Damned natural obsolescence
Any adult who adopts a pet has intrusive thoughts about how quickly it will age and die. Worse than that is anticipating the pet owners’ dilemma of mercifully killing it when its remaining life becomes nothing but pointless suffering. This uneasiness is not a first-world problem. It’s a common issue of the heart for billions of people worldwide. When not causing extinctions, humans are obligate domesticators. We need animals. Unfortunately, our most common animal friends have lifespans that are far too short.
Last week, I had to humanely end my cat’s life, closing a friendship that lasted 14 years.
An angel cosplaying as a cat. || by Author
Hard knocks
When I first laid eyes on Sashi, she was a traumatized rescue, a very young, nervous, little mother cat who whelped at least two litters of kittens. (She was found nursing one litter and pregnant with another.) They let her have and helped her raise her kittens. At the adoption center, they named her “Mama Cat.”
Rescues of adult feral cats are rarely successful and not recommended, but Mama Cat was barely larger than a kitten herself. I couldn’t believe such a small body could contain a family of five, but she had done it.
Criticisms of humanizing a different species to the contrary, I see her early pregnancies as hardships because gestation and birth can’t be easy for any immature mammal.
Hard knock-ups
Pleasure isn’t always the way nature compels a species to have sex. For cats, mating is like a street fight. It’s grimly serious, hormone-driven madness where caterwauls, vicious fighting, and gang rape are the rule. Having endured such unpleasantness at a young age might explain why Sashi despised her own species (except her kittens). Tiny, but a berserk scrapper, she’d attack them on sight, claws out, no warning. I’d never seen anything like it.
What saved her in captivity is she adored humans. (Advice: if you want to charm a mother cat, help her care for her kittens.) She then captivated her rescuers with her beauty, unusual sweetness, and the ease at which she accepted, and even delighted in, domestication.
Perversely, her hatred of other cats (not to mention dogs) forced her to spend a year in a cage as attempted adoptions failed one after another. She was on her way to being euthanized when I heard about her. I was her last chance.
Our Meeting
My sister relayed this cat’s sad story heard from a veterinarian. Suffering “empty man-cave syndrome” for six months since the death of my previous cat, I jumped at the chance. The center was so happy I was adopting her that they waived the fee and the cost of her shots.
The only name that came to mind when I saw her was “Sashi,” the perfect name for a unique creature. Her papers inadequately described her markings as “Tortoise Shell.”
At first, I mistook Sashi for an ugly duckling because stress had thinned out her coat. Five days of care and love later, her tail fluffed out, and she was angelic. The picture above only partially depicts her beauty. With the mix of colors along her back, I had a Jackson Pollock painting in my apartment, except friendlier and minus the money laundering.
The center said she was “about two years old.” I don’t know, because two years after I adopted her, she hit a growth spurt and became a normal-sized cat. I’m serious. It’s as though her maturity had been deferred until her life settled.
You look like you’ve never seen a blonde tortoise. || by Author
Adopting Sashi was lucky for both of us. Had I known of my life's disastrous turn to come, I likely would never have met her.
As it happened, my life collapsed in a matter of months. I lost my job, lost my apartment, lost my girlfriend, and lost my car. Bottoming out in the psych ward with electroshock therapy, I ended up recovering in my parents’ house. Sash ended up incarcerated in the basement to protect the other cats and the dog from her rage.
Excuse the muddled picture positions. Daily Kos can’t make it simple. || By Author
Two second acts
We bonded. I rebuilt my life over the next fourteen years. Sashi was at my side daily. As much as I hate to admit it, I spent more time with her than with any human. She gave meaning to the more empty minutes of my solitude. Her presence got me out of bed each morning and made me look forward to the day.
I saved her life, and arguably, she saved mine.
Sashi showed signs of trauma from her feral days. Skittish, she demonstrated symptoms of PTSD. She seemed to have occasional flashbacks and hallucinations. Her eyes would fixate on some shadow, and her body would tense with fear, tapping the shadow with a paw and recoiling like touching a hot stove. She also had nightmares and would awaken claws out and hissing.
I provided the safety and security she needed to heal. Happily, her fugue episodes faded and finally stopped over the years. She loved me, thrived on my attention, and didn’t ask for much in return.
In the meantime, I also recovered. My first apartment after my crisis was small, but Sashi delighted in the outdoors. She had lived as a stray. I wasn’t going to force her to stay indoors after what she had been through. She seldom spent the night outside, and in a few years didn’t wander very far from home.
