Kiki 2

A day like today ...

... and there are days like this, when the black mood falls upon the shoulders, and the back aches for some unknown reason, and the head hangs downwards towards the chest and one looks at the rain out of the corners of one’s eyes and all is not well with the world ...
... last night she cried out suddenly to me: “That’s adding insult to injury!” ... and she said it in a loud voice, angry, yet hurting me because she was hurt herself and thought that I had deliberately hurt her ... and she said it because her cat was no longer on the computer, her cat, her dead cat which she had held in her arms while the vet was slipping the needle into the shunt tied to the cat’s paw, I remember it well, that tiny wind of life, gusting through the cat’s fragile body, and suddenly there was a ceasing of the struggle, a slipping of the cat’s head, the cat’s tongue protruding, just a little, in a beloved and well known gesture, from the lips ... and that was it ... it was over so suddenly, that battle with cancer that had begun such a short while before, that battle was suddenly over ... over so suddenly ...
... and all the while we second guessed ourselves: was it fair to pay a thousand, two thousand dollars for chemo-therapy when there was only a 60% chance of recovery, and think of all the attendant miseries of regular visits to the vet, the needles, the treatment itself, and the cat so young, so full of life such a few short days before ...
... and “Look!” our daughter said, when she came home for Christmas, “There’s a lump in her neck, you can feel it right there!” This was in January, at the beginning of the new year and that same day, she got on the plane and flew back to Toronto, and we were left on our own with the cat, and there it was, the beginning of the end, although we didn’t realize it then, a hard lump, but a small lump, much smaller than a pea lurking, unmoving, like a Great White shark, waiting off the beach for an unsuspecting swimmer, just below the surface, on the left side of her neck as she looked at you, my right side as I felt the lump, her left side ...
... and we took her to the vet the very next day and, sure enough, it was a lymphoma. They took blood samples, ran tests and called us later that afternoon ... and a lymphoma it was, small, but deadly, and the prognosis was given: steroids, cheap, might help, give her a 40% chance at a life which would get increasingly shorter and more difficult ... a life, however, that was better than the alternative, to put her down now, that very day, and she was bright, and sparkling on the surface, like sunshine on a lake, or the sunlight through the crystals in the window playing across her coat ...
... and then there was the chemo-therapy -- but the cat didn’t really like to be loaded into its crate and it certainly didn’t like its annual visits to the vet, with the prodding and the poking and the shiny needles inserted and withdrawn, so how would it endure chemo-therapy, let alone like it or appreciate it, a chemo-therapy moreover which could kill as well as cure and which wasn’t even guaranteed ... how could it be guaranteed, with this form of cancer, nothing can be guaranteed, except that long slow progress to an inevitable end ...
... and can we even guarantee a life and for how long ... and what kind of life ... yet life is better than nothing, and throughout January the steroids went in and the cat glistened and grew fat, there was no sign of the lump, and by the saint’s day of Thomas Aquinas it was back and we counted the days: January 31 ... February 4, our daughter;s birthday: and the lump quite solid and definitely there ... February 14, St. Valentine’s day and think, just think, that in an act of charity and love, three years previously, we had brought the cat home, salvaged it from the SPCA where it languished, abandoned in a cage, a stray, half feral, in from the streets and subject to who knows what sort of treatment and feeding in its infancy and was it then the seed of the disease was planted? Who knows?
... Or did those seeds come later, when she wandered the garden and fed and drank from the lands around us, contaminated lands, deadly lands, with their run off and their fertilizers, their weed killers and their anti-ant ant traps and their anti-dandelion poisons, and what are we doing to ourselves and is our cat a canary in the coal mine, doomed to give us warning that this is what awaits us, a slow poisoning of the system and then those cancerous growths, followed by the rapid acceleration into death ...
... and who, who will slip that releasing needle into our veins? Who will hold us and comfort us while that final deed is being done? Or will the disease be allowed to ravage our bodies while the chemicals flow to hold it back and we slip and slide, day after day, on a downhill slope that sees us walking slowly at first, then unable to get out of doors and into the garden, and then we will be seated permanently at the table or in the chair in front of the telly or the computer and then we will be confined to bed, all our bodily functions given over to the care of another who wraps us in our elderly nappies while our wills slip slowly away, and we start to forget who and what we are and what we have been and then, one day, we turn our faces to the wall and we hope to god it will soon be over ...
... and will it soon be over? ... March the First and I write a story about my childhood and I read it at a local society dinner, and the cat has passed another milestone, St. David’s day, but the strain is telling, it is getting to us, we watch each movement as the cat climbs a steep hill one day, panting and huffing gruffly, because the lump in its throat is starting to affect its breathing and the air passage is slowly becoming blocked ...
