That night, I couldn’t sleep—it was like having a raccoon in the house. I could see his tail whipping across the front of my bed and hear him sniffing around; he attacked his litter box with a ferocity I did not know domesticated house cats could have. (This did not temper itself over the years.) When he peed, he would wake me up because it was so loud. When I tried to talk to him or pet him, he would hide under the green armchair my parents bought right after they were married in 1974.
This was not sustainable. I called Possum.
Possum was also a cat lover, and he had two of his own. I told him that I had adopted Tommy and changed his name to Shrummie—after Bob Shrum, the Democratic political strategist whom I’d spent a fair amount of time with on the Kerry campaign; I just thought he was so lovely that I would name a cat after him one day. Shrummie was hiding under an old chair and wouldn’t come out, and I needed Possum’s help.
Pete Rouse, the man who had seen a Senate majority leader through the impeachment of a president, came over, sat down cross-legged in his cowboy boots and jeans on the creaky wooden floor in my little apartment and spent approximately five minutes coaxing Shrummie out from under the chair. I couldn’t believe it.
A few months earlier, my boyfriend Marv and I had broken up. We had dated for almost six years, and I loved him very much—he was my best friend—but we both knew something wasn’t right and hadn’t been for a while. We lived down the street from each other for years. He was still working for Kerry—how we met—but had lots of friends in the Obama office. We broke up during our lunch break on the day the Vatican sent the white smoke out of the chimney to signify they had chosen a new pope. I was crying on the sidewalk and told Marv through my tears, “People must think I’m really upset about the new pontiff.”
After our conversation, I went back to the office with red, puffy eyes. When Anita (Decker Breckenridge—then our downstate Illinois director) called me to talk about Obama’s next trip, she could tell I was upset. I told her what had happened, and she confessed she was going through the same thing. We were friendly before, but this made us sisters-in-arms.
A few weeks later, she suggested we give match.com a whirl. I was pretty lonely at that point; the DC political community is small, and when people heard Marv—who is about six feet eight inches and was a hot commodity—and I had broken up, they would throw parties and invite basically everyone I knew except me, because all the girls wanted to date him. In 2005, Match was sort of the preeminent dating website, and this was my first foray into online anything.
Cara helped me write my profile over pad thai and cocktails, and I posted it and waited. We trolled prospects and were kind of unimpressed; preempting Tinder by several years, we agreed that anyone who lived in Virginia was a No. This is simple, DC-resident prejudice and not right, but it’s where I was at age 30.
About a week went by before Anita and I regrouped to discuss our progress. She asked how many “winks” I’d gotten.
“Um, what’s a wink?” I replied. I checked my profile—nothing. I clicked through the site and realized “winks” came from guys who thought your profile/photo were cute. Anita had 30. I had none.
COME ON.
I became overwhelmed with emotion and started to cry at my desk. Not ugly crying—more like a string of single tears—but crying nonetheless. Any postbreakup fear that I might die alone was being confirmed. My lifelong unhappiness was cemented after five days on match.com.
Possum came over to talk about something else and saw I was crying. I’m kind of an open book—it’s not that I lack boundaries, but I don’t think emotions are something to be ashamed of—so I told him what was wrong. This meant explaining what exactly match.com was and why “winks” mattered. He grumbled. “I don’t understand this,” he said, and walked away. Possum does not like having his personal space violated, and I worried for a minute that I had been a little extreme.
The next day I came into the office and there was a card on my desk. Inside was a cat winking and the message, “This guy will wink at you.”
I always say that if it weren’t for Shrummie, David and I probably never would have gotten married. In the middle of our relationship, I had to go on a long trip to Asia with POTUS. David asked who took care of Shrummie when I went away; I told him about this pet-sitting service, FurPals, that I used.
