The Unknown Cat

Callie didn't come to me like a refugee, with nothing to her name. She was a grand dame in a large carrying case, much nicer than any I already had. She had a comfy pad inside with her, already soiled with cat hair as if she had been sitting peacefully in this cage for quite awhile.

The pad and the cage were the only items that seemed even slightly used. Her two food bowls were brand new. The hair brush was still in its package. There were six cans of deluxe Science Diet hairball control food. There was a new litter box and shovel, and a container of cat litter. Whoever was passing this cat along at least cared enough to give her a good start in her new home. Mostly everything was new for her new life. I would have preferred to see some well-worn possessions to give me a clue about who she was.

I would have benefited from more information. Callie's journey to me was through two others, so I never spoke to the original owner. A neighbor I seldom talked to collected Callie from her sister, who had collected her from a friend because the friend planned to put her down. They were moving. Something had happened in their life. Loss of job, or house, or a new husband, or a new baby. The story was vague. The cat was maybe named Callie. Like the game Telephone, when information goes through a line of people, it gets distorted.

Callie, I was told, was at least 9 years old. (The vet would later guess 13 to 15.) She was most certainly deaf and declawed. I had no information on when those catastrophic events happened. I had no information on what she liked to eat, or what a typical day was like for her. No information on any favorite activities. No information.

Callie was a good traveler. She did not seem upset when I took her cage the first time and brought her inside. Our one evening trip to the vet went fine. She made no noise in the car and showed the most curiosity that I had ever seen in her, looking out the window at the passing lights. She was well behaved at the vet. She took her medicine without a fight.

But the three weeks of twice daily antibiotics didn't radically change her behavior. She still ate very little if anything at all, and seldom moved except to go to the litter box. To the end she was a polite lady, never incontinent, leaky, or smelly. You wouldn't know anything was wrong except for her muscles atrophying so she was wobbly on her back legs.

The vet claimed the blood test showed no organ failure, just an infection of some type that would take more money to investigate. And she had a heart murmur. And cataracts.

She had shown some interest in her new home the first couple of weeks, hissing at the other cats, checking out the bathroom, coming into the bedroom at night and jumping on the bed, enthusiastically eating her food with an audible "nom nom nom." But when her appetite faded, she lost all interest in everything except snoozing on a heating pad in a papasan chair in the corner.

The chair was behind me in my home office. Whenever I walked in to work, she greeted me with a single, "moaw." If I turned around in my chair after working at the computer, she said it again. She tolerated petting, but didn't want to be picked up. Whenever I tried putting her in another room, she immediately made her way back to the papasan chair. Then it got to the point where picking her up, even if I put her right back, was so exhausting, she panted for many minutes, or jumped off the chair and pushed herself up against the wall under the chair so I couldn't pick her up again.

On the last day, that's what killed her. I put her on a scratching post perch in another room so she could see out the window, and she jumped down. I picked her up again and put her on my bed, and she jumped down again. The two jumps were too exhausting. She couldn't slow her breathing no matter how wide she opened her mouth, and when I picked her up a third time to comfort her, her head snapped back and she went limp.

Finally, she was relaxed and comfortable in my arms, a sleeping beauty, face serene. No incontinence, or blood. Or smell. She was a polite and tidy lady to the end.

I can't believe she's gone. It was only seven weeks, yet every time I pass the room, I expect to see her in the chair. I expect to hear the "moaw." When I turn around from my computer, she should be there. No other cat in the house has resumed using the chair, even though some of them did before she came.

I should get rid of the chair because it's such an empty throne now, but I think that might make me feel worse. I'd like Callie's ghost to visit me and tell me about her life. I still want to know.

Callie Died - My Fault Again

Callie's not in the chair behind me this afternoon as I work, the first time in seven weeks. She died just an hour ago. As usual, I cannot leave well enough alone.

Okay, she barely moved, barely ate, but at least she was alive. If I picked her up, it upset her and she'd breathe heavy, so better to not pick her up, right?