... we’ll keep her, we say, while she can still clean herself and feed ... and she continues eating, day after day, but she is hand fed now and my wife gets down on her knees and feeds her bits of her favourite food, and her coat is a little bit less glossy and getting more spiky and she no longer jumps on the bed at night, and no longer lies on top of us, a mobile weight, purring like a diesel engine warming up in the engine shed on a cold winter morning, and will she last until St. Patrick’s Day?
... but every day is an agony, and every hour of every day hurts each one of us in a different way as the cat watch continues and decision time draws near ... and will it be today we ask ... and do we need some more tablets ... and will she ever need another box of food? And we up the dosage slightly and the cat appears to improve, but then the downhill slide begins again and we count the hours, not just the days, until, suddenly, one morning, my wife bursts into tears and says I must call the vet because she can stand it no longer and the cat, the small cat, the nine pound cat has become an enormous burden, a mill stone around my wife’s neck, an albatross hanging there, its dead weight flapping dying wings and pulling my wife down and down, lower and lower, and so I call the vet and make that last appointment ...
... that very same day, at three o’clock in the afternoon ... but the cat seems to know and she will not let herself be found ... for she has hidden herself away ... and she will not go gently ... nor will she fit gently into the cat crate, but she finds new strength, a surprising strength ... a new lease of life, a new will to live ... from somewhere, god alone knows where ... and she struggles to the last and the two of us fight her and pour her into her crate, push her into her crate, then carry her crate to the car and ready ourselves for that one last journey together, one last time, out of the door, down the hill, driving very slowly, turning left on the main road at the bottom ... and yes, I am driving slowly ... the sun is shining ... and down to the surgery we go ...
... and there the vet is waiting and we hand the cat over in the small surgery room where we have been before with other animals, but none so close, none so precious, as this little grey furry bundle, this jewel of a cat, this cat companion, this playmate and play fellow, this child substitute for the child that has left the nest, this grand child substitute for the grand children we will never have nor see, this almost human attachment to our family, and it’s only three short years and a couple more days and the sun is shining and the garden was beautiful when we left, but probably it was also deadly, and we sit there in silence as the little paw is shaved, the shunt is put in place, first in one paw, and then there is an almighty nine pound fight, on my left, in the blue corner, weighing in at 210 lbs, the challenger, the vet ... loud applause ... in the red corner, on my right, the defending champion, the cat .... weighing in at a little under 8 and a half pound, because she is weather worn now, and suffering and hasn’t been able to eat too well for a couple of days ... and what a fight she puts up, but finally the shunt is in place, in the other paw, the poisons which will finally end her life are prepared ... and her release is upon us ...
... the vet explains, once more, the process, and my wife holds the cat, the little grey bundle, so tiny, with such lustrous fire filled eyes, and she strokes her now and talks to her and the cat is stiff beneath her hands, but relatively calm, and she relaxes slowly and “Now!” says the black angel ... “It is time! Do it now!” and the needle is inserted in the shunt and the cat slowly gives in, slowly relaxes, slowly stops her fight, and her eyes go dull and quiet and lose their lustre and her little pink tongue creeps out between her lips and with one last twitch she has fallen asleep, fallen into that permanent darkness -- or is it light? --- that awaits us all ...
... I have tears in my eyes and my nose is running, so I leave the room and as I do the vet’s assistant asks me if I would like to cover the charges now or come back in the morning ... and what do we want to do with the body? Burial or cremation? Single cremation and a little urn for the tiny body of ashes that will be all we have left ... and do we want to take the ashes home and bury them ourselves, or would we like to have a common burial, the cat thrown in with all the other dead bodies in a common burning and a common grave ... but when the spirit goes, it doesn’t matter what you do with the burnt out body ... and it was the same with my mother and my father ... and it will be the same with me ... and the cat, whose lifeless eyes no longer see, whose lungs now longer fill with air and expel it with a joyful Miaow of greeting when she sees us or with the force of expulsion, a tiny Miew when she leaps on to the bed or jumps in the early hours down to the floor ...
... but she is still here, she is still around the house, a part of us, although she is gone ... and she sits in her favourite places and catches her favourite flies in her favourite windows and we occasionally see a shadow where a shadow shouldn’t be, an ethereal shadow, a shadow which brings light and which brightens our day ... and life is not the same without her and there are always other cats ... but other cats are not this cat ... and other cats will play and please in other ways and will look as though they might be the same but they are not the same and though all cats are grey in the dark, this was a special cat, a one in a million cat, our cat ... our very special cat ...