Mostly, though, we simply enjoyed each other’s company.
Not that everything was all positivity and sunshine. I soon learned that whereas novels are works of fiction, memoirs are true—and while (having written one of each) I’d always been aware of this technical distinction, what I hadn’t thought about is that when readers don’t like the “character” in your memoir, the person they actually dislike is you, yourself.
I heard from people who thought I was a heartless monster for having thought about my cats on 9/11, a day when so many human lives were lost; I heard from people who thought that I’d married a man who wasn’t worthy of Homer; I heard from people who accused me of having adopted Homer twelve years earlier just so I’d someday be able to write a book about him. And I received one very long, very earnest email from an anonymous woman who was convinced that Homer had fallen ill in the months before my wedding because Laurence was slowly poisoning him with a household cleaning agent—in order to get rid of the competition, as it were, for my affections. Calling Laurence a “charismatic and sophisticated alpha male,” she warned that he was likely to reveal his true, abusive nature at any moment, and advised me in the strongest possible terms to hire a private investigator to follow him—presumably so as to catch him in the act of being unfaithful.
“Follow me where?” Laurence seemed perplexed when I shared this email with him—albeit tickled at having been described as a charismatic alpha male. “You and I both work from home.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I’m going to start marking the levels on the Windex bottle—so don’t get any ideas.”
Poor Laurence! If only this letter-writer could have seen the grace with which—on the occasions when he joined me on one of my trips—Laurence accepted being referred to as “Mr. Cooper.” (His last name is Lerman.)
But these were only a handful of negatives floating in an overwhelmingly positive sea. I had the daily joy of hearing every day from other animal lovers, from rescuers and people who were every bit as crazy about their own cats as I was about mine.
Homer’s social-media community would continue to grow over the next couple of years. There was a big jump, after the paperback was published in 2010, when Homer’s Facebook following expanded from two thousand to five thousand people within only a few months. But a lot of people seemed to “like” the page and then forget about it—so even when the numbers would appear to indicate otherwise, our core crew stayed more or less the same size.
And, to tell the truth, at the time I liked it that way. Homer didn’t have the kind of huge following that seemed likely to sell many books. Then again, I’d never really seen Homer’s Facebook page as a place to sell copies of Homer’s Odyssey. It seemed probable that the only reason someone would follow the page was because they’d read the book already.
And, by then, Homer had gotten to be such a pro at posing for pictures, it seemed a shame to let his talents go to waste.
HOMER’S ONLINE COMMUNITY was always enjoyable, a place where I could post ongoing tales of Homer’s amusing antics, a sounding board off of which I could bounce ideas for blog posts or new books as they came to me. But I’ll always be truly grateful for the way our internet friends rallied around our family over the next two years, when first Vashti and then Scarlett fell to age-related illnesses.
Ultimately, this is Homer’s story. I won’t take you too far with me down the paths of confusion and sorrow that Laurence and I traveled during that time—paths well-trodden already by anyone who’s loved an animal.
Suffice it to say that between the time when Vashti was diagnosed with chronic renal failure in late 2009, and the time when we lost her in August of 2010, there were many months during which she lived—a life that could only be sustained by a strenuous schedule of home treatment, which seemed overwhelming and impossible for me to undertake when her doctor first explained it. I was positive that I would fail Vashti in ways I couldn’t imagine yet.
But, no matter how anxious or bewildered I felt, Homer’s community was an unquenchable source of strength and insight.
By far the hardest part of Vashti’s new care regimen was administering her every-other-day subcutaneous fluid injections, meant to help her body compensate for her failing kidneys. Vashti was a sweet girl who would tolerate just about anything we did to her, but it was easy to see how much she hated those injections—which weren’t simply a shot, but a slow drip that had to be administered over the course of several long minutes. The subQ injections were the only thing Vashti really fought us on (and, bless her heart, she didn’t fight hard—she merely struggled). Laurence had to hold her down while I inserted the tiny needle into the back of her neck, and sometimes she squirmed enough that the needle inadvertently hit a tender spot. Her tiny squeaks of pain whenever that happened left me ready to throw in the towel.
Many in Homer’s community were old hands at the subQ routine. A few of them suggested a brilliant fix for us—heating the bag containing the solution in a pot of warm water until it came to Vashti’s body temperature. This way, Vashti’s experience would feel less like being immersed in a cold shower from inside her own body, and more like the pleasant relief of a warm bath.
It was astonishing how immediate the difference was. After our first attempt with this new method, Vashti began to like her fluid injections. She would practically bounce with happiness by the time they were over, ready for a recently instituted ritual known as Vashti’s cuddle time. “It’s cuddle time!” Laurence or I would exclaim when the subQ was finished, and we’d climb into bed with Vashti eagerly following. Alone in the bedroom with us—the door closed to keep the other cats out—she would enjoy one uninterrupted hour of exclusive time with both her humans, crawling first onto my chest and purring into my face for a few minutes as I stroked her back, before walking over to Laurence and doing the same with him. She’d spend the whole hour migrating back and forth between us while the warm fluids we’d just injected spread throughout her body, and when the sixty minutes were up she’d rejoin Scarlett and Homer, cheerful as ever.
It’s hard watching an animal you love grow frailer—but Vashti was beautiful right up until the end. She did lose quite a bit of weight, but with her thick, lustrous coat of white fur it was nearly impossible to see, unless you knew her very well. And that fur never lost its silky luster. I have a picture of the two of us taken just days before the end, and in it Vashti literally glows, as if spot-lit from an unseen source.
The eternal feminine was what Laurence said of Vashti on her last day. It was something Lee Strasberg had said about Marilyn Monroe at her funeral, a way of describing the timeless, imperishable quality of her beauty—a beauty so overpowering, yet also so vulnerable, that it could reach right out and squeeze your heart until it ached.
Camille on her deathbed had nothing on our Vashti.
The paperback edition of Homer’s Odyssey came out less than a month after we lost her. This time around, my publisher did spring for a small book tour—and, even though it wasn’t near any of the four cities they’d originally planned to send me to, I insisted that the first stop be at Blind Cat Rescue & Sanctuary in North Carolina.