No, I had to today. I wanted to show her the snow out the window. I wanted to change her blankets and give her fresh ones. I put her down on the cat climber near the window and she didn't like it. She wanted back in her corner, but when I brought her there, she was panting so hard, she went under the chair. Then she was panting very hard and biting the chair leg. It reminded me of when Merly was biting on the blanket when she had her final seizures. I watched her for a few minutes, praying it would subside. She acted like she needed to throw up a hairball, so I picked her up again and patted her like I was trying to burp a baby. She threw her head back in a jerk, and was suddenly totally still. Oh no!

I killed her by picking her up. If I had just let her stay in her chair, maybe she'd still be alive. I saw her sitting in the middle of the room earlier today. She had gotten out of the chair for something. I can't believe she went that fast. I must have caused her to have a heart attack or stroke because I moved her.

We had a record snowfall last night. It hasn't snowed this much here since 1917 or something. Our street has not been cleared. We can't get to my mother-in-law's anytime soon. There is no where else to bury her. Animal Control said to put her in the garage to freeze until the weather broke, or just put her out in the trash.

Poor, lovely, gentle, calico cat. I don't know anything about you. I don't know how old you were. The vet thought maybe 13. I don't know if you were deaf all your life. I don't know if you were ever happy. Someone declawed you along the way. I don't think you were too happy here, despite the heating pad I gave you and the real tuna and real turkey you wouldn't eat. Sometimes you ate moist treats if I put them in front of you, one at a time.

The first week you were here, you walked around a little. You hissed at the other cats. You would meet my husband when he woke up and sit in the bathroom with him. Whenever I came into your room, you spoke to me. But you never got out of the chair. I know you missed the place you were used to, but I don't know what happened there. They lost their job. They gave up their house and moved into an apartment. They were going to put you down but gave you away instead. A couple of times you came into our bedroom at night.

Then you got sick and wouldn't eat. The vet said you had an infection and we gave you antibiotics twice a day for two weeks. You ate a little, but I guess not enough. Then I picked you up and upset you so much, you stroked out and died, or something.

I'm so sorry. I wanted to love you and give you a nice life.

Cat Hospice

We've had Callie 21 days now and she went from sitting in a chair in the back bedroom, hissing at all the other cats, to walking down the hall hissing, to a week of sitting on the sofa in the living room, to being back in the chair in the back bedroom, practically comatose.

She hasn't eaten anything that I've noticed in several days, isn't drinking water, and the the few times she goes to the bathroom, it's very runny. She sleeps all day and night and barely moves. She's getting unsteady on her feet when she does try to move. I think I have another dying cat here.

And I'm angry. I'm angry that its owner, whoever it was, didn't see fit to let this cat live out its final days in the comfort of familiar surroundings. I'm angry that this poor cat went through its life deaf and declawed. I am sad that I never knew her when she was young and full of exuberance, that my only memory of her will be a very sad, listless cat. I'm sad that I can't think of anything she'd like to do. She doesn't want to be held. She doesn't want to look out a window. How is time passing for her? All she does is stare at the pink corduroy fabric of the bucket chair she's in. I can't take a dying cat to Disneyland. They don't care.

Maybe the owner was doing Callie a favor by deciding to put her down, and we rescuers just made Callie's situation worse.

I created one of those Apple iPhoto books with photos of Merly's life and even though I had seen it several times on the computer before sending it off to be printed, when the printed copy arrived, it was too much to bear. It was too soon to watch her whole life go by in just 20 pages of photos, from curious, thin young cat to scraggly looking cat who always looked confused and startled at the end. My husband put it down quickly, and I know I won't be able to page through it for...I don't know how long.

Callie has gone back to sleep without eating or drinking today. Holding her head up was too much work.

Callie

Callie came to us on Sunday, Nov. 1. I'd been hearing about her from my husband for the past few days. A neighbor we seldom saw suddenly started talking to him because she knew we had cats. Her sister had a friend who was pregnant and decided to have her two cats put down to make way for the new baby, which seems a rather severe reaction to pregnancy.

A home had been found for one of them. The other was more of a problem. She was deaf and declawed. Don't you love people who threaten to have their pets killed if someone else doesn't provide for them? What a handy, blackmailing solution.

My husband was obviously moved by the dilemma because he presented the situation not as a story but as a situation we were now in as active participants in this cat's fate. I was immediately resigned to acquiring another accidental cat -- not one that I chose. I thought the plan was to gradually have fewer cats now that my own life can be measured in one cat lifespan left.

