These posts are turning out to be very “pet forward.” That’s what I want to write about right now though, so 🤷
This is Max.
Max lived to the age of 16, and 10 of his years were spent with me. A friend of mine adopted Max from the Humane Society when he was looking for cats on their website and he fell in love with this 5 year old, grey haired gentle giant. Max was a big boy, very long end to end, and he had a lot of fur. I still ended up calling him the little man.
Those days I’d spend a lot of time hanging out at their apartment, and Max and I also became good friends. A year after Tike got Max though, he had to make some big decisions for his career and one of those decisions meant that he’d be leaving the country, so he started looking for someone to adopt Max. It wasn’t really something I needed to think about a lot.
My brother Ali and I lived together at the time and we were so excited. The only pets we had ever had in our lives were two terrapins when we were really young; I was maybe 10 years old. Don’t get me wrong, I also loved Babs and Buster but there’s something different about mammals! Max was a bit nervous for a while though. We lived in a tiny two bedroom apartment in the Village in Toronto, right at Church and Wellesely. My room was on one end, my brother’s room on the other end, and there was a little living room in between us. Ali would hang out in his room playing his guitar, I’d be in my room reading, and Max would be in the living room, lazing.
One day, about a week after Max moved in with us, I was lying in bed reading something with my door slightly ajar. As I scanned the page, I heard a little scratch and I looked up to see Max pawing his way into my room. He strolled up to my bed and then jumped up to lay down next to me. I was so happy I thought I’d cry. This isn’t a picture of that exact moment but it’s basically what we looked like.
He was a lovely little man and he’d spend equal amounts of time with both Ali and me. I couldn’t find any pictures of him with Ali in my online vaults, but I did find this picture that I took of a picture that my mum put up on a wall in their house.
I spent a lot of time reading back then with Max laying down near me. One time I was reading “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. I still remember this because as I flipped through the book, Max would sit up and bite the bottoms of the turning pages and leave little puncture marks in them. I have re-read Snow Crash a couple of times over the years and when I see those little bite marks I think of Max and those weekends reading with him by my side. Sometimes I pick it up just to look at the little holes he left behind.
We lived there for quite a while actually, almost 4 years. Eventually Ali moved out of the city and so Max and I lived alone in that place for a bit. Then we moved to one of those horrific, tiny, bachelor apartments near Cityplace. I just needed a place to be and it worked for us at the time. There was a bathroom, a kitchen, and my bed. Truthfully it was probably not as bad as I’m making it out to be, but also truthfully, that is literally what it was like.
I used to bike a lot back then and it was around this time that my friend Udai and I started planning a huge bike trip. I’ll write about it in another post, but for now I’ll say that I was planning a lot of my life around this ride. My lease ended at the Cityplace place, and I found an apartment in St. James Town that I’d be able to rent on a month-to-month basis, giving me the flexibility to leave when I needed.
Just FYI, Max would be staying with my cousin Fatima for the duration of the bike ride, so no worries there. It would be for a couple of months over the summer. He had stayed with my friend Eiko a few times when I went to visit my folks in Dubai so he’d been through this before, just not for this long. Also I just remembered, Eiko took some of the best pictures I have of Max. Here’s one of my favourites.
So anyway, we moved to St. James Town to a bigger bachelor apartment. It was actually so much better! I could move all my bikes into the actual apartment instead of having to leave them in the stupid parking garage, and a huge bonus was that Max had a balcony to explore.
Max and I took our first Christmas photo at that place. It’s a classic.
This is when I met Geetha. We started dating three months before I left on my trip and she saw Max and I in our bachelor-pad-prime. Thing is, Geetha was actually allergic to cats so she’d flare up when she came over. We had to make sure we had claritin or something similar available just in case.
After three months of us hanging out together, I went on my trip, and Max went to Fatima’s. I really wished the little guy liked the outdoors but he was the indoorsiest cat I’ve ever met. He loved people and he loved to cozy up to them, but he did not like other animals. Max would not have been one of those cats from a youtube video that goes on a roadtrip with their person.
Here’s a picture Fatima sent me on the road of her and Max and their shenanigans.
Almost three months later I got back and moved in with Geetha at her place which also was a little bachelor apartment. Her building didn’t allow pets so Max stayed with Fatima a bit longer. Our plan was to rent a new apartment together and have Max move in with us. That place ended up being our apartment building on Wood Street. Max and I were back in the Village and Geetha was here with us this time! I was extremely worried about the allergy issue and Geetha was allergic but over time I think she got a bit more acclimatized and it ended up being okay. In fact Geetha and Max have their own love story that I can’t really write about but the pictures do some of the talking for her.
Here’s the Christmas photo we took at Wood Street that year.
I found a couple more good pictures from those days.
This is Max doing a thing he loved doing, sitting on Geetha as she slept.
A bathroom selfie of the three of us.
Me starting my self learning journey to becoming a web developer with CS50 and Max supervising on the side.
When Max was 13 he was in and out of the vet clinic quite a bit. One time he had to go in because his dental health was really bad and we needed to see if it was going to be okay to go under for a thorough teeth cleaning. The vet said that his pre-anesthesia tests were inconclusive because he may have had a heart murmur. Or not. Unclear. So we had to do more tests. After a battery of non-invasive testing, it turned out that Max was just nervous around the vet 🤦. He was given the all clear and the procedure went ahead. They ended up having to remove one of his teeth as well. That wasn’t the end of his vet visits though. We always knew he was at risk for developing pancreatitis and at the age of 14 he had to start eating a special food to keep things under control. We kept a close eye on him, his food, and his general demeanor.
And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, Max started looking and acting old. He was always my little man so I never really thought of him as old but he was. His pancreatitis really flared up and we took him to an emergency vet because he just stopped eating. There they fed him and put him on a drip for fluids, and he had to stay at the clinic for 2 nights. Geetha and I visited him and held him and I hope he felt good for those few moments that he saw, smelled, and heard us. I felt so terrible for him. There’s pictures of him around from this time but it makes me cry to look at them and I don’t really want to put them up here.
When we brought him home we had to start talking about the reality of the situation. Max was old, in pain, and ready to go. I had to make myself ready too. Over the course of that week, all of his friends came over to say goodbye, and then before we knew it, it was his last day. My brother was back in Toronto then and so Ali, Geetha, and I took him to the vet. His doctor, Dr. Pilar was there ready for us. She was crying. We were all crying. The nurse said that we could sit there for as long as we wanted after he stopped breathing. I knew that she didn’t mean literally as long as we wanted but I did want to stay for a bit. Max had been my best friend for so long; he knew all my friends, he had lived in all the places I had lived in, he listened to the same music that I listened to, he watched me grow into myself and figure things out. As a kid I read all these books about people having to let go of their dogs or their cats and just how painful it was. I was a 32 year old man when I first felt that feeling and it really hurt. I was so used to him being around me and my life that I found myself looking for him as I walked around the apartment; it took me a while to come to terms with his absence.
I still think about him all the time. In fact, I got a tattoo of Max to make sure I’m always reminded :)
I loved Max. I wish that everyone gets to have that with a pet at some point in their life; it’s such a lovely friendship. Of course it hurts so horribly when they have to go but Tupperware Remix Party said it best in their song “Pets”
You brought us closer together
You gave us love and laughter
But I knew that having you around
Would have to end someday
And even though that sucks
I wouldn’t have it any other way