Ten years with Grady cat
It is a special day for us here in our home. We adopted our cat Grady ten years ago today. TEN. This feels momentous and glorious for a few reasons.
The first? Obviously, that pets are amazing. How lucky are we to share our souls with these animals, who bring us such joy and connection?
When you adopt pets who are already into adulthood, you really don’t know how much time you’ll have with them. Grady was thought to be 3 years old when we got him. Jim and I had two cats before Grady, both of whom we had to say goodbye to far too early. Our first sweet buddy, whose companionship was literally what got me through my second year of graduate school, was Oliver. Oliver had likely been abused before he entered my world, based on damage they could see on hip Xrays. He used to sit on the window ledge above my desk and would look down on me as I worked on my master’s thesis- as I said, that cat literally saved me. We loved the heck out of him prior to his death at only age 7 from heart failure, and our second, the amazing Major Dobbs, was with us for 8 years. He lived a long life and was the best kitty cat to have when our kids were babies- but he was older when we adopted him. To be able to love an animal in your home for ten full years is such a beautiful thing. Our kids were 5 and almost 3 years old when we welcomed Grady; almost their entire childhoods through to now have been spent with him!
Grady has a story. An incredible, unbelievable story. In 2018, he jumped off our 15th floor balcony and onto a 7th floor patio AND SURVIVED. Sometimes we have moments in life that we know will provide an instant burst of gratitude anytime we think of it moving forward. That is how Grady’s presence from May 2018 through to the present has felt for me. When he jumped off our balcony, we actually didn’t realize it had happened for several hours (I’ll include full details of the story below). All of a sudden we couldn’t find the cat. It was a beautiful Sunday at the beginning of May, and Buckingham Foundation was having a special celebratory event where they turn on the fountain to signify the start of the warm seasons. Jim and I were panicked looking for the cat, and we also knew we had to get the kids out of the apartment. So I walked them up to Buckingham Fountain while Jim tried to figure out in desperation where our cat had gone. Standing at Buckingham Fountain, where everyone cheered when Tom Skilling flipped the switch to get the water to flow, I looked up to the sky, channeling whatever higher power is there for us, and I prayed. Please, I pleaded to the sky. Please. Please help us find our cat. If we find him, I will remember this place for the rest of my life. This moment. My feet on the ground. The clouds in the sky. The mist from the fountain. I will know that this world contains wonder and magic, and that here on this spot in front of this city as a witness, my prayer was answered. The following year, we returned to the event at Buckingham Fountain, and I took this picture from the spot where I had prayed the year before.
You know those days where you just feel…low? On those days, I remember that Grady survived. That every day since then, we could have gone on living with the knowledge that we let our cat sit on our balcony and that on one awful day, he leapt off to his death. But, somehow- that didn’t happen, and he is with us to this day. This little dude with a messed up lower jaw that doesn’t seem to cause him any discomfort. “Sun’s out, tongue’s out” is what we say on the days when his tongue really hangs out of his mouth because of his previously shattered jaw. He is a truly happy cat.
At the beginning of last year my daughter came home from school with an assignment where a parent had to write a quick story about something that had happened to them and then compare it to their child’s memory of what had happened. I think my daughter was expecting a paragraph of material, but I handed her a full three page essay (which she told me she completely pared down to a paragraph anyways before turning it in). Eighth graders…
Here is the unedited story that I wrote about the experience:
It was a gorgeous spring day in May, 2018. I was in the kitchen baking and we had the door to our balcony open, allowing in the breeze. I heard a clatter from the balcony door- it was like the sound that a stack of folding chairs would make if they were to fall over. I went to the balcony, looked over the edge, didn’t see anything, and honestly didn’t think anything more of it.
An hour later, my husband looked up at me and said, “Have you seen the cat?” I hadn’t. We started to search for him, checking his usual spots- the kids’ beds or underneath, the closets, a spot in the sunshine by our bedroom window, but with no success. There was no cat. And it seemed like we wouldn’t find the cat in the apartment no matter how much harder we looked, as we had looked everywhere. How does a cat leave a 15th floor apartment? We opened the door to look in the hallway, and as silly as it seems now, we even got on the elevator and went down to the parking garage to search (had the cat been in the garage, it would have meant that he had gotten onto an elevator, then exited into one of the elevator lobbies on floors 2-6, and then get past the heavy industrial doors to the garage, all without an adult there? He’s smart- but not THAT smart).