The arrangement was if the neighbor couldn't find someone else, we would take Callie, but that arrangement always means you're getting the cat. Callie arrived on a Sunday afternoon in a large, rather nice traveling case, with brand new food bowls, a hairbrush, and six cans of expensive Science Diet food. How old is Callie?

"Well, I know this woman had her for at least nine years, but I think she may be older," the neighbor said.

Was she very upset to be parting with a pet she had that long?

It turned out no. The woman showed no emotion. The husband had recently lost his job. A lot of reasons to be emotional here, and yet none were displayed. I guess anyone who would declaw a cat because furniture is more important than a cat's safety and emotional well-being might not have deep feelings of compassion.

So Callie has issues. She can't hear. She doesn't hear anything coming up on her or any of the comforting noises of a house --voices, arrivals home, cat food cans opening. She can't hear the birds outside. She can't claw. There is no pleasure in scratching. She can't even scratch where she itches. She's listless and fearful and growls at the other cats. She sleeps 23 hours a day in a corner of my office, burrowed down in a felt sack. When she talks, she talks loud, unable to modulate her voice. She is plaintive and I don't know how to comfort her. Everything she knows has changed to something she doesn't know and she doesn't know why it happened.

She is not an attractive cat. My husband guessed -- probably correctly -- that she was named Callie because she's calico. She is every cat color, black and orange and white. She doesn't know her name is Callie and won't know if we change it, although we won't. I tried to find a home for her the first few days I had her, posting on Twitter and Facebook, but after a week, to move her again would be cruel.

I wouldn't be surprised if she is older than 9 or even 10. I wouldn't be surprised if she is very old. There is no spring in her step. She yelps and grouses like an elderly woman who's uncomfortable in her own body. Her countenance is grouchy.

I don't sleep well and wake up often during the night, so I know Callie moves during the night, that she comes to our bedroom and gets on the bed, and then leaves again before dawn and returns to the sack in the corner of the office. Last night she sat on my husband's pillow all night.

Doing Too Much for the Dying

Merly knew she was dying before we did, and she didn’t care. She made her peace with it before we did. Because we couldn’t accept her decision, we kept her alive another month and I don’t think it was a good month for her. I feel bad about that.

Merly’s life was eat, sleep, sit in the sunroom and look out the window. When there was an opportunity to go outside, she went out to eat grass and roll on the warm cement. Then she was ready to come back in. Sometimes she wanted her head scratched and would head butt you until you rubbed her. She liked being brushed. She did not like being picked up. She never had a bath. She did not like riding in the car so only went to the vet when it was absolutely necessary. She lived in four different houses and she adapted well to each one.

She did not socialize with the other cats in her last few years, or very much when she was younger. She kept to herself. Because of her size, all she had to do was hiss and the others would scatter. No one pestered her.

She was no trouble. She ate whatever food was available. I can’t think of any food that was her favorite. It was all good. She didn’t like missing a meal so often sat on the dining room table so she would be first. I suspected she ate all the leftovers, too, even if they were a day old.

She liked splashing her paws in the water bowl. She liked jumping up on the breakfast bar and sitting on the bills whenever I had them all spread out. She would rub her face against my pen when I was trying to write checks.

All that was her total life, and when she no longer felt like doing any of it, she had no reason to live anymore. In cat years, that happened when she was 13, which is 73 in people years. I guess that is a good life, but she seemed so healthy right up until the last 60 days, we didn’t think about her being old.

Merly was seriously overweight starting soon after we had her fixed when she was about a year old. At her heaviest, she might have been 17 pounds. Her stools were the largest and smelliest of all the cats, and she didn’t bother to bury them. Around 2005, four years before she died, I noticed there was sometimes blood in her stools. We took her to the vet about it, but their cursory examination didn’t find anything. I researched bloody stools in cats on the Internet and couldn’t find anything alarming about it. To discover if this was an early sign of what would eventually kill her would have cost hundreds of dollars in uncomfortable tests, and then what? If she had been a human, we would have done it, but she was a cat. She didn’t seem bothered by any digestive problems. We didn’t worry whenever the blood appeared on her stool like a garnish.

