DIED 1998
A LIFELONG ANIMAL LOVER, I was disappointed by The Skater’s aversion to pets—then completely taken aback by the kitten he hid in the bathroom on my twenty-ninth birthday, a week before my due date. How would I take care of a new baby and a cat? A few days later our baby’s heart would stop beating and, as we could eventually stand to joke, that kitten would all but wear the onesies.
We lived in a condominium complex then, and Rocco grew up like a kid in the projects. During the day, he hung out on the wall that bordered the parking lot, authorizing arrivals and departures. He ate and slept at every apartment, had twenty-four-hour access to homes I’d never seen. Many people didn’t know whose cat he was, and he probably had at least a dozen names. I once heard a redhead with a briefcase call him Mr. Big.
Moving to a single-family house with a yard was not an upgrade for Rocco, but he tolerated his diminished social position with dignity, as if living in rural exile. He never forgot who he was. In 1998, after exceeding all expectations for cat performance for more than a decade, he suddenly grew very thin and listless. When the woman from the vet told me it was feline HIV, I said, Oh my God. My husband died of AIDS four years ago. Well, ma’am, she replied, he didn’t get it from the cat. Ah, I wanted to say, but did the cat get it from him?
Philosophers of justice talk about “moral luck”—the difficulty of assigning blame when the consequences of a single act can be so diverse. Truck driver A and truck driver B take the same route, run the same stop sign, but a child darts out in front of B and dies. B is a murderer; A is not. A cat doesn’t have to worry about this. Nobody thinks it’s his fault he got AIDS, or that anyone else got AIDS.
The people who took care of Rocco while I was house hunting in Pennsylvania expected him to die every day I was gone. But he waited, literally dragging himself to the door on my return.