Neelix 2002-2017

Neelix had made it to his 15th year mark in mid-May of 2017, three and a half years living with nasal cancer, and had one of his better visits with the oncologist. Nothing was wrong; his weight was stable. The tumor was not growing. We were going to buff him up with some Prednisone along with his now just twice weekly chemo pill.

I immediately felt like: this is not good. From long experience, I know animals and people seem to level out at a good place right before they take the final plunge. I had not told the oncologist about the seizure he had six months before where his body just started twisting around. He had immediately recovered from it. Then there was another mild one a couple of months later. I did not tell her about the occasional nosebleeds. I did not want her suggesting we put him down, not as long as he kept eating and walking around. I always blamed the nosebleeds on their examination since they seemed to follow his bimonthly exams.

And so it was this time. It was a bad bleed, too. I’d wake up in the morning and find a trail of blood

spots across the floor, splatters on the wall. He was spending more time in his fortress of solitude, a fabric cube where he felt walled in. During the week of the nosebleed, he stopped eating and I thought, here we go. But the nosebleed subsided after three days and he resumed eating and Memorial Day weekend passed without incident.

My husband said Neelix came out for breakfast the morning of Tuesday, June 6, and when he got home from work, he appeared for dinner and went outside with the other cats. When I came home, he was sitting upright at the edge of the pool, staring into the water. When he heard me walking toward him, he walked toward me, in his usual stiff-legged way. He seemed tired, but he had seemed tired for a long time. In human years, he was in his 80’s. I picked him up, carried him inside and put him down on the floor.

Thinking back now, I wonder if I heard the distress cry earlier but didn’t know what it was or the TV

Gone, as if my heart could resuscitate him

was drowning it out. My husband walked in to ask what we planned to do about dinner, and there was another, louder, guttural noise. We looked at each. He ran to the back room and I followed, but he saw it first and was saying, “oh no” by the time I got there. Neelix was outside his cube, having another twisting seizure, but this time his forearm was in his mouth. I thought we just need to pull his paw out of his mouth, but my husband was pushing me back, “Don’t touch him,” and the other cats were trying to get to him to see what was going on, and he started yelling at the other cats, and I’m trying to reach out and grab Neelix, and it was utter confusion for just seconds.

“I have to hold him,” I cried out, and my husband backed off, but only because he said Neelix had stopped breathing. He reached down and pulled his paw out of his mouth. I refused to believe it. Neelix had bounced back from a seizure before. I grabbed a towel from the next room and scooped him up, but my husband was telling me he was gone. His eyes were open, but he was limp. I didn’t know what to do. This isn’t happening. He is going to come back. He always does. I sat at the end of the bed and rocked him, patted his face, pulled his paw. Come on. Come back.

Time passed. I rocked. My husband disappeared downstairs. When I finally gave up and went to join him, I had to turn away. His grief had swollen his face. No one felt like dinner anymore.

All evening I patted and arranged Neelix so he looked like he was sleeping, and the warmth subsided, and by morning he was a statue with fur. Only then I started to accept he wasn't coming back. I could clean his ears and wipe the crust off his nose without him fighting me.

We had lost our great pet cemetery in the woods behind my mother-in-law’s house when she sold

the house to downsize, and the terrain behind her current house was rough, trees and branches down and hard, unforgiving dirt. Pet cemeteries were too expensive. Cremation was another bill, and I didn’t trust anyone to give me the actual ashes of my actual pet. My husband said there was no place suitable to bury him in our small, gravel yard, so we went to my mother-in-law’s and found a tiny clearing behind the shed. It was an ugly and sad grave.

The unknown to me women who had helped pay for about a fifth of his medical bills through a GoFundMe came back for one last round after I posted his passing, and I was left with just a few hundred left to pay.

I haven’t done a picture book yet, which I did after each of the other cats died. Going through the photos, I was struck by the lack of any of him looking happy or peaceful. I found one and had it enlarged to 16x20, but in most of them, he looks annoyed or stressed or aggravated. In most of the photos, he’s asleep, because that’s when he seemed most relaxed. When he was younger, he would sleep stretched out, or twisted around. He probably felt good then and was carefree. I can only imagine he seldom felt that great the last few years. He was always on the lookout for me coming toward him with a dose of amoxicillin or the chemo pill, or Q-tips and alcohol swabs to clean his eyes and nose. He didn’t like any of it. But he kept eating, and walking, and sleeping, and getting up, and walking around the backyard.

So many worries and fears lifted when the worst happened. You live in fear every day that he’s going to die, and then he dies, and the fear is gone. It lifts off your shoulders and you are weightless with equal grief and relief. Every night for 15 years, he got in bed with us at night and I listened to him breathing, calculating how bad his current cold was, or if the cancer was advancing. I felt his wiry body and wondered why he never gained weight like the other cats. All his life, his stomach was flat and firm.

Now we don’t have to worry if we have enough raw chicken on hand, the only thing he would eat. We stopped buying six to 10 bottles of Reddi Wip with the blue cap, which he had to have several times a day. We stopped going to Arby’s to get him classic roast beef sandwiches, hold the bread, his special treat that always picked him up when his appetite was slack.

His head is as big as a lion’s in the giant portrait now framed on the wall, still watching me to see if I am coming at him with Q-tips and alcohol swabs. But in life he was a tiny cat, a sickly little kitten that needed so much nursing and then was always trying to take off on some adventure only to run out of steam and forget where he was going or why.

My husband tells people he was the bravest, strongest cat. I think he didn’t know how to be anything else.