Growing Up—and Older—With Our Pets

I went to Dallas recently to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. My parents always seemed older to me, perhaps because they adopted my sister and me when they were already in their middle to late 30s—not an unusual age now, but somewhat in 1963, when I was born. Yet the prospect of her turning 80 nonetheless saddened, even surprised me. No one, of course, relishes the sight of his once-vital parents aging, if for no other reason than it's a reminder that we are inexorably slouching toward the same fate. And, of course, the Alzheimer's disease that ravages her mind may more easily explain my sadness. My mother has shown serious signs of the disease for more than a decade, but for whatever reason—her powerful will to preserve her diminishing intellect, the cocktail of antidementia drugs she's taken for several years—she has always remained herself, if a bit less so, until the past year.

Perhaps her decline has been quickened by the stress of watching my 82-year-old father, her husband of 59 years, and himself now victim of a form of dementia. For my sister and me, the essence of our parents, their personalities—the very core of who they were—are gone. Or almost so.

As she has retreated within her confused and disordered mind, my mother has come to live almost exclusively in the present. By that I mean the very immediate present. Anyone who knows someone intimately with this awful disease will immediately recognize what I am describing. On her birthday she received multiple cards of good wishes from church friends and a bouquet of balloons from her younger sister. Each arrival elicited the same question—"Is this my birthday?"—expressed in the same tone of surprise.

Still, she mostly retained her own deeper past, the past of her childhood spent with her beloved father as he and her mother worked for the telephone company in north Texas. She could recall the times she accompanied him on his rounds, inspecting oil and gas wells in south Texas near the Gulf Coast, where they had later moved to build a better life. Only a few months ago she recounted in precise, vivid detail how my father's best friend bicycled many miles to visit her at her college to ascertain just how serious she was about my father, whom she had recently met at a church dance. His friend evidently feared that she was only trifling with him and would break his heart. I asked whether, after such a long trip, he had at least spent the night before the long bike trip back to Austin, where he and my father attended another college. "Well, of course not," she exclaimed, scandalized anew at the prospect of spending the night with a man not her husband, or even her future husband.

When she isn't so tired, or the pain from her severe arthritis has subsided a bit and she is able to concentrate, she can still summon some of those memories. On this last visit, as I struggled to find a way into conversation, I began talking about one of the many cats our family had over the years. It was a tiny cat, dark as midnight, that we had rescued in the backyard of the house in a tiny west Texas town where we lived in the early 1970s. My mother immediately brightened as she recounted the many variations on the cat's name. We called her B.C., a name bestowed for some reason even I no longer exactly recall, but invariably she was "Baby Cat" or "Black Cat" or "Bad Cat," depending on her behavior that day.

My family always had at least one cat and usually more. For several years we had a sweet if not particularly bright beagle named Penny (can anyone ever really explain the names we give our pets?) whose presence at first annoyed, then delighted the resident cats. They discovered she was endlessly easy to torment. Each time we moved—which was frequently, because my father, a Methodist minister, was called to a different church every few years—we would load the animals into makeshift cages or boxes with holes punched in them, put them in the back seat and haul them across the state to the new town.