On Saturday morning, I woke up and started sobbing, because for some reason, I well and truly believed that my cat Tilly hadn’t been hiding for the last twelve hours, but rather that she had crawled into some dark place in the basement and died. You see, she hadn’t been acting entirely right and had lost some weight and then the previous weekend, I noticed that she hadn’t touched the food I had given her, even though she was normally a cat that lived for her kibble. I called the vet and he agreed that she was pretty but that whoa, she had lost half her body weight in the last six months (hello, how did I notice this until she got noticeably bony?) and so we ran every test that he had and he said that she was old, very old, possibly the oldest cat in the world, but extremely healthy in every possible category but one: she was pretty anemic. Ok! I thought, we could handle that! We’ll give her liver and iron and some shots of vitamins and some fluids and feed her a special sick kitty food that has a lot of calories in it, kind of a liver cheesecake, and then she’ll get better! She seemed to get better. One thing is certain: she heartily approved of the liver cheesecake, especially when I warmed it up in the microwave. She seemed to be better. Except then she disappeared and was acting weird and then on Saturday morning, every fear I had culiminated in those foggy moments upon waking and I was certain that she had gone.
I was wrong and Esteban found her sleeping in the basement, curled up on a pile of laundry, but just the same, I wanted to take her in and test her blood again, to see if the liver cheesecake and vitamins were helping. They weren’t.
In fact, she was worse. She weighed exactly the same but had dropped several points in red blood cells, which proved that her body had simply stopped making blood. She wasn’t in distress right now, but she would be very uncomfortable in the next two days or so. She had a good life, the vet said. It was time, Esteban said. Goodbye, Tilly said.
Goodbye.
After we left the vet’s office, after the worst of the wailing had subsided, Esteban said “Well, what do you want to do now?” It was a very good and horrible question, because what was there to do? My plans for the day had involved the farmer’s market and making apple butter and doing the laundry and maybe braising some beef for dinner, but that all just sounded stupid and horrifying now. In fact, it was only 8:30 in the morning. We circled the city for an hour, not wanting to walk into an empty, silent house, and then finally settled on visiting an out-of-the-way Starbucks so that we wouldn’t have to deal with our normal barissta asking if we’d been to the Farmer’s Market yet. After that, we couldn’t put it off any longer, so we home and it was awful, and so I turned off the phones and walked into the bedroom and went back to bed, which is where I stayed–emotionally if not physically–for the rest of the day. The day felt four hundred hours long. We would deal and cry and watch a tv show and then cry and then listen to some music and talk and cry some more and then we would realize that only five hours had passed since I had been holding her in my lap on the way to the vet, and that very fact, it seemed impossible. On Jupiter, a 100 pound woman would weigh 236.4 pounds, and on a day when someone you love dies, an hour takes five times longer than normal. It’s the gravity that gets you, every time.
Every reminder that she is not there is painful. There’s a room that we kept closed all the time because she would accidentally get trapped in there, but I opened it and now every time I walk by the door, I feel a sense of panic and think “That door needs to be shut. Where’s the cat?” When I’m walking through the house, I keep expecting her to be occupying sunny windowsills. I keep waiting for her to knock over the glass of water that is sitting on the bedside table. At any moment, I will lose control. Any moment. Five days out from what was my very worst possible day in all of 2008, I still feel like my heart is shattered and held back together loosely, with twine and maybe some spit.
Because I have nothing else, WH Auden, who if nothing else, gives good death poems.
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone ” by WH Auden.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
