cat tributes – Pain In The Bud

We take a break from our usual inanity, humor and Buddy’s mind-bogglingly terrible advice column to call your attention to this beautiful tribute to a special cat.

Tom Wrobleski, an opinion writer for the Staten Island Advance, said a tearful goodbye to his cat, Malkovich, on Jan. 11.

“I’ve cried more for that cat over the last three weeks than I have over some people that I’ve lost in my life,” he writes.

Tom says Malkovich was supposed to be his kids’ cat, but ended up bonding with him:

Mal would meet me at the door when I came home, flopping down and giving me his belly. He followed me into the bathroom. He curled up next to me in bed. He would flop in the hallway upstairs and rub his face on my foot.

Don’t let anyone tell you that cats don’t bond, that cats don’t love, that cats are stand-offish. Mal loved me. And I loved him. He was my buddy. My best boy. The top cat.

He became part of the fabric of our lives. He even grudgingly tolerated Lucy, the neighborhood stray we adopted in 2017.

Mal’s illness snuck up on Wrobleski, as so many cat health problems do because our furry friends are so stoic.

“We thought that Mal was getting a little chubby in recent months. It turns out that he was ill, with fluid gathering in his abdomen,” he wrote. “The news from the vet was dire: Mal had cancer throughout his body. There wasn’t a lot we could do.”

malkovichfiltered — The author’s favorite photo of Malkovich the cat. Credit: Tom Wrobleski

The rest of it is really sad and would have made Buddy and I cry if we weren’t so manly and tough. Wrobleski writes about how much he misses Mal, and how much Mal changed his life during the 11 years he was a part of the family. (They adopted the little guy when he was four years old, and he lived until he was 15.)

His pain at losing the little guy is evident in every word and anecdote.

Be warned, though, that if you’re not as tough as Buddy and I, you probably will shed some tears, which Buddy and I definitely did not do. In fact, immediately after reading Wrobleski’s tribute to Malkovich, Bud and I watched a football game, drank Budweiser and shopped for a good old American pick-up truck while practicing our Sam Elliot voices.

malkovich — Malkovich on the day he was adopted. Credit: Tom Wrobleski

malkovichlastday — Malkovich on his last day, sitting in one of his favorite spots and soaking up the sun for the last time. Credit: Tom Wrobleski

buddy_bed — “I don’t cry about anything…except vacuums, rustling paper bags, truck back-up beepers, dinner, and being locked out of the bathroom. But other than that, I’m fearless and keep a firm leash on my emotions!”

Russell Crowe was training for the 2005 movie Cinderella Man, in which he plays boxer James J. Braddock, when he “took the bunch of blokes who had been beating me up for their pay check” — his trainers and fellow actors playing boxers in the movie — on a mountain bike ride in rural Australia.

After cresting a “particularly punishing hill” and stopping for a sip of water, Crowe wrote, he heard plaintive mews coming from the trees off the rural Australian trail.

“Underneath the swirl of sounds I heard something out of place. Was that a meow? I started to look around me. I heard it again. I took a few steps of the track into the rain forest. Thick with ferns and vines. One more step and then I saw it. A kitten…”

The baby cat was abandoned, and Crowe says he thinks the cat might have been dumped by a driver who passed the bicyclists a few minutes earlier.

“I looked back down the track and the boys were gaining on me,” he wrote. “I put the kitten in my backpack and rode on.”

cinders — Cinders as an adult. Credit: Russell Crowe

After returning to camp, Crowe took the kitten out of his pack, showed it to his friends and told them he was going to give it to his mother, who had been talking about adopting a cat.

“There’s something reassuring in a bunch of big sweaty boxers going crazy over a kitten,” Crowe wrote. “We flew down the hill in a tight group and arrived back at my farm together where I presented my mother with this tiny baby kitten. She was floored. So happy.”

That was in 2003. Cinders lived for 17 years and died on June 9. Crowe shared the story of finding and adopting the beloved cat in a Twitter thread.

Crowe, who was living with his mother while training for the movie, said he was originally opposed to getting a cat because felines are “the notorious enemy of bird life.”

When he found Cinders, he wrote, he felt “this was the universe telling me to respect my mother and give her what she wanted.”

“She had never grown to be fully trusting of humans, but, she loved my mum and my mum loved her.”