Four years passed. One day she was sitting on the bills on the breakfast bar and when I moved her off, I noticed small droplets of liquid stool on the envelopes. Why was she dripping? That was the first sign something bad was happening, but it didn’t happen again, so I didn’t do anything. I feel bad about that, but it may already have been too late.

In the middle of May when we took her to the rabies clinic at the fairgrounds – where she mournfully expressed her distress at being in the car – she seemed to be her normal weight. At least that’s what we remember. When you’re not looking for signs, you don’t really notice when they begin.

But soon after that we couldn’t help but notice she was getting thinner. We thought it was a good thing. Maybe she wasn’t eating as much and was finally slimming down to normal cat size.

By June, we could feel the bumps of her spine along her back. She was losing muscle weight, too. She wasn’t jumping up on the breakfast bar anymore, or the dining room table. It was time to take her to the vet. She didn’t like the car ride.

The vet felt a mass in her abdomen. I blame the vet for being too tactful with us. He was certain she was going to die sooner than later and this mass was not a good thing, but he kept offering things we could do. We could leave her for the day so they could put her on an IV and rehydrate her. We could bring her in the next day for another day on the IV. We agreed to both. Merly didn’t appreciate the two days in a cage at the vet’s. Her choice, if she could talk, would have been to skip the rehydrating and stay at home. She didn’t care about living an extra month. To do what?


I can understand that people want to do something for their dying cat, so vets make offers of various things, costly things, futile things, that humans can do to make themselves feel better. The cat, on the other hand, doesn’t want to do any of it. They just want to die quietly, soon, and on their own terms. They are not going to miss you. They aren’t going to miss being alive. They aren’t afraid of death. All they know is they don’t want to hurt or feel even a little uncomfortable and strange, and if they don’t feel like eating anymore, if they can’t eliminate without messing themselves, if they’re too weak to jump up on the table and look out the window at the birds, then why live? They don’t care about living. Or dying.

Merly wasn’t looking out the window anymore. She wasn’t interested in eating unless I brought it to her, and then she only took a few bites. She couldn’t climb into the litter box anymore, and so sometimes she had accidents, even after we got her a box with a door open to ground level. We’d have to clean her up with a damp washcloth and she didn’t like the bath. She looked at us like we were just annoying her with all this attention.

She had already picked her place to die, on the floor by the side of the bed. She liked the bowl of water we kept there and drank often from it, although she had to tip her head to the side and got half her face wet. And she was too tired to dry herself, so she just sat there with a wet face. That upset me more than anything. I should have known that was the end. We were done. She was done. When she felt especially bad, she’d creep halfway under the bed, too tired to make it all the way.

But I kept pulling her out, kept trying to get her to eat. Trying to dry her face for her. I even tried force-feeding her with a syringe. If she had the strength, she would have slapped me away. If she could talk, I know she would have said, “Leave me alone!”

I agreed to x-rays, and the mass was clearly visible and growing rapidly. We declined the offer of exploratory surgery because the only point of it seemed to be to tell us what was going to kill her. No vet would offer even the possibility that they could cut the mass out and she’d be good as new. We feared we’d get a call while she was still on the operating table that it was indeed cancer and there was too much of it and the best thing to do would be not wake her up. We didn’t want her to die that way, although in the end, even that would have been better than the way we finally let her die.

The best choice, of course, would have been to do nothing. She knew it was time. She was good to go. She picked her spot next to the bed and she was waiting it out. I think she would have passed by the end of June if we had given her that privilege. By not eating or drinking, she would have quietly euthanized herself ahead of the mass getting too big.

After Merly died, my husband’s aunt told me stories about how her cat and dogs had died. Both just disappeared into the woods behind her house and were never seen again. They never found the bodies. Her other dog kept moving out to the driveway, which is as far as he could get. She’d carry him back to the garage, and he’d drag himself back outside again. They want to die outside, away from people, away from everything, by themselves. Goodbye. It’s been nice. Time for the woods. Or under the bed.

The couple of times I took Merly outside during the last couple of weeks, she walked slowly to the edge of the yard and then sat down with her back to the house. The first time she had enough strength to roll over on her back and let the warmth of the sun touch her one last time. Watching her, I prayed she would die right then. It seemed like the perfect moment, but she didn’t.

