Life After Mother: Who’ll Feed the Cats?

“Who’ll feed the cats?” may have been the one question that truly bothered my mother about what would happen after she was gone. No matter how many assurances I offered, she kept arguing for the sake of arguing.

Finally, I tried some pointless contrariness of my own: “How about I take ‘em to the pound? How about I kill ‘em and bury ‘em? How about I crate ‘em and ship ‘em, no-return, to faraway relatives?”

That stopped the “Who’ll feed the cats?” loop tape playing in her mouth, but it also stopped any further serious discussion. 

Cats were always a part of my family’s home. My mother had as many as eight at a time, but by the time she and I were facing what proved to be her last Thanksgiving, the population was down to one old black tom, Ben.

I remarked to my mother how long it’d been since the last time there’d been only one kitty in the house.

Days after I said that, a playful, graceful grey-and-white cat, grown but still kittenish, waltzed in through the pet door and made herself at home. She was so faithfully affectionate, my mother named her Faith.

When my mother’s refusal to do any advance planning crashed into reality and she went directly from emergency hospitalization to a long-term memory-care facility, somebody had to feed Ben and Faith immediately and for an extended period of time. A neighbor cheerfully accepted the chore until I was able to move into my mother’s home. 

Pet care is a part of end-of-life planning that is seldom taken seriously. When I once visited a lawyer in Torrance and explained I wanted to discuss estate planning for myself and my parents, I got an example of how the legal system tends to treat pet care. 

I expected the lawyer to first ask about situations and finances. Instead he went immediately into a canned “I can set you up with a trust fund and avoid probate” spiel.

My parents were long divorced, we were all barely on speaking terms, and except for my mother, there wasn’t much property anyway, but this guy only wanted to turn us into one big happy family of trust-fund babies.

“My mother just wants something for her cats,” I explained.

“It’s going to be a rich cat,” he scoffed. He obviously couldn’t think beyond eccentric (as in, crazy) cat ladies leaving everything to their cats, so I ended the meeting.

If only I’d found someone, maybe a stern fatherly type, or a persuasive charmer, who understood how to use my mother’s obsession with cats as a starting point. Maybe that person would have explained to her that the best way to make sure the cats got fed, would be to assure that her daughter would be able to assume cat-care duties with a minimum of financial and legal obstacles.