I’m old
enough to have had lots of animals – and people – die on me. Other cats. Good
friends and mentors. Grandparents. Parents. Rock-and-roll heroes. And most
recently, my first and favorite chicken, Miss Buffy. None, however, affected me
quite the same as losing Lucy.
Our kitty of
eighteen years, nearly a quarter of my lifetime, is gone. Take all the tears in
my life of nearly sixty-eight years and they might add up to the salty river
I’ve shed in the past few days and weeks.
If you were
to ask whether a grown man crying over a dying cat is normal, that would be a
fair question. Yes, it is a bit embarrassing. On the other hand, my wife posted
on Facebook a notice of our loss and got a host of heartfelt comments. I
suspect that anyone who has outlived a longtime house pet understands.
We struggled
daily with the timing of the inevitable: When is the right time? How do you
know? Is she in pain? What’s best for kitty? How can you ever know for sure? Waiting
for the vet to arrive like the grim reaper, I was torn between wanting the
clock to speed up or stop.
I went
through this once before with my one-and-only hunting dog, Levi. The vet came
out to the parking lot and put him to sleep in the back of my Pinto station
wagon, where Levi had spent much his life accompanying me everywhere. Then I
drove home and dug a hole in my backyard garden and laid him on his rug (“Go to
your spot, Levi!”) and covered him
with dirt. I gave him a headstone – a football-sized piece of white limestone
shaped like a gnome from a trip we had made together to the Florida Keys. Though
that was thirty years ago, sometimes I still picture him there, his underground
bones smoldering to dust, and wonder if my timing was right.
Lucy – our
little bitch, our favorite diva – went out with dignity in her own bed. I was
proud of her. When the vet tried to shave the hind leg of this placid-appearing
old cat in order to find a vein for the fatal injection, Lucy summoned a last
shot of adrenaline, hissed and clawed, and tried to take off his hand – one
last “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I thought I
would be better the day after, taking care of the mechanics of loss – washing her
blankets and putting away her cat things for a time when we bring a new kitty,
or kitties, into our lives. I wasn’t prepared for how empty the house felt. Outdoors,
rain howled in the fir trees and wind chimes sang their monotonous tunes.
I cleaned up
the last of Lucy’s ubiquitous shed hair, the errant kitty litter, and the
carpet spots from her end-of-days sickness – which she bore with stoic
cat-grace, never complaining, never whining, just slowly, but irrevocably winding
down. Probably what finally got her was diabetes.
With an old
cat like Lucy, what you lose are small things; her days of frenetic cat antics
were long past. There is a personality missing. Routines are shattered – feeding
and watering, dealing with poop and pee and hairballs, putting her to bed at
night. Suddenly, the house stays cleaner longer. My allergies are better. But
there is a new silence. A loneliness has taken residence. Everything seems a
bit more fragile.
Maybe our
grief and anxiety at such times is about more than just a pet. How can it not
remind us of the truly great sadnesses that lie in our futures, those
nightmares we usually keep at bay?
When we
dropped off Lucy for cremation, I asked Adam at the funeral home if I could see
the crematorium. “Probably not since it’s in use right now,” he said, taking my
box. No doubt it was a former human under transformation to ashes since he said
they only get about one pet cremation a month. I can understand not wanting an
audience. If it was me, I wouldn’t want one, either. I just thought it would be
interesting to see, since there is a better-than-fair chance that it’s exactly the
place I’ll end up one day. Adam explained that the pet and people remains shouldn’t get
mixed up since they only do one body at a time and capture by vacuum all the
ashes after each use. I found that oddly comforting.
Our shared grief over our shared loss has brought us closer together than ever. I didn’t think that possible, but it’s true. So I guess I should say, thank you, Lucy, for that surprise. A final, lasting gift for the unconditional love we gave her. Not bad for just a cat.
Here’s a concluding thought from an essay, “This Old Man” by Roger Angell, in last week’s The New Yorker:
TEACHER: Good morning, class. This is the first day of school and we’re going to introduce ourselves. I’ll call you, one by one, and you can tell us your name and maybe what your dad or your mom does for a living. You, please, over at this end.
SMALL BOY: My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.
TEACHER: A mechanic! Thank you,
Irving. Next?
SMALL GIRL: My name is Emma and my
mom is a lawyer.
TEACHER: How nice for you, Emma!
Next?
SECOND SMALL BOY: My name is Luke
and my dad is dead.
TEACHER: Oh, Luke, how sad for you.
We’re all very sorry about that, aren’t we, class? Luke, do you think you could
tell us what Dad did before he died?
LUKE (seizes his throat): He went “N’gugngghhh!”