Although many women would be put off by the “Rent, don’t own” and “Never get married” aspects of David’s personal philosophy, I didn’t get that far, because the “No pets” one seemed like the first deal breaker for me in a life partner. But in a fairly shocking move, he offered to have Shrummie come stay with him instead. He had met Shrummie a few times, and because Shrummie likes dudes best, he cuddled up to David immediately. Nevertheless, Shrummie was about 13 at this point, and although he’d shed a solid eight pounds with the help of Science Diet cat food, he still had his quirks (and fur that shed like crazy).
While I was in Asia, David would write me notes from Shrummie about how much fun he was having at “Uncle David’s”; he knew he was naughty to wake Uncle David up at 3:00 AM for snacks, but good old Uncle David got out of bed to give him food anyway. From there, David’s relationship with Shrummie grew. They became best friends, and this was my first indicator that maybe David’s policy on bachelorhood wasn’t as strict as I’d thought.
The week after David and I got married, we awoke on Thanksgiving morning in Rhinebeck to a paralyzed Shrummie—he couldn’t use his hind legs. We were supposed to be having dinner with Cara, her husband, and some other people to celebrate our nuptials, but I was so upset about Shrummie that instead of a festive meal at Le Petit Bistro, everyone came to the house for pizza and beer.
Shrummie’s legs eventually started working again, but he was still really off. We left Rhinebeck around 9:00 PM to get him back to more familiar surroundings in Georgetown, and for the next few weeks, he wasn’t right. He didn’t eat and was in and out of the animal hospital.
Meanwhile, Nelson Mandela passed away, and it was my job to oversee the presidential delegation for the funeral. For someone like Mandela, this meant former presidents and first ladies. With more than 300 current and former heads of state coming, the South African government was totally in over their heads, and the trip was extremely complicated to plan. We were used to hosting and planning international summits at the White House and had the infrastructure to support them, but it was very unclear if the South African government did. The arrival of each DV could have taken more than three hours if not done properly.
The day I was getting ready to leave for Pretoria, Shrummie was really off. We took him back to the animal hospital, and I was beside myself that I had to leave. I was beyond tears; I couldn’t eat. He had been tested for everything, from heart disease to pancreatic cancer, but the vet had no answers. I lost my shit—started to get really emotional—and tried to explain that I needed to leave for Nelson Mandela’s funeral in a few hours so we really had to know what was wrong right then.
This is not the kind of thing you often hear working at an animal hospital, even in DC, I imagine. The vet gave me a look like I was a freedom fighter. “It’s not like we were friends,” I said. “It’s my job.” I sounded like I needed a hospital myself.
We took Shrummie home and were told to monitor his appetite, which is a key indicator (along with how many times they poop every day) of a cat’s health. I headed to Andrews Air Force Base a few hours later.
When I got to AF1, President George W. Bush and Laura Bush were already on board, as was Secretary Clinton. After spending so many years traveling together, I had a nice rapport with the secretary, but I had never met Bush 43 or Mrs. Bush before (though I enjoyed her book very much and had always heard she was nice and laid-back).
“There she is! The married lady!” Secretary Clinton said from the AF1 conference room. President Bush remarked that I would probably rather be on a honeymoon than on my way to what was bound to be a shitshow in South Africa.
&n
bsp; For some reason—I plead exhaustion, and the anxious kind of grief that I was experiencing, where you sort of know something bad is going to happen but you think you can stop it—I started telling President Bush about Shrummie. I caught myself when I started explaining the cat’s “inappetence” and went back to my seat to start working on getting our Secret Service weapons into South Africa. The South African government had detained them at the airport, and we were not going to get off AF1 in Johannesburg if our protection didn’t have guns.
Eventually everyone left the conference room and went to sleep, and I went back to my seat to monitor updates from our advance team on the ground. They were making little progress, but David was also sending me videos of Shrummie eating from a smorgasbord of Fancy Feast, and I felt a little better. A few hours later, President Bush came back to my cabin to ask how things were on the ground in South Africa, and how my cat was.
