I read the other day that some cats, like some humans, get amyloid plaques in their brains and may develop Alzheimer’s disease. I always thought old cats wander around howling because they go deaf and can’t hear themselves, but dementia certainly works as an explanation. 

There is nothing so picturesque as an elderly cat. When I say picturesque, I mean like an old English thatched cottage with the door hanging slightly off kilter and great big patched holes all over. I mean like a half-demolished building, with the insides of painted rooms fringed by rebar and clumps of plaster. Falling apart, and old, and beautiful because it is falling apart and old. 

An old cat has eyes that reflect the light weirdly, because of cataracts, and it has crusted rheum at the corners of its mouth and around the eyes. An old cat resembles a worn out shag carpet, and its legs are stiff with arthritis. Old cats totter, and they yowl, but as long as they keep on eating and using the litterbox, I keep them going. 

Why yes, I have owned a number of old cats. 

They weren’t old when I got them. 

Pippin, for instance, was not a skeletal structure draped with sagging fur when my mother let me have a kitten. Rebecca did not resemble a filthy dust mop or a bundle of rags when we got her from the shelter. Callie, most of her life, was plump, complacent, and magnificently striped, not a much-repaired chew toy.

It was Max who first introduced me to the song of the elderly cat. Max was the first cat I was absolutely responsible for. I knew I would have him for the rest of his life, and though I was only 20 at the time, I committed to that mission. It’s easy to say that when the cat in question is a small round baby with a pink nose and vivid green eyes, and even easy when he is a statuesque gentleman who radiates peace wherever he curls up to sleep.

But when Max was old, seventeen or so, he used to sit out in our grassy back yard (he was the last of our outdoor cats, before people knew better) and he would sing that questing song, looking like Bill the Cat from Bloom County. His fur and his whiskers went every which way, and he was staring madly at nothing. “Owwooooooo,” he would remark. “What?” I would say, and he would sing, “Whooooooo? Whaaaaaaah? Whaaaayyyy?” And back and forth until I went out and got him, cuddled him, laughed, and gave him treats. He had a long and wonderful life, even if at the end he was ridiculous.

May I be just as funny at the end of my life as he was. That’s all I ask.