The next time was a disaster. She was in such a weakened condition, with her stools leaking, that flies were landing on her. They left maggots in her, which meant another trip to the vet to pull them out of her anus. He tried to make it sound like a good thing. “Maggots eat the diseased tissue,” but how can having maggots in you ever be a good thing? So that was the end of her going outside. By that time, Merly was really fed up with our interfering with her death.

She had chosen the date – end of June – and the place, under the bed. Here it was the middle of July, and I was carrying her around the house, wrapped in a towel to catch the anal seepage, because I didn’t want her to die alone. 

All she wanted to do was die alone and I was getting in the way.

I feel bad about that now.

Maybe if I had not rehydrated her, had not kept forcing her to eat, not kept squirting water down her throat with a syringe, she would have died peacefully before the tumor got as big as a sweet potato, according to the vet the last time we took her in. Maybe she wouldn’t have had the seizures, or at least would have died after the first one. But no, I had fortified her body to keep going, and it took eight seizures to weaken her to death. And even then I couldn’t bring myself to rush her to the vet and have her put down. She didn’t like riding in the car. She didn’t like the vet. It was the middle of the night. I kept telling myself all these excuses. I wanted her to die at home in my arms.

But that had not been her choice. She wanted to die alone under the bed when we were sleeping, and she wanted to go before things got too bad.

I feel guilty that I didn’t let her.

After the first seizure, she never really looked at anything like she was seeing it, or made any noise, so she might have been only technically alive those last hours, but even then, she waited until I finally left her alone for a minute to go to the kitchen and get a donut. The short time I was gone, that’s when she died.

That’s all she had ever wanted, to be left alone.

I feel so bad about what I did to her, which was I did too much when she wanted none of it.

Regrets of a Multi-Cat Household

Ever since Merly died, there's been a disturbance in the force -- the cats are behaving differently. For instance, Arbee, who had lived with Merly the entire time she's been with us, seems liberated all of a sudden. She's no longer hidden somewhere in the house. She's often out in plain view, even making contact with the other cats.

Did Merly intimidate her for a decade and I didn't know?

Merly's death has given me a lot to think about regarding the disadvantages of having too many cats. We were slow to notice her weight loss. Although I suspected the foul smelling stools, sometimes flecked with blood, belonged to her, I could never be sure. I did take her to the vet because of them four years ago, but there were no other indications of a problem then. The one time I noticed she had some anal leakage, I didn't do anything about it because it didn't recur. I wonder now if Merly had been my only cat, if I would have acted sooner on that.

The problem, is testing animals to find out if something is amiss is very upsetting to them. They don't understand and you cannot explain what is happening to them or why, that if you leave them with the vet, you're coming back. Because I give my cats feelings and thoughts which they probably don't actually have, this prevented me from seeking medical help sooner.

Also, I could not monitor her stools, her vomiting, or even if she was eating normally because with seven other cats, you don't know who is doing what unless they do it in front of you.

So we let her lose almost half her body weight before we took her to a doctor. The other problem was because she had always been obese, at half her body weight, she looked like a normal cat. I should have known something was profoundly wrong when I felt the lumps of her spine on her back -- that meant she was losing muscle mass as well. I let things get too advanced.

Grieving Merly

The night Merly was dying my husband had band practice and he didn't cancel it. During Merly's frightening first seizure, I could hear the music and laughter downstairs.

He can compartmentalize his emotions. I suspect most men can. But the fact that they can turn it on or off doesn’t subtract from the sincerity of the emotion. I believe he did hurt. That’s something women don’t understand about men. We tend to marinate a long time in our emotions. I can sustain being unhappy, depressed, bitter, angry, or revengeful. I can wear it like a floppy hat obscuring my face. I can manifest positive emotions as well, but their shelf life is much shorter.

All through the month that Merly was slowly melting away of whatever killed her (cancer, pancreatitis, FIP, does it matter?) he could sit with her and look profoundly sad, and then he could go downstairs and watch television…or sleep at night. He could talk about other things. He could do other things. I could only huddle around the cat, frantically trying to figure out a way out of this for both of us. At the end, I couldn’t even go to work. I stayed huddled with Merly for the last three days, day and night. I didn’t sleep. Sometimes she would look at me like, “Please go away so I can die. You know I can’t do it with you staring at me.”

