Where do I even start?
Writing DiNozzo’s eulogy was something I did the same day he died. I couldn’t help it—the words poured out of me like my tears—but this time, I’ve had some distance from Riley’s death, brought on by our move and all the chaos that relocation brings. It doesn’t mean the grief is gone, not by a long shot, but it’s different. We’ve been so busy moving out of the house and getting it ready to sell that I feel like I didn’t get much of a chance to grieve. I ‘ve been too busy.
Grief steals moments from me when I’m least expecting it because grief is like that. It doesn’t care that you’re too busy for it. It’s only in those moments that I’m feeling it, or maybe having two cats die within a two-month span makes the grief combined in such a way as to not hurt the same. I don’t know.
O’Riley Oak came to us with the name O’Riley, to go along with his brother, O’Malley. Most of the time we shortened the names to Riley and Malley, which they never minded. The only time we really called him O’Riley was when the O’Reiley Auto Parts Store theme song came on the TV or radio because we had to sing along and make their ads about our cat.
After all, all songs are about cats.
Riley’s story is an odd little tale, as he was an odd little kitty, and if we can believe the foster fam, the boys were born on May 21st, 2007. We adopted them in May of 2008, supposedly as one-year-olds. The reason I worded it that way is that none of Riley’s (or Malley’s) copious vets and specialists have agreed with their age. They all feel that the two cats came to us at age two or three or older.
Their foster home was one of overcrowding and food scarcity. Both boys learned early that you had to eat everything as quickly and as often as you could because you didn’t know when food would be available again. Considering the home had ten dogs and over a dozen cats, I’m not surprised. They were constantly struggling for food, attention, and security.
We were told that both boys were shy and that neither were lap kitties, though Riley enjoyed riding on one’s shoulders. This turned out to be wrong, especially as they aged. (Riley never did warm up to strangers, but if you were a cat person, he would tolerate you. Both boys also loved laps.)
The first night they spent with us, we didn’t have high expectations. Most cats hide, which Riley and Malley did immediately. Even then, Riley set out from the getgo to etch himself into our memories.
Molli woke up sometime after midnight to use the bathroom as her stomach wasn’t agreeing with her. She was tired enough that she might have dozed lightly and when she next looked down, Riley had curled up around her ankles as she sat in the bathroom. As long as Molli didn’t move, Riley was completely calm and happy. Of course, you can’t sit on the toilet forever. Molli did have to move, and Riley scurried beneath the bed again to hide with his brother.
Hence, Riley became the kitty most obsessed with underthings and smelly objects. I have hundreds of photos of him curled up in dirty laundry, or digging through it so he could bury himself in the smell. He continued to curl up around ankles if either of us where in the restroom.
If you had food poisoning, he was your kitty.
Gas? No big deal. In fact, he enjoyed farts. I have never seen a cat so enamored with flatulence. He would huff the air and follow the scent to the person it belonged to, and then curl up in your lap so he could bathe in the smell. Sort of gross but in a way, smell was how Riley bonded. That and food.
Riley was a true Garfield or orange tabby. He could and would eat anything and everything. He never truly got over his food insecurity and would panic if food was late, even after 19 years with us. I’m not talking about the typical cat who whines and acts like he’s dying if food is one minute late, though he’d do that too. Riley would genuinely grow anxious. He would work himself into the cat version of a panic attack. He had separation anxiety, but it especially centered around food.
His ability to find food he shouldn’t eat once led to a nasty case of pancreatitis that almost killed him when he was six years old. Other than that, he lived the majority of his life as a healthy, fat cat. As long as he had his brother, he was happy.
When Riley stayed in the hospital overnight for his pancreatitus, his brother, Malley, spent the night searching for him. When Riley came home, they curled up tightly against each other for half the day.
They were inseparable.
Riley was the goofiest cat I’ve ever met. He absolutely loved to play pirate and ride on our shoulders, especially Molli’s. He would keep me company in my office as I wrote, and absolutely loved to bird watch. Kitty TV was his jam, as was pretending he could catch the birds.
One evening, a barred owl landed in a tree branch not even a foot from our bedroom window. It was pre-dawn—the time of hunting—and that owl would’ve happily eaten our kitties as a morning snack. DiNozzo was frightened by the owl’s size, but Riley paced in front of the window, completely convinced the owl was just a large chicken for him to eat. It was comical the way Riley was so fearless in the face of this owl that was much larger than he.