She would look in the window, wanting back in. Or so I thought. When I opened the door, she would run off. She’d look back with a human-like shrug that said, “Come on!”
No, she didn’t want in; she wanted me to come out and play with her.
She had a personality trait I thought impossible for a feline: manners. She loved me and didn’t want to vex me in even the slightest way. Like the merchant in Monty Python’s Life of Brian teaching his customer how to haggle, I tried to teach her to be rude. But no, she never became a typical cat. She did make exceptions for getting up into her cat tree and sleeping in my bed. I still wonder how she caught on to those and comprehended them as my preferences.
Time flies
My age encroached. I wasn’t playful enough for Sashi. Yet, she didn’t leave. Cats are wild animals that choose to live with us, and given every chance to leave, she chose to stay with me.
When she was nine, I was forced to move to a new place on a busy street. Her outdoor days were over. Somehow, she agreed. She never showed a desire to go outside again. The larger apartment satisfied her territorial needs. Already, she valued caution and security over adventure and curiosity. I consider these latter years to be her retirement.
Then, her age then encroached. She played less and spent much of her time within arm’s reach of me, either sleeping in a chair next to me at my computer, like a copilot, on the pillow next to me in bed, or under my desk, trying to gently distract me from writing.
Cats are such physical marvels that they seem ageless, even when they’re very sick. Alas, they are as mortal as us, even more so. Even as I first noticed her decline, I hoped she’d live into her twenties. But she stopped playing. I tried to find new toys for her amusement, but she ignored them. When I’d get her to play with the string or the laser pointer, she’d only do so for a minute or two and would then walk away. I now know she lost interest because she was in pain.
She stopped cleaning her belly fur, which became an oily mess. Still feral down deep, she seldom let me touch her belly, and I wasn’t going to subject her to a bath (I tried that only once).
Gradually, her appetite diminished until she stopped eating. Her cat naps lengthened until she slept 24 hours a day.
The writing on the wall was as readable as an inscription on a gravestone. I knew my good friend’s days were numbered. Yet, even after the vet discovered the tumors in her lungs and abdomen, it took me a few days to come to my senses and make the only decent decision. Because I was slow on the uptake, she endured more hours of what must’ve been excruciating pain. You could never tell with a cat unless they’re bleeding.
A brief foray into youth
Then, on the day I reached my decision, she began to act like a younger cat again. She came to my office and jumped in a box, tried it on for size, as felines always do. She got up on my desk and greeted me in good cheer.
What Sashi did next was even more surprising. She stood at the back door and signaled she wanted to go out, though she hadn’t been interested in the outside for six years. Was she thinking she always wanted to explore the outdoors again? Was it an item on her bucket list all along? Or like my father with dementia, did she think she was younger?
(As I write this, I realize she most likely was looking for a place to die.)
To my surprise, she descended the staircase, something she had never done in the six years since we moved. Then she changed her mind and headed back upstairs. My heart broke watching her climb. She had none of her feline athleticism that had been her birthright, straining to pull herself up step-by-step. I had to help her. Her youthful episode, if it had been that, was over. She went right to the bed and stayed there.
She was unconscious when I brought her into the veterinarian. After it was done, I didn’t receive her ashes or paw prints. Those artifacts do nothing for me. Instead, I have pictures to commemorate her. I intend to make prints and frame them for my walls. It’s all that remains of my best friend and the most beautiful creature in my life.
All beauty passes away eventually, despite our efforts to hold on to it. It’s as mortal as we are.
In my last years with Sash, I often wondered about the pet owners’ dilemma. Do we put our animals to sleep because we want to put them out of their misery, or put them out of our misery?
It doesn’t matter since it accomplishes both goals despite the purity or mixture of intentions. Every living thing is born infected with mortality. It’s a feature of nature, not a bug.
But the nature of living beings is to strive to continue living. That’s one reason why we never deal with death well. You could either die young or live to a ripe old age. However, if do you have a long life, you’ll see family, friends, and many things valuable to you die out. I recommend stoicism.
Having more years is generally the best choice because only with life are any options and possibilities. Sometimes, however, life yields no good options and is diminished to the point where pain is the only remaining quality.
I have planned to die before that happens to me. I might be a stubborn atheist, but if I’m wrong and there is an afterlife, I want to go where Sashi went.