Last night, after sitting silently over bowls of soup at Panera, I finally asked him the question that had been irritating me like a bug bite since the incident happened. “After you saw her have the seizure, why didn’t you say let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

When band practice ended and his friends went home, he came back upstairs where I was sitting with Merly on the sofa. The seizure had been over for about an hour, but she was trying to push her head under the sofa cushion and was gently paddling her feet. I told him what had happened, and he immediately folded into sadness and sat next to her, petting her. After awhile, he said, “I think she’s trying to climb off the sofa.”

So I picked her up and put her on the floor, arranging her body like the Egyptian Sphinx. She briefly held her head up, then started wobbling, and then horribly, the second seizure started. “Don’t touch her,” my husband said alarmed, but we both moved to the floor and hovered over her, our palms open as if we were trying to catch the seizure and toss it away as it bounced over her body. After it ended, she was again limp and exhausted, and didn’t seem to notice us anymore, or care. I thought for sure my husband would say, “Grab your purse and keys, we have to go to the vet now. It’s time.”

Instead, he said he was going to bed. And he did. And he slept.

I picked up Merly and went downstairs to the futon where we had been restlessly sleeping for the last five nights. Every morning when the sun came up, Merly would lift her head for another day. So many other nights when she had gotten so still that I thought she was gone, I had been wrong. Maybe I’d be wrong again. So we bundled up together on the futon and waited.

There would be eight more seizures that night before the dawn. You could set your watch by their regularity. Sometimes I thought I should jump in the car and drive to the emergency vet by myself and be done with it. I knew he would be upset when he found out, but if he couldn’t make the decision, someone had to. But then I couldn’t either. The seizure would end and she’d be peaceful again, asleep and breathing quietly. I would think, okay, that’s the last one.

But it wouldn’t be the last one. By 3 a.m., the craziness set in. Maybe it’s not a tumor, but a cyst that is breaking open, and once it drains, she’ll be all better? She’ll wake up her old self! This is just the poison leaving her body! All is well!

That trickery lasted for a couple of seizures. Then I went to negotiations. God, end this. End this or cure this. I want a dead cat or a well cat right now. Work a miracle. You can do it! You are God! Do it. What good is being God if you don’t do stuff like this? Now, now, do it, now!

That didn’t work either, although the seizures from 4 a.m. on were less violent. Her head didn’t shake. Her mouth didn’t open. Only her legs would paddle furiously, like she was running somewhere. Then less furiously, slowing down to a trot, like she was arriving somewhere.

The sun came up. I could hear my husband upstairs waking up. Another day had started. The cat was still breathing, although asleep. Her body was strangely warm in places, cool in others. I kept checking her. If I rubbed an ear, it would twitch. If I rubbed a paw, it would flinch. Or maybe that was my imagination. My husband came downstairs.

“How is she?” he said, ready to be sad. I dully, bitterly reported the eight seizures, the night of no sleep. He just said, “oh, man.” He petted her for a while, and then he was able to switch it off again, go upstairs and start the coffee. I hoped all the normal morning noises would provoke a response in the cat. It’s morning! Breakfast time! Lift your head again like you do every morning when you hear his voice! Like you did yesterday!

Nothing.

I wrapped her in a towel and moved her upstairs to my bed. Now that she had survived another night, it was my turn to get some sleep. My husband could watch over her. Her body felt limper than usual, but it was still warm and she was still breathing. I put her head on the pillow and pulled the blanket up to her chin. I went in the kitchen to get a donut and went back to my bed. That’s when I noticed the look.

I had two cats die on me years ago, one at age 18 and one at 17, both at home, and I knew right away it was a dead cat, not a sleeping cat when I saw them. Their mouth opens just a little. This look was different than the one she had when I went for the donut. I tried rubbing the ears, the paws, nothing moved now. She was still warm in parts, cool in others. I couldn’t see breathing anymore. The vet had said to watch the eyes at the end. I shined a flashlight in her dilated pupils and they didn’t contract. They didn’t move. My insides starting folding in on me like a collapsing house of cards.

