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You've passed forty. You're single, deeply addicted to watching television, and obsessed by the past. Your business seems to be failing. You're hopelessly devoted to two diabetic cats, whose dietary and medical regimens dictate your schedule. Not only are you informed your apartment is haunted, you're actually starting to believe it may be true. This is a life?
Waiting for My Cats to Die is Stacy Horn's heartbreakingly honest and achingly funny reply to her own question. Here is a memoir that goes straight to the indignities and preoccupations of midlife: what happens the moment we realize that life has a distinctly downward pull to it, and that death is more than simply some theoretical possibility.
Stacy decides dying is not something she's going to take lying down. Having polled subscribers on echonyc.com, the online service she founded, for advice, she concludes that the best strategy in the battle against aging is a frontal assault. We're all going to end up in graveyards? Fine. Let's make them as homey and welcoming as we can. She clears away underbrush from abandoned cemeteries, wipes cobwebs from forgotten crypts, looks for gems amid the clutter of storage rooms and basements, tracks down precious records of long-dead relatives, interviews the elderly for the wisdom of their age, and pores over local archives, seeking the identity of her ghostly roommate (and hoping to learn why it seems to have nothing better to do than hang around a small one-bedroom apartment in the West Village of Manhattan).
As this wonderful, courageous, and irresistible memoir shows, acting out can be both survival strategy and affirmation. There's no avoiding the day when the credits will roll on your life, so accumulate as many credits as you can (that way, they'll take longer to unroll). Stacy seizes her days with fierce passion: she learns to drum, sings with a choir, writes treatments for TV shows, somehow manages to keep her business on an even keel, and freely embraces all the fantasies and denials that sustain every one of us. And those poor afflicted cats? Their furry, stubborn will to live provides reason enough to celebrate. Waiting for My Cats to Die will make you weep, laugh, commiserate, and fall back in love with life.
Customer Review: Same Boat, Waiting To Sink
Almost 40 here, 2 old fart felines- Chelsea (16) is diabetic with a number of itchy ailments, Shakespeare (17) has used the litter box about 3 times during his life- I've been cursed with the chore of rotating hand towels for his toilet leisure. And for the past 5 yrs or so, Chelsea has played kitty see - kitty do. Saves me a lot on the cost of litter, but I well make up for it with air deodorants and plug-ins as kitty urine smells 10x worse on a towel hung to dry while I wait for a full load to wash every 4-5 days. A friend asked me if I'd heard about Stacy's book, I had not but quickly picked up a copy and waited a while to read it, dreading the ending chapter of course. Since I am home all the time, very emotionally in tune and attached to these two cats- having spent more time in their presence than with any other living creature during my life, when I did read the book, it was like reading my own story mixed with a close friend's story. This in 2002, at a point when my cats were rotating sick days, and I figured it wouldn't be long. Well we don't always rotate sick days now, being a diabetic now myself- sometimes we are all having a sick day on the same day, but we pull each other through. If you are a cat lover, or ever taken care of a sick loved one, or in general a person with any kind of kindness and love in your heart, you will giggle, roll your eyes, tear up and break down- all within a few pages of each other even! Its a wonderful and touching book. I'm a guy that 17 years ago never thought I'd be in such a boat with these two old friends. As I STILL wait to start a new life once these guys are gone, we snuggle up to bed and I never regret a second of it, no matter what or how much I had to clean up today, or how bad one of them is smelling at the moment! :) Friends that tell me its time to put them down, don't see how as sick as one is one day, they bounce back the next day and play like the mighty hunters they once were. It is going to be a little longer, at least. Thank you Stacy!
Customer Review: Not really about cats
If you like to read cat memoirs, this is only marginally a cat memoir. Two thirds of it is really about Ms. Horn and her obsession with researching cemeteries and interviewing old people about dying. And selling her Internet bulletin board. And the results of surveys she takes on the bulletin board. I was bored and skipped over most of that to get to the cat parts, which were sad because her cats are sick and one dies. We never get closure about the other one. I didn't think it was very good, or of interest to much of a readership, but now I'm even more inspired to write my cat memoir book because if she could get this published by St. Martin's Press, I should be able to get mine published because it is really about cats.


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