Riley’s goofiness, along with his bond with his brother, is why I originally started the webcomic Cat’tain’s Log.
Captain Riley was going to go on so many space adventures because of our three boys, he was totally the cat to do it. He would have been frightened by space, but I think he would have enjoyed it as long as his brother was there. Riley’s domain consisted of his foster home, then a home we rented, a house we bought in Texas, then the condo we bought in Seattle, a rental apartment while we sold the condo, and finally our house in Bothell. Through all of these adventures, scary though they might be, he thrived.
In the winter of 2022, we woke up in the middle of the night to something very, very wrong.
Riley couldn’t breathe.
We were already familiar with the 24 hour emergency vet hospital near us because of DiNozzo, so we rushed Riley to them sometime after midnight. Because a new wave of COVID was hitting the world, we wouldn’t be allowed to go into the veterinary hospital with Riley unless he was dying and then, we’d have to don full P.P.E.—hazmat gown, slippers, full face shield, the works. I remember hoping we didn’t have to do that because if my kitty was dying, I wanted Riley to be able to smell me. I wanted him to be able to feel my skin and hear my voice, unmuffled by a mask and shield.
Riley’s heart stopped in the ER. They had to resuscitate him.
The news wasn’t good. Riley was in heart failure and likely wouldn’t survive the night. We stood in the parking lot in winter rains as we donned their protective gear. Then we walked inside and said goodbye.
But Riley was a fighter. The medication they gave him not only helped him survive the night, but he improved. His heart worked, and he made it clear he wanted to come home. It wasn’t time for his adventures to end.
Over the course of the next year, Riley not only thrived, but his heart healed. The hole in his heart reversed itself and grew smaller until he was no longer labeled a cat with “heart failure” but a cat with “heart disease.”
Every day since that 2022 winter was an absolute gift.
Two weeks after DiNozzo died, Riley had a grand mal seizure. While neurology found a reason and a treatment, he was back in the ER a few days later when he was gasping for breath. We all thought he was in heart failure again, that maybe the seizures triggered it somehow, but then they took imaging of his chest cavity.
In the lower lobe of his left lung was a mass. A tumor.
It was large enough that they were sure it was keeping Riley from breathing properly. There were concerns that maybe it caused the seizures. What if this was a secondary tumor, and he had one in his brain? Four different specialists weighed in.
They gave him some medication to help his body drain the fluids on his chest, and then told us it was likely Riley had an aggressive form of cancer that meant his time left was numbered in a few months. If we were lucky, a year.
We thought we had more time. He was such a fighter that we thought he’d ben on the year end of that estimate.
A month later, he couldn’t breathe again. This time, the fluid build up was severe enough that they had to tap his chest cavity and drain it. They warned us it would fill back up and the speed with which it did would determine how much time we had left.
Four days later, he couldn’t breathe again. Before, when they drained his chest, Riley had come home happy. He’d eaten heartily and snuggled with us and his brother. But this second time was different. Riley was tired. He couldn’t move well and while he snuggled some, he wasn’t himself.
On January 6, 2026, we said goodbye to Riley, this time for good. He was able to smell us and feel our skin. He could hear our voices as we talked to him and told him he was our eternal kitten forever.
Malley was able to say goodbye to him as well since we helped Riley cross the rainbow bridge in our house. He seemed aware of Riley’s illness, perhaps before we were alerted. Sometimes Malley glances around the bedroom in a way that suggests he’s looking for his brother, but otherwise, he seems to understand that Riley isn’t coming back. Honestly, he’s doing better than Molli and I are on that front.
To lose our goofy pirate, our 20-year-old eternal kitten, is crushing, especially so soon after saying goodbye to DiNozzo. At one point, Riley had a fang pulled. Between the snaggletoothed grin and his shoulder love, he really was our pirate boy. Maybe he’s a space pirate now…
May Riley’s stardust find its way back to his brother someday, and maybe to ours as well.
See you space cowboy.1
1 This phrase is from the anime Cowboy Bebop, which is one of Molli and my favorites. Seemed fitting here.
