We have a cat who’s so old now that I’m a little surprised she’s still walking about let alone jumping on tables and the like. She’s a rescue cat we got at least ten years ago, and at the time, the vet said she was four to six years old, which makes her fourteen to sixteen years old. She was rough to begin with, hence the name: “Bida” means “poor little thing” in Polish. With cats having an average lifespan of 16 years, this puts her right at upper limit.

She’s completely deaf now. When she’s on any surface that largely absorbs vibrations, you can sneak right up on her without even trying to do so. She has no idea what’s going on around her, and I think it’s only through the vibrations through our hardwood floors that she anticipates anything that she can’t see.

She’s lost all of her teeth except the small incisors at the front of her mouth. This makes for a pathetic moment when she gets angry — say, when you’re trying to get one of her many, seemingly endless clumps of matted hair out — and she tries to bite you. Without her canines, there’s simply nothing there that can actually do any damage or cause any pain.

Her claws are brittle and largely dull. She can’t do much of anything with them but get them stuck in something she’s trying to scratch.

Her body is withering away, and she’s literally a sack of bones now. And since she’s developed arthritis over the last few years, they are knobby and protruding hideously. Running your hands along her back, you feel each and ever vertebrae clearly.

She no longer grooms herself very much. This means her hair gets matted easily and thoroughly, and I’ve quite honestly given up on trying to get them all out. The only option is the nuclear option: shave her completely, especially her belly. We don’t have the heart do that, so we do what we can. The other side of this is the odor that emanates from her: a long-haired cat who doesn’t groom herself simply stinks for reasons that don’t need further explanation. This is why we give her a bath on a fairly regular basis.

I mention all of this simply because I bathed her tonight and noticed, when she’s completely wet, there’s almost nothing there. She is literally nothing but a sack of bones, and I’m quite surprised she can survive like that.

“Has she not been eating?” I asked K, and apparently, she’s turned up her nose at everything but human food. So I took her into the kitchen, still wrapped in towels from her bath, and made her one of her favorites: scrambled eggs. No salt, no pepper — just a bit of butter and the eggs. She initially had some trouble finding it, but once she located the pile of eggs, she hunkered down for a long, slow meal. (With no teeth, it takes her a long time to eat anything.)

She’s a fighter. Of our two cats, she’s the one who’s stood up to our dog from the time she was a puppy, and she’s the one who, though defenseless, defends her territory fiercely while the younger, faster, stronger cat with deadly teeth and sharper claws runs. Bida knows she’s a member of our family and refuses to let anyone forget it: she’s always looking for a lap, always begging to be with someone.

“She’ll outlive us all,” K laughs on a regular basis, and she’s probably right.