Waiting For My Cats to Die: A Morbid Memoir
by Stacy Horn
(St. Martin's, 2001)

reviewed by Terri Nelson

Stacy Horn isn’t just having a midlife crisis – she’s rolling in it.

The Manhattanite and founder of Echo finds herself living alone at 40 with two elderly, diabetic cats who require insulin shots every twelve hours. Her life seems to have whittled itself down to catching the cats’ urine in cups to test it, channel surfing, and having panic attacks. Rather than simply sinking into a swamp of depression, Horn does the only sensible thing: she becomes obsessive. As she lies on her couch channel-surfing and in between shuttling the cats back and forth to the vets, she thinks, a lot, about the end of life, for humans and of course for her cats.

Horn’s obsessions become entertaining, poignant musings. When her friend Michael suggests that a ghost lives in her apartment, she tries to hunt down who it might be. In the process, she details exactly how to go about researching history and who to talk to find out who and what happened in old New York buildings. In the process of doing this, she also becomes intrigued with the stillborn sister of a friend, buried out on Hart’s Island in the paupers’ cemetery, and makes a beautifully detailed account of her trip to the island to find the baby. Her genuine interest and compassion in others’ lives leads her to interview the elderly, attend veterans’ parades, and befriend a mortician while worrying over the boxes of cremated ashes that go unclaimed every year.

Not all of her life is taken up with the compulsion to think about death. Horn is indulgent with her neuroses and lets them wander – as pampered as her cats – into all corners of her life. She gripes amusingly about the lack of men in her life, or at least that the men who share her life with her are not the one she wants to marry. She complains about her failing business (Echo is a New York online community and Internet service provider, and as plagued with problems and lack of money as all online communities seem to be), and chronicles exactly how NOT to sell it. She drums in a samba band, sings in a chorale society, and hangs out with New York writers – none of which stops her from whining. All in all, it’s an accurate portrayal of daily life with the literati.

However, what would be a litany of complaints and subject matter too morbid to be fun in a less self-aware and clever writer become, in Horn’s hands, a rich and delicate description of one woman's attempt to live her life as fully as she can. Her writing is choppy and direct, reflecting the style of someone who writes online all the time (or a channel-surfer), so there’s never a chance to get bored with the subject she’s covering before she flits to the next one. Somehow, though, the fast cuts never short her readers. Her self-effacing humor makes her book fulfilling, and by the time you finish it, you love Stacy Horn a little bit. You just can’t help it, any more than she can stop her cats from dying.