When we came home from a recent weekend in Manhattan, there was no one to greet us at the door. After almost 13 years of a welcoming presence, Susan and I now found the house empty. Phileas J. Fogg, our family cat, long accustomed to arrive in the front hall from wherever he had been in the house, was no longer there.  

A few days before our leaving town, Susan had arranged for Phil to be put to sleep. Gone was the legendary ferocity that had made him attack a long series of medical providers.  Reduced to only a bony shell of his former self, he was dragging himself around the house.  We felt sad to see him in such decline from his former vigor and wanted to save him from further suffering. The visiting vet handled Phil’s demise with much sympathy, easing our pain for the loss of a beloved pet.

So this is the last of my columns about Phil. Through the years I have detailed many of his adventures, and ours, starting in 1991 when he joined us. At that time, our daughter was 11 years old and finally had accumulated enough “cat points” to qualify for receiving a kitten. Dutifully, she signed a contract at that time, agreeing to discharge all the duties of ownership, a responsibility that she graciously ceded to her parents.

In previous columns I wrote about Phil’s various attempts to escape from our house, about his growing older, on his contemplative nature, of his resistance to all efforts to tame him, and other facets of his life with us. From those essays it must have become clear how he influenced us as much as we him. Unsaid, most of the time, was the growing affection that flowed in both directions as we came to appreciate one another more deeply.

In a French film called “Lumière” a daughter says: “My father wants a dog that won’t die.” There is, of course, no such dog, at least yet, nor is there any such cat. The trouble with domestic pets remains that their life span is shorter than ours, so that unless our own lives are cut short when they are with us, we are bound to experience their deaths.

Susan and I are currently in withdrawal. We are changing habits of the last 13 years, many of them provisions to guard against Phil venturing into places where he was not allowed. No longer do we have to close the doors to our living room for fear he would scratch the furniture. Now we can leave open the bathroom doors kept closed to prevent him from slurping water from the toilet. And the entrance to our cellar, formerly his lair, now remains open for easy access.

When we go away we no longer need to make provision for Phil’s feeding and other kinds of care. Neighborhood children or their parents will not be pressed into service to provide for him. Our friend and next door neighbor George will no longer have to don his heavy gardening gloves when asked to look after the house in our absence.

Mind you, I had frequently fantasized about the freedom that would come with the demise of Phil. For years I had chafed at the restrictions on my personal freedom around my own house imposed on us by our resident animal. When would it ever come, I wondered, the day when I would not have to share domestic facilities with that beast?

But now that the day of liberation has arrived, it does not feel as gratifying as I expected. Yes, the house is entirely my preserve now but I must admit missing Phil.  He had become an assuring presence, a kind of cousin who shared our lives and was always there to receive our affection. Yes, I know that political correctness calls on me to affirm Phil’s life as his own and not merely as a being that existed in relation to me. But my mentality still smacks of the old attitudes that see animals as created for our pleasure. Perhaps some evangelist of animal liberation may convert me some day and induce me to renounce this medieval thinking.

Meantime, I have no one to kick around anymore. Though this practice used to alarm purist friends it is what Phil most like about me: I was the one who would gently move him across the rug with my foot to his accompanying appreciative purring.

Nor do I now see him at my office door watching me at work typing my columns at the computer. Susan likes to compare this scene to the classical ones of St. Jerome doing his biblical scholarship as a lion gazes at him. However, my vanity stops short at welcoming any comparison to a saint, even a notoriously crusty one. But our own resident lion was every bit as crusty as St. Jerome’s.

We miss him.

Richard Griffin