I went to the front door and opened it. My husband had just finished watering the bushes and was talking to the neighbors. I let him be happy until the neighbors drove away. He turned around and saw me in the doorway. I couldn’t find the words, but I guess my flailing hands and collapsing face said them for me. He ran into the house.

I did my crazy act. “Maybe it’s a coma. You think it’s a coma?” But he was realistic. “She’s gone. She’s gone.” And we cried, again hovering our hands over her like we could catch her spirit leaving and stuff it back in. For the rest of the day, we solemnly went through the ritual. Finding a box. Deciding where to bury her. Getting the shovels and picks together. Picking up favorite items to put in the box with her. Looking at photos of her and printing them to put inside the box, photos of us with her so she wouldn’t forget us.

He was able to turn the ritual off long enough to go to McDonald’s and get us food, food I couldn’t taste although I tried to eat it. Then we went to the woods for the burial, a story in itself for another day, and it was over. I haven’t seen him cry since and he’s been fine, like it was something that happened a long time ago to someone else. That is, until I asked him the question at Panera’s.

“After you saw her have a seizure, why didn’t you say, let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

The muscles in his face started moving like there was an earthquake under his skin. His facial features sucked themselves inward as if I had literally punched him. It all happened in a fleeting half a second and I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking right at him. The emotion exploded and was contained that quickly. He put his head down so I couldn’t see anymore and mumbled something that sounded like, “I couldn’t…”

I quickly changed the subject because that had been answer enough. Maybe that’s how men deal with strong emotion. They compartmentalize it; they turn it off. It's the instinct of war where you can't mourn a fallen comrade for even a second because the battle continues all around you and you have to continue. They’re able to, in the face of a painful decision, just not make it and go to bed. And sleep. He had left that hard decision to me, knowing with my high threshold for pain and drama, even if I couldn’t make it either, I could endure the consequences of our not making it. I’d take care of it. I’d absorb it all and suck the pain right out of the air for him.

I’ve read about couples who lose young children. It is very difficult to keep the marriage together after that. The divorce rate is high, as if the only way to escape the memory is to escape the relationship that created the child that died. I had a friend whose marriage collapsed after their son died. I look at the marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards and know they were damaged irrevocably when their son died, and nothing they’ve done since has fixed it for them, not having more children or running for President, or even having an affair.

I have to accept that we mourn differently. He can put his pain away and be happy again. If I keep poking at it, I can force him to hurt and cry for me, but as soon as he can, he’ll shut it down and move on. The first weekend after Merly died, he went away with friends to play music and swim in the sun. No one will talk about the cat there. If he had stayed here with me, we would talk about Merly, because I’m wearing the pain like a big floppy hat that gets in the way of everything else I need to do. I would want to talk about what we did wrong; what we should have done; the clues we missed that she was sick. I would rehash it over and over, even though I can't change the outcome now. Even if I said nothing, he can tell by looking at me that I’m thinking about it.

He doesn't want to do that. He wants to live his life. That is not a bad thing.

If I keep wearing this misery hat, eventually he’s going to forget that it’s about the cat and think I’m just a miserable person in general. Another woman will come along who is happy and laughing, and she will seem like a much better person to be with, and he will be right. She’ll be able to taste and enjoy food, laugh at bad jokes, want to go out with his friends, and embrace him without thinking that the last time they hugged, it was over the cat. Never in her life will it ever cross her mind to blame him for making her sit alone through the night, through eight seizures, because that will not be in their history.

Maybe it’s women in general or maybe it’s just me. Maybe realizing how we’re different and accepting it is half the battle. He’s going to be all right. I need to take off this hat and put it in its own box.

From the Book: Introduction to Merly

This is an edited, past tense excerpt from the chapter of the book where I introduced Merly.

Whereas our cat Red is light and nearly flies when she walks, Merly was the opposite, obese and waddling, with short gray hair. Merly originally and unfortunately was named Booger, a kitten acquired by a woman who soon discovered she was pregnant, so my sister-in-law volunteered to find Booger a home. Booger was in bad shape, sickly and afflicted with fleas, worms, mites and runny eyes. Everyone who offered to adopt Booger promptly rejected her when they saw her. So my husband took her.