When I got home from South Africa two days later, Shrummie was doing OK, not great. We brought him back from the animal hospital, and out of nowhere he stopped walking again.
Late that night, we were at the animal hospital, our second home. The vet there thought—again—that Shrummie had pancreatic cancer, but that diagnosis made no sense. Finally, at like 9:30 or something, a nice doctor pulled us aside and said she thought his problem might be neurological. There was this great neurosurgeon, Dr. Lauren Talarico, out in Virginia who might be able to help us.
The nurse called ahead, and Dr. Talarico met us sometime after 11:00 PM. She diagnosed Shrummie with a fibrocartilaginous embolism (FCE)—essentially a blockage in the spine that affects the hind limbs. She had him stay overnight—she referred to his cage as a “condo”—and said she would do an MRI to confirm and call us in the morning.
David and I went home and made a frozen pizza; it was the first time I had really eaten in weeks. I finally felt like I had someone on my side who was going to figure out, for better or worse, what was wrong. She texted me later—“Oh, we got this,” I think she said—and was extremely kind.
Meanwhile—meanwhile!—our honeymoon was looming ever closer, and I got an email from the concierge at Kauri Cliffs, New Zealand, about David’s tee times and my spa appointments.
When I showed David the email—not saying anything but kind of getting a sinking feeling in my stomach about the fact that I was about to go on a beautiful vacation to the Southern Hemisphere—he looked at me and said, “We aren’t going.” And so instead of golfing and getting massages at the edge of the world, we spent Christmas taking Shrummie for physical therapy and acupuncture. You know you’ve married the right person when you agree, without argument or discussion, on the decision to cancel a two-week, fully paid honeymoon so you can stay home and start your cat on intensive medical treatment. Possum told me that his cats, Moose and Buster, were saying prayers for Shrummie. Maybe it was ridiculous, but it felt like what we had to do.
I didn’t realize what an important part of my life Shrummie was until he got sick. As I had moved around the country, he was the constant; he made all the random apartments I’d lived in feel like home. When I was upset or sick, he slept right next to me and wouldn’t move. Even when work was shitty, you couldn’t help but lighten up when he would stand at the front door waiting for you to get home so he could lead you to the cabinet with his food. He had many nicknames: Shrum, Shrummington, Shrumpkins, Porchetta, Porky Monkey Butt, and his physical therapy alter ego, Mr. Boods.
Shrummie rarely meowed, let alone hissed, but Mr. Boods would hiss at everyone at SouthPaws (though he never bit or swatted at anyone). When he walked through the PT obstacle course and hopped over hurdles, he would hiss like a tennis player grunting to get her best serve.
By this time, I was waiting for my last day at the White House to come. This is going to sound silly, but the joy his hissing brought me put that in perspective: Every one of his doctors—and especially Dr. Talarico (I am now the godmother to her daughter, Gigi)—was so kind, so invested in his recovery. Something about the entire process made me feel that either at the White House or not, I would be OK. I would have a purpose. Plus, the White House team was able and willing to arrange meetings so I would have time to go back home to Georgetown for an hour every day to give Shrummie his meds and do some quick midday physical therapy. I was never made to feel bad about it, or like a crazy cat lady. Eventually, Shrummie regained full mobility in his hind legs.
About a year after I left the White House, David and I decided to go on vacation from Williamsburg, where we were living in the horrible rentals. We never left Shrummie behind anymore—and he had been a little sleepy for a few days—so we rented a cottage out near North Fork on Long Island so we could bring him with us.
I didn’t think too much of it, but we had only been gone for a few days when he seemed to get a little worse. He looked like he was dizzy—his head was sort of bobbing around—and he wasn’t eating. He was actually sleeping in front of his dish, which was really odd. I asked David if we could bring Shrummie to Virginia to see Dr. Talarico, the neurosurgeon who’d helped him before; I knew that no matter what was wrong, we would figure it out there. I called her up, and she said they would start prepping “Shrummie’s suite.”
