I’d have to climb up onto a barstool to rescue it from the top of a curtain rod. Now, if anything, he tends to stand droopily in front of the stove, nodding at the hole behind it where I already knew the mice were getting inside in the first place.

A year ago, when he took a sudden turn, I drove Garp to the vet and prepared myself. This was a cat with fifteen good years behind him of ravaging carpet, knocking glasses of water off counter tops in the middle of the night, and leaving puddles of bile in the path of my bare, uncaffeinated feet after waking me up at 5:30am to feed him. I tried to communicate to the vet the complexity of my feelings. I didn’t know, for example, if such a thing as hospice care existed for cats. As a gesture, I agreed to pay $287.00 to send some of his blood work to a lab in Michigan, and as a result, I have had to squeeze an expensive brown placebo gel onto his salmon guts feast every 5:30am since.

It’s true your relationship with your cats is a lot like the one you have with your children. You are always going to have one favorite, although sometimes it’s one and sometimes it’s the other, depending, for instance, on which one has more recently cost you sleep, or resisted brushing, bathing, or nail clipping with more vigor. Isn’t there something in one of the main parenting books about children being welcome members of the family, but not the darn centers of it? Well, I’m definitely not letting the cats be in charge—is there a bumper sticker that says that, or only the one that says the opposite?