Today was Antares Aloysius Collins’s last day on earth. He had been declining for some time, but he awoke late last night in incredible pain and unable to use one or both of his hind legs. After a midnight trip to the emergency vet, I made the decision to end his life.
The first year with Sentinel taught me that Sentinel wanted a buddy. He was always interested in hanging out with other cats like upstairs kitty. And I wanted a kitten. I found a listing on the Oregon Humane Society’s website for Atari, a small black kitten who had spent the first few months of his life as a feral kitten and needed a cat to teach him how to be a housecat. I had just such a cat. We picked him up from his foster mother and Matt found the name Antares, which is the brightest star in the constellation Scorpio. We pronounced it An TAR eees, rather than An TEAR eeses. The dictionary says both are correct.
Antares was a feral kitten for a short enough time that he was friendly to those who wooed him, but long enough that he was incredibly skittish for his entire life. If I had a dollar for every time I said, “It’s okay!” to him, I would have been able to pay for all of his care, and probably some of Sentinel’s too.
Antares was a champion hider. When people would come to the house, he would crawl under the comforter on my bed. He was a visible lump, and many people jokingly wondered what that lump on my bed could be. But under the covers was a safe place for him, and also quite warm. Because he was always hiding, it was only in the last few years of his life when he calmed down enough to be wooed by people other than me. I would guess only about six people besides me were ever able to pet him.
He wasn’t the smartest cat in the room. I blame his feral kittenhood, which perhaps was missing a few nutrients. But he was a learner. His foster mother brought him to her home to hang out with her three cats, so he would learn how to be a house cat. Sentinel continued the lessons. While it never occurred to him to jump on top of the refrigerator, when my aunt’s cat Squeak came to stay, Antares watched Squeak make the jump and then make the jump himself. Was he doing it to push Squeak out of his spot? Yes he was. But still, he was learning.
Also, when my friend’s cat Mork came to visit, he was similarly rude. But Mork is a champion kneader, and Antares noticed. He tried out kneading on his own, and it became a comfort in his life. He preferred to knead my shoulder as I was reading before bed before settling down on my chest.
Antares spent most of his life as an ineffective alpha cat. Sentinel just didn’t care about his antics and mostly ignored them, and he was very rude to cat visitors. He woke me up in the middle of the night once because he was attacking the back door where presumably there was a cat sitting on the porch. He often wasn’t nice to Sentinel, to the extent that if they both liked something, I needed to buy two, because Antares would not let Sentinel have a turn. This mellowed when both cats got old, and disappeared entirely when Sentinel died. At that point, he became a very sweet cat. Although I had learned by then not to have cat visitors.
I called Antares my southern California cat, because he loved sitting in the sun. In this house that means my bedroom window. When I made the back porch catio, that also became a porch sitting option on sunny mornings. That option got even better with the pandemic, when I shifted to working at my desk many hours of the day. I could easily open the door to let Antares in and out (and in) (and out) (and in) (and out). He also kept his feral roots going and used the cat door for the front catio most nights that weren’t cold and rainy. And sometimes he would go out on cold and rainy nights.
Possibly my favorite quirk about Antares was that he loved rolling around on swimsuits. I think it was the chlorine smell he liked. Because he was fairly destructive, especially when he was younger, I made sure to keep my active swimsuit out of reach. But I saved old swimsuits and would intermittently set them out on the bed. He would roll around on them and claw at them, and eventually curl up and sleep on them.
While Antares wasn’t wedded to eating at a specific time as Sentinel was, he didn’t like his daily routine to be interrupted. Unmaking and making the bed was an ordeal as it meant moving the bed from the wall to get at the sheets (blasphemy!) and the covers being disturbed (intolerable!). I eventually bought a second sheet set so I could immediately remake the bed because he didn’t like the mattress bare while the sheets were being washed, and he would complain loudly. If I ever had to wash the comforter, that was the end of life as we know it. No other comforter would substitute. Not even this delightfully fluffy blue one in the next picture.
Antares was a bit of a delicate flower. Not in the digestive way, like Sentinel was, but in a whole host of other ways. He had to have a bunch of teeth extracted when he was around three years old. He got a mysterious eye disease that meant going to the cat eye doctor and an expensive regime of drugs. When that more or less cleared up, he started having troubles with his nose, and eventually had a blockage in his left nostril. Then he started growing a lump at the base of his tail and was quite accomplished at that feat. By then he had heart problems and couldn’t get it removed. So he ended his life sneezy, a bit drippy, blocked, and lumpy. Poor cat.
In later life, he had some joint problems which meant he got to a point where he couldn’t jump on the counter anymore. I found this to be a bonus (while also not wishing that fate on him).
Antares was a great fan of being groomed. After the teeth removal, I started brushing both cats’ teeth. With Sentinel, it was a process that took months. (Set on counter, get a treat. Touch outside of mouth, get a treat. Touch gum line get a treat, etc.). With Antares, we were brushing within the first week. He also didn’t mind medication doling, claw trimming (somewhat), and loved to be combed.
One of my favorite stories about him happened at the vet. He was angry, as usual, that I had taken him from his realm, that he had to go in the car, and that he had to sit through an examination. The vet tech took him in his carrier for some bloodwork, and when she bought him back, he was still wrapped in a towel. She explained that she did the blood draw and wrapped him in a towel while she finished up. When she went to de-towel him, he protested, so she left him wrapped up. We both laughed, and I took him home in that towel, which I still have.
Names I called him: cute kitten, boneless kitten, old man kitty, kit-TEN
It’s very sad to say goodbye to such a cat.