With some unease I remembered that sound, a crash, from hours before, and cautiously went back out onto the balcony, looked over the edge to see all the balcony railings below us, all the way down to the patio on floor 7 (which is the rooftop of the building’s parking garage), and again- saw nothing out of the ordinary. Jim taped his cell phone to a broom handle and held it out over the edge to get a better view into the balconies below us. He went out onto the street and looked at the small crack between our building and the one next to it. We were starting to feel desperate, and it also didn’t make sense. Animals don’t just disappear.
“I think we need to call down to the building,” I said, “And have someone look on the 7th floor to see if he’s there somewhere.” Jim agreed. He found our maintenance man, Karim, who was working that Sunday, and together they climbed up a ladder on the side of our building to get to the 7th floor and the patios for those apartments, as well as a green space on that floor over the garage. Jim knew that residents were definitely NOT supposed to be allowed on this ladder on the side of the building. Karim told Jim to stay where he was, and walked away to look for Grady. After a minute or two he reappeared to Jim. “I found cat.” He said.
“Ah man,” Jim replied. Jim said he felt so saddened by the thought of our cat having died this way. “Okay- well wait there, I’ll go get a bag or something…”
“What?” Karim replied. “No- he alive!”
“ARE YOU MESSING WITH ME?” Jim told me that he literally yelled this (we later treated Karim to a 6-pack for his help that day).
I was nervously waiting up in our apartment with the kids, who at that time were young, 7 and 5 years old. My phone rang. “Come down to the 7th floor with the kennel,” he said firmly into the phone. “Call the vet. Tell them we’re coming.” My hands shook as I dialed. When they answered and I explained, they asked me how badly he was hurt, where he was hurt. “I’m sorry I don’t know!” I cried into the phone. I’m heading to them right now with our kennel!”
“Hey guys! Mommy’s going to be right back! Watch your show!” I raced out to the elevators with the kennel. The elevator seemed to take forever, and when I got to floor 7 Jim was waiting. He grabbed the kennel and ran into the apartment on the corner, where our front desk man was standing, holding the door open.
What had happened was this- the darn cat had, indeed, leapt off our balcony. He landed on the neighbor’s patio on the 7th floor below us, falling through a small glass table (THAT was the sound I heard!) and had spent all the time after that huddled up at the neighbor’s patio door. There were bloody paw prints all over the glass. The neighbor wasn’t home, and the front desk man had to enter her apartment to get to the patio. When I had looked over the balcony edge earlier when we were looking for Grady, I hadn’t seen anything. But, after Jim had whisked Grady off to the emergency vet near us, I went back and looked again. And now, with the knowledge I had, I did notice a few things. The appearance of a pile of dirt- was that dirt? No…that was actually broken glass. And a small table on its side.
So that was our story. The trauma of the event sat with me for such a long time afterwards. Grady shattered his lower jaw when he hit that glass table- but the table is actually what saved his life by breaking the fall. It is true that cats land on their feet when they fall, but when there is that much force when they land, their front legs can’t hold the weight and so it’s their jaw that often receives the greatest impact. For weeks he had his incisors glued in place to allow his jaw to heal. We had to feed him through a feeding tube coming out of his neck (which sometimes backed up, spraying us in the face with pureed chicken). He permanently lost one of his toe nails. They had to pick glass out of his belly. And for many days afterwards, he walked around so gingerly, it was clear that his whole body hurt.
We felt terrible. It was our idea to keep the balcony door open, and we never thought he would have done something so ridiculous (and our balcony wall was clear glass, which meant he jumped up and OVER the railing). Turns out- animals (cats, dogs) have no depth perception. A bug or a bird flies by, and poof!, they go after it. What happened to Grady even has a name- High Rise Syndrome. Grady fell 8 stories, which allowed for his body to orient itself to land feet first. Any shorter distance, and he may have died. And longer distance, he may have died. Without that table there to break his fall, he may have died.
All in all, his medical care cost us $8000. But you know, now, 6* years later, we feel so grateful to have gotten this time with Grady cat, who continues to be a super feisty, chunky, opinionated, playful, and lovable boy.
*Now 7.5!
