The thing about Hudson is, he was good. He was just good. He loved to be loved, and he loved to show off how much he loved you, too. He was the only cat I’ve ever known who wanted constant belly rubs. He would slam his head into your hand demanding pets with startling force. His preferred sleeping position was little spoon. He never wanted to be on his own. He just wanted to be loved. He just wanted to show us how much he loved us.
N and I adopted Hudson on May 28, 2017: our first full day in our first apartment together after college. In the thick of moving-chaos, we went straight to the animal shelter, determined to come home with two cats. But we didn’t go in planning to adopt this cat. He wasn’t the kind of cat who’d catch your eye in a photo—I don’t remember if we even saw his photo on the website in advance—and anyway, we wanted kittens! We were certain we’d come home with kittens!
Well, there were no kittens that day. Instead, we asked if we could instead meet a beautiful white cat, Evelyn, who’d come into the shelter with her six kittens but still looked like a kitten herself. She shared a room at the shelter with a gorgeous all-black cat. When Evelyn started crawling all over us—the most loving and playful girl—N and I looked at one another, already entranced by the thought of this stunning black-and-white pair. And… then the black cat attacked Evelyn in a way that was not friendly whatsoever.
Not those two, then.
I was already smitten with Evelyn, my immediate kitty-soulmate. A volunteer mentioned another cat, Kedi, who might make a good friend for her. A friendlier cat. A cat so friendly, in fact, that they’d had to move him out of the room for adult cats and into the room for senior cats, because he was trying so pathetically to cuddle with the other adult males that they wouldn’t stop bullying him. I watched N’s face light up at this and started to suspect he was coming home with us.
Kedi was very much not a kitten. The shelter told us he was maybe 2, maybe 3; we’re pretty sure he was older. He was friendly, but not especially playful compared to Evelyn, and he did not strike us as especially cute. He’d come into the shelter from, it seemed, a hoarding situation. The only concrete information in his records was that he’d arrived covered in poop and one ball had never dropped, two facts that somehow made N love him even more. After we met him, we stood in the hall—glass walls, shelter staff peering at us perhaps as a touch judgmentally—as I tried to convince N we could just adopt Evelyn and come back for a kitten.
She insisted we adopt him.
I am so glad she did.
The staff at the shelter warned us we might need to keep them in separate rooms for days, maybe even weeks. We were prepared. We went home to our tiny new apartment, closed Evelyn in the bathroom, and let Kedi explore the bedroom as we brainstormed names for our two little roommates. At first, they were Harlow and Herschel, named for two astronomers, in honor of hours spent stargazing early in our relationship. But N felt that this chunky, funny, snaggle-toothed, sweetly pathetic guy wasn’t a Herschel. And she was right about that: he proved to be such a Hudson. (Later, we bought two movie posters for our living room, one for a film starring Jean Harlow, one for a film starring Rock Hudson, as if we’d planned these names all along.)
So. We were ready to keep them apart. Hudson was not ready for this. He spent his first hours in our apartment crying at the bathroom door, like he was trying to say someone trapped a cat in here! we have to rescue her! what are you idiots DOING! We hemmed and hawed. The rescue had said not to introduce them so soon. Common sense said not to introduce them so soon.
But he was distraught. We opened the door, and—at least in my memory—they just fell into one another, no hesitation. He loved her immediately. He loved her before he loved us. She was so tiny (the shelter said she was 2, but in hindsight, she was not yet fully grown) and he was, from the beginning, so incredibly protective of her. In all the photos from that first week, she’s asleep, and he’s curled up at her side—wide awake, staring suspiciously at us. Protecting her. Figuring us out.
I’ve known other bonded pairs, but I have never never never known two animals who loved one another like these two. Almost every photo I have of Harlow, Hudson’s at her side. He was always just there. He wanted to be close to her. When he was dying—when he couldn’t stand up by himself—he would perk up the moment she walked into the room. One night, Harlow fell out of a (ground floor) window. As we looked everywhere for her, he howled and howled, as raw and horrifying a display of grief as I have ever seen from an animal. (She was gone for probably three hours total, if that.) I don’t know what she’ll do without him. But—I know he couldn’t have lived without her. He wouldn’t have known how, and he wouldn’t have wanted to.
I can’t say this without sounding corny, but I believe they were meant to find one another; I believe he was born to love her.
They were such different cats. Harlow is beautiful and loving and easy-going. Hudson was—sometimes prickly. He never hissed and never swiped, not once in his life, but he didn’t like being picked up. The moment you put him in the car, he would begin pooping and would not stop until his destination. (You can imagine how fun that quality was when we moved across the country.) He would sometimes pee on the laundry to leave a message. He would scream and scream about his bowl being empty, regardless of the fullness of his bowl. If you moved too slowly when remedying the non-empty bowl non-problem, he would furiously lick himself, then spit a hairball up right at your feet. He would get halfway through a bag of kibble and decide that flavor was no longer acceptable. If you didn’t sit with him while he ate, he would be irate. God forbid you closed a door. God forbid you closed the shower curtain.