Bobby’s sister had renamed her Merlin from the King Arthur stories for reasons no one knows, yet spelled it Merly and pronounced it “Mer-lynn,” the emphasis on the second syllable. Bobby acquired Merly around the same time as Red, so they became playmates and groomed each other until their kittenhood wore off. After that, they paid no attention to each other.

We called her “Mer-lee.” She needed a lot of attention to survive and she got it and remained devoted to my husband. She was briefly a normal sized cat until she was fixed (and discovered to be pregnant during the operation, as was Red.) She not only didn’t lose her baby weight after losing the babies, she gained weight until her legs nearly disappeared. She ate any brand or flavor of cat food, which may be why she was so fat, but with six others competing for food, I don't know how she maintained her size over the years.

She liked going outside, but it didn't take much to make her frantically want to come back inside where she was perfectly happy to sit in view of the food bowls or look out the window. We figured she knew she couldn't move very fast, so she stayed aware of anything that might possibly require a fast get-away and got away before it had to be done fast. She reminded me of a possum.

When we lived in the rental house, she slept on top of our bed's bookcase headboard because there was a window there that looked out over the woods. When we moved to the house we bought, she slept under the bed. She was very needy sometimes. She wanted to be in the bathroom if you were, in front of the computer if you were working on it, next to the sofa if you were watching TV. She followed us around, asking the same insistent question which we didn't understand. I think she just wanted us to stop walking and sit down. She was especially insistent about this when I got out of the shower. She desperately needed to sit on my chest when I was warm, damp and smelled like soap.

The last couple of years, she stopped doing most of that except still maintained a vigil on the dining room table so she'd be first to inspect the food bowls when they were refilled. If she wasn't hungry, she had a favorite window. And whenever I spread the bills out on the breakfast bar and brought out the checkbook, she wanted to sit on the bills and rub her face against my pen. That was very annoying because until she tired of that game, I couldn't get anything done.

The last favorite thing she did was roll. When she was outside, she'd roll on the warm cement and wiggle.

Merly Leaves Us

Merly died on the morning of July 15, 2009. She was between 13 and 14 years old. I will write more about her later. It's just not possible now.

Merly on Monday

I think it's telling that I am often unsure how to spell this cat's name. It was named by my husband's sister. It has something to do with the wizard Merlin, and I think it was originally Merlyn, but got shortened to Merly. His family often has issues with pet names. They evolve and change. He tends to call all the male cats "Buddy" anyway.

The surgery has been postponed for now. They found fluid in her stomach they tapped to run more tests, but the third vet to look at her suspects several masses in her intestines. I'm thinking there is also some bad reason she tilts her head all the way to the side to drink water now.

I knew something bad was coming a couple of months ago when she was dancing on the table when I was trying to do my weekly bills, just like always, and when she left, my bills were flecked with tiny brown spots. That was probably the beginning of the blockage.

Merly on Sunday

My prayer today was that Merly would die on the deck while she was stretching out in the warm sun, really enjoying all the things she likes about the backyard. The prayer was that God would let her go peacefully in a favorite place. That didn't happen, and tomorrow morning we have to keep the appointment for exploratory surgery, so I am hoping that this means the second part of my prayer will be answered, that if she has to go through it, she'll survive it and thrive again.

Distractions

Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett died today, which totally took my mind off the possibility one of my cats is also dying. She is down to 9 pounds from 14, and we don't have much evidence she is eating or using the litter box. We drove back to our old vet across town because he's the best, and I think he's mentally preparing us for intestinal tumors, even though he gave a range of possibilities.

Even though I have had this cat for almost 14 years, I seem to have just four photos of her. Merly was never the cutest, just the heaviest and the hungriest and sometimes the most emotionally needy. Otherwise, she kept to herself. It is sad seeing her get so thin.

Five Books Sold!

I received a 1099-Misc in the mail today for royalty income and I could not figure out what it was, until it dawned on me maybe someone actually bought my book (same name as this blog) on Amazon Kindle. Apparently I sold five copies last summer. The royalty deposit was so small, $11.20, I didn't notice it had gone into my checking account.

Anyway, thank you if you were one of the buyers.