Not that I was focused on having a man. I had fun when they were around, especially the dancing, but I didn’t spend my nights pining for them. I was too busy enjoying what I had: a meaningful job, a loyal family, great friends, and a wonderful library cat named Dewey Readmore Books. Sure, I was basically the person that answered his fan mail, but Dewey never treated me like the help. We were partners. I wasn’t giving up anything by building my life around that partnership, and especially that job. I was gaining a life of contentment and laughter, a life where I didn’t have to scatter my attention or waste my energy on something other well-meaning (and nosy) people told me I was supposed to want. Instead, I got to focus on what was important: supporting my daughter, caring for my parents, establishing deep friendships, and using my talents to build an institution that would provide for the citizens of Spencer. I was extremely happy as a mother and librarian by vocation, and a cat lover and a dancer by habit. I didn’t want to be a girlfriend, too.
Then Dewey died.
My relationship with Dewey can’t be summarized in a few sentences. I know that. And yet, I always come back to these few lines from my first book when I think of him: “Dewey was my cat. I was the person he came to for love. I was the person he came to for comfort. And I went to him for love and comfort, too. He wasn’t a substitute husband or a substitute child. I wasn’t lonely; I had plenty of friends. I wasn’t unfulfilled; I loved my job. I wasn’t looking for someone special. It wasn’t even that I saw him every day. We lived apart. We could spend whole days together and hardly see each other. But even when I didn’t see him, I knew he was there. We had chosen, I realized, to share our lives, not just tomorrow, but forever.”
But nothing lasts forever, no matter how strong your bond. Dewey was my best friend; he was my comfort and companion. He changed the library. He changed our town. And he was gone.
The job wasn’t the same after that. I had been the library director for twenty years. I had dedicated more than two decades of my life to building the organization. Now, suddenly, it didn’t feel like my library anymore. Part of that was my relationship with the library board, which had broken the moment they tried to remove Dewey because he was old. But there was also a coldness, a loneliness, an emptiness that had not existed within those walls for the nineteen years Dewey lived there.
As always, I threw myself into my work. I had projects to finish, goals I still wanted to achieve. I wanted to build on what Dewey and I had created, to continue to transform the library from a warehouse for books to a meetinghouse for souls.
I also wanted to write Dewey’s story. I felt I owed it to him, because of what he had given to me and the town of Spencer. I owed it to his fans, who deserved the whole tale. His love, his companionship, his friendship—those were the reasons more than 270 newspapers printed his obituary and more than a thousand fans wrote letters and cards. That’s why his life mattered. And that’s what I wanted to share. I felt I owed the book to the world because I believed, and I still do, that there’s an important message in Dewey’s life: Never give up. Find your place. You can change your world.
But I was sick. After Dewey’s death, I had developed an upper respiratory infection, and no matter what I tried, it would not go away. I had suffered for decades from serious illness, ever since that hysterectomy in my early twenties—a hysterectomy I didn’t even know was going to be performed until I came out of the anesthesia—damaged my immune system. Every three or four years, what started as tonsillitis ended in the hospital. It was part of my life, part of what Dewey had helped me endure.
But this time was different. This time, I was sick in heart as well as body. In December, I drove myself hard to fulfill every Dewey-related request, but bitterly cold, post-holidays January found me tired and weak. In February, the weakness moved into my muscles and lungs. By March, I was barely making it out of bed. In April, I started working from home, at partial pay, to conserve my strength. My doctor tried all sorts of treatments, but my health deteriorated further. Nausea, headaches, fevers. Most days, the only food I could keep down was saltines. My doctor performed tests. Colonoscopies, upper endoscopies, MRIs. There seemed to be no solution. I went back to work in May, but I wasn’t myself. I was sent to specialists in Sioux City and Minnesota, but driving to the appointments wore me out. By summer, I was so weak I couldn’t take a shower without having to lie down afterward for a rest.
Everyone thought I was depressed. And I was depressed. Dewey’s death, combined with my problems with the library board, had collapsed my comfortable world. But I wasn’t sick because I was depressed; I was depressed because I was sick. And nobody knew what was wrong with me. I thought, This is it. This is how I’m going to be for the rest of my life. I can’t get out of bed, I can’t go anywhere, I can’t see anybody. And then I’ll die.
Twenty years before, I had been a single mother making twenty-five thousand dollars a year. To keep my job, I had to earn a Master’s degree in library science, which required a four-hour round trip to Sioux City every weekend for ten hours of class. At the same time, my daughter—the rock of my life—was growing apart from me. Maybe it was a natural part of growing up. Or maybe it was the fact that, because of everything I had to do to support her financially, I couldn’t support her with my time. All I remembered for sure, years later, was the loneliness of my nights in the library, dead tired and struggling to complete my school papers and keep my priorities in order. I remembered the moments when it felt as if the weight was too much and the ceiling was caving in.
In those moments, Dewey came for me. He jumped on my lap; he knocked pens out of my hand; he flopped on the computer keyboard. He bumped me with his head until I relented, and then he streaked out of my office and down some dark aisle between two shelves of books. Sometimes I caught glimpses of him disappearing; sometimes, after five minutes, I still hadn’t found him. Then, just when I was ready to quit, I’d turn around and he’d be standing right behind me. And I could swear he was laughing.
Now, once again, Dewey came to me. Before my health collapsed, I had committed to writing a book, and I was no quitter. Every evening, after working as much as I could for the library, I would sit at my kitchen table and talk with my cowriter, Bret Witter, about Dewey. And the more I talked about him, the more alive he became. I could see again the way he crouched when I dangled his red yarn and how, just when I turned away, he would leap at it with all four paws. I remembered the exact way his nose twitched as he sniffed his food—and then rejected it. I laughed at the memory of the poor cat soaking wet and angry after his twice yearly baths; the way his tongue would drag as he licked his toes; how he would jam those wet paws into his ears for a good cleaning. I smiled at the way he sniffed the air vent in my office three times every day, always protecting me.
Some nights the conversations were hard. My brother’s suicide. My mother’s death. I was most terrified, I think, to talk about my mastectomy. I had kept my surgery a secret, and even a decade later, I felt vulnerable and scarred. I was afraid to admit, even to myself, that when the doctor said breast cancer, I felt my world pull away. No one would touch me; no one wanted to say those words. Only Dewey was there for me, hour after hour, day after day. Only Dewey gave me the physical contact I craved.