We drove back home to the city to unload some stuff and were planning to get right back on the road to Virginia. When we pulled into our parking space at our apartment, Shrummie started to have a seizure.
We took him straight to his vet in Tribeca—wrapped in his favorite blanket—but I knew this was it. He had fought the good fight, but I had vowed to never keep him around just for us. In his bag, I had hidden a very sweet ceramic-and-cork urn that I’d had made months earlier. Back when he first got sick, I had done a lot of late-night Internet searching and read on some message boards that if your pet is ill, you should get the urn for his ashes made in advance because you won’t have the emotional fortitude to do it when the time comes. This is good advice (and a hat tip to preparedness).
I walked into the vet while David tried to park. They did a quick exam and confirmed that Shrummie was quite sick. I told them I thought it was time to put him down; David came in and we said good-bye.
When we got home, I was devastated—just empty. Everything made me tear up. I emailed Anita, who was in Alaska with POTUS. Her dog, Jonas, had gotten cancer and died a couple of months earlier, and I’d promised to let her know about Shrummie when the time came.
About 30 minutes later, I got a call from a strange number on my phone. VICE had a journalist detained in Turkey, so I figured it would be about him and answered, choking back tears.
“Ms. Mastromonaco, this is the Air Force One operator. We miss you up here! Are you available for a call from the president?”
Before I registered what was happening, I was on the phone with POTUS. “I heard we lost Shrummie today,” he said. “There are a lot of sad faces up here on Air Force One right now. You should know—I’m pretty sure we saw his spirit up here over Denali.”
Forget about me—that call meant so much to David, who, by this time, loved Shrummie as much as I did, if not more. David could hear POTUS through my phone, and he teared up, too.
Having been with POTUS when he made calls like this one, I knew how hard it was. So many of the calls the president has to make are really sad—calls to parents who have lost their children serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, parents whose children were murdered or kidnapped—and in the grand scheme of things I knew that I did not rank. Barack Obama, graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, broker of normalized relations between the United States and Cuba, and the nation’s first black president, does not have time to call a 39-year-old woman to offer his condolences for the loss of her cat. It’s bordering on an episode of Broad City.
I said something like, “I really appreciate this call. I know this is awful.”
“He’s been around since the beginning,” he replied.
Later that week, I got a note from Possum saying that Shrummie had had
a great life with us and had loved me very much. A month later, we rescued a crazy white Persian cat—he is older and I’m pretty sure he has an anxiety disorder—and named him Petey.
Kindness often exists on a smaller scale than the grand gestures popular on social media would have you believe. Though anonymously paying off someone’s student loans or giving a waitress a $5,000 tip are amazing acts of goodwill, things like being willing to cut someone some slack, or making a thoughtful phone call, can help another person so much.
Maybe this all sounds cheesy to you. Maybe you’re feeling secondhand embarrassment that Barack Obama called me to say he saw the spirit of my dead cat soaring over a mountain. Maybe you think I’m a spoiled baby—that there are real problems in the world and instead of dissecting them and advocating on behalf of them, I decided to end my book with a story about how much I love cats. (Shortly after we adopted Petey, I fell in love with another white Persian. We named her Bunny but call her BunBun.) Maybe the fact that my Instagram account consists primarily of pictures of these cats—or the fact that I have an Instagram account at all—is infuriating to you. Maybe you think this proves the point that I’m a “cupcake-eating cheerleader,” and not a “serious” professional woman. I think a “serious” woman can also be a crazy cat lady, and I will be rescuing cats until someone has to rescue me.
CONCLUSION
Politics, Now with Less Navy
A few days ago, for the first time in a long time, I had no choice but to go to J.Crew. I’d been reading up on Wendy Long, a staunchly conservative Christian politician from New York, and it was clear my post–White House wardrobe of Birkenstocks and patterned linen dresses was not going to help me in my quest to impersonate her. I needed navy, and lots of it.
Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? Page 19