Harlow loves everyone; Hudson was more skeptical of strangers. He permitted Winnie’s presence (and taught that little puppy how to climb cat trees and birdwatch from the windowsill) but the addition of a second dog was unforgivable, and—while they were sometimes known to cuddle, especially if no one was looking—Hudson was also known to provoke the dogs just because he could. He was the boss, and he made sure the dogs knew it. One look from Hudson and Winnie would go into a perfect sit. Wilf would give up his bed if Hudson wanted it (Hudson often wanted it). He would sometimes sniff the dogs’ butts and make a big show of gagging. He was in charge—not a king but a majordomo, intent on keeping things just right for Harlow.
We griped about some of these things. He sometimes seemed determined to be a nuisance just for the sake of being a nuisance. He was bossy! He was needy! But—we put this sweet grumpy boy through so much. So many moves! So many long drives! So many dogs! I want to laugh every time I think about his dear God what have you done face the day we brought home a puppy. He was the chattiest boy, often in a way that made it feel like he was giving us a stern talking-to. We joked he was a little old man trapped in a cat’s body. He meowed in a way that seemed to say “get me outta here.”
He wanted to sleep with us every night. Or, really: he just wanted everyone to sleep in the same place every night, so he knew we were all okay. Harlow likes to sleep under blankets, which completely baffled him; he could not find her when he could not see her, and more than once I watched him sit down on a lump of blankets that let out a squawk. He would stretch out next to me to spoon—but he was a terror at night, always squirming or knocking his stinky little head into mine. Eventually N and I had to switch sides of the bed; I’m the lighter sleeper and I could not endure the sheer force of Hudson’s biscuit-making prowess. (Of course he had a favorite side of the bed.) I guess we could switch back now, which is a thought that makes me want to weep.
The house feels so empty without him. I cannot find the words for the hole he has left in our lives, and I know we’re going to keep finding new ways to miss him. Last night, N and I both started crying when we realized we could walk up the stairs without steeling ourselves for a sneaky paw-bop through the spindles. He was a constant presence. I’ve spent the past two years working from home; I’m not sure how to work without him. I keep expecting to find him at my feet, in my lap, in the chair next to me, standing ominously behind my laptop making eye contact over the screen. He would stand on the back of my chair whenever I had a Zoom meeting and glower at the camera. He loved to press his teeth and gums up against you—wheezing and vaguely manic and often distressingly wet. Any time we opened a door, he was there. Like he’d been waiting. We would joke we could open two doors on opposite sides of the house at the exact same moment, and somehow he would be standing outside of both. Every time we came back from a walk with the dogs, he was waiting to give them each a good sniff as they came through the door.
He got sick so suddenly. Or—what I mean is, he hid his sickness for so long. His job was to protect everyone else. And he didn’t have any symptoms until, very suddenly, he did. On the 13th, we noticed… well, we noticed he wasn’t being annoying about mealtimes. On the 14th, I called our vet to make an appointment for the 21st. But the longer I looked at him, the more certain I felt that something was wrong. His only symptom was lethargy when I took him to the emergency vet on the 15th, where he left as a medical mystery: severely anemic, with otherwise perfect bloodwork. He spent all day at our vet on the 17th. And, by the end of the day, he had a terminal cancer diagnosis. He wasn’t a candidate for surgery or chemo. His anemia kept getting worse. By the 18th, he would not eat and would not drink. He was visibly in pain, no matter how many medications we tried. He was crashing. He went downhill so, so, so quickly. And—we were watching him starve to death. We tried everything (and, God, spent so much money). Our only hope was to treat his pain and keep him with us—even as a shadow of himself—a little longer. We could not get his pain under control.
On the morning of the 19th, we said goodbye.
The night before, we made him a platter of extravagant foods, none of which he could eat. That morning, we sat with him in the dark and sobbed and sobbed. We took photos. We brought Harlow to him. And then we drove to the vet in the middle of a snowstorm.
He’d never really let us hold him before. But he let us hold him then. His death was so, so peaceful. He was just tired. He was ready to go. We were afraid; he was brave. Even then, even at the very end, he took care of us. That was all he’d ever wanted to do.
Kedi. Mister Handsome. Tootsie. Spudson. Bestbudson. James T. Hurk. King Baby. Little Prince. Spudmoni. My best, best boy. We sometimes joked, with the utmost affection, that he was the most ordinary cat: like those images that combine thousand of photos to reveal the “average” face, a cat so ordinary his shelter name was just “Cat.” But he wasn’t ordinary. He wasn’t ordinary.
The thing about Hudson is, I will love him and miss him for the rest of my life.
The thing about Hudson is, he was good.
The thing about Hudson is, he was extraordinary.
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