Two new furry members of the family

My wife and I were scanning the cages full of kittens at the North Shore Animal League in Port Washington when, from an open cage, this little gray fur ball leapt onto my arm, scurried over my shoulders, jumped onto my wife and ran up and down her arms.

This was the one, we decided instantly.

And so it was that my wife and I adopted our first pet together, a domestic shorthair that was so energetic that he could hardly contain himself. In fact, he couldn’t contain himself. On the car ride home to Long Beach, where we lived at the time, he bounced around his cardboard box, meowing incessantly.

We decided to call him Augie, which sort of sounded like ogan, the Bulgarian word for fire, to match his fiery personality. (My wife was born and raised in Bulgaria.)

That was a little over 17 years ago, in November 1994.

Augie died early last month. As is so often the case with older cats, he developed a tumor. He rapidly lost weight, and struggled as he lumbered from his bed to his kitty litter, barely able to walk. He was clearly in pain, but he never made a sound. As I learned, a cat’s instinct is to stay quiet when it’s hurt. In the wild, a cat is most vulnerable to predators when it’s ill, so keeping perfectly still, without making a peep, is a matter of survival. In his final days, Augie laid in his bed most of the day and night, virtually motionless. Our vet said he wouldn’t recover, even if he were treated with chemotherapy. He was just too old.

And so, after many agonizing hours of discussion, my wife and I made the painful decision to put him to sleep and so relieve his pain.

You don’t realize how much a part of your family a pet becomes until he or she is no longer there. Our children were devastated by Augie’s death. He was 6 when Alexandra was born and 8 when Andrew came into the world. Our kids grew up with Augie. When they were little, they used to sneak around the house, pretending to be cats. When they got older, they would turn down the lights and lead Augie around the room with the beam from a flashlight.

That little fur ball turned into a 20-pound cat capable of frightening houseguests by his mere presence in a room. You could hear his big paws plodding over our wooden floors as he dashed after that little light beam, darting here, then there.