The End of An Era, Or The Deaths of Two Friends

TW: talk of animal deaths, both natural and violent (though not graphic)

I didn’t intend to adopt animals ever again.

I had had two instances of adopting animals in my teens when I could barely take care of myself and had no business taking care of animals, and neither of them remained in my care. One of them, an orange tabby, was adopted by a sweet older woman and to my knowledge he lived the rest of his days in happy coziness. The other one, a very sweet pitbull, was killed in cold blood by my ex-boyfriend. Because of logistics, she stayed with him when we broke up. I ended up living with my father in another state, so I couldn’t see her on a regular basis, but I believed that she was in good hands.

But he killed her. In his words, he just didn’t want to take care of her anymore. He killed her without my knowledge, let alone my blessing, and I didn’t even find out she was dead until a mutual friend told me months later. My mother would have taken her. My friend would have taken her. Any number of people would have taken her, and I would have arranged everything if I had known. But her killed her anyway. To say that it was traumatic is an understatement.

After that, even though I wasn’t responsible for her death, I still believed in my heart that I didn’t deserve to have animals ever again. If I hadn’t adopted her in the first place, she wouldn’t have died.

So when my best friend called me years later and said, “Can you please take my cats?” I agreed, but on the condition that it was a temporary arrangement. I loved animals, but I didn’t do animals anymore. The universe had shown fit to demonstrate that I didn’t deserve them.

My friend had left to do a thru-hike of the Appalachian trail and her soon-to-be ex-husband was trying to push the cats off onto some random strangers he met on Craigslist while she was gone. She intervened from afar and begged him to give them to me. Then, at least, she would know they were safe until she came back or could make other arrangements.

I knew the cats. I loved them. Two beautiful black cats who were six years old and litter mates. Styx had sleek short fur and Creature had fluffy, thick long fur. I’d lived with my friend and her husband temporarily when I first moved to town and one of the cats, Styx, had come into my room daily to spoon with me and keep me company. She had a presence I had never felt in a cat and, in fact, often struck me as a cat who wasn’t aware that she was a cat. Persephone, who I ended up calling Creature on a permanent basis, lived her own mysterious existence, happy to dip in and out of our company and cuddle before vanishing again to pursue whatever it was that she did in the shadows.

I took them in, but reluctantly. I took them in because I wanted them to be safe and happy. I took them in because I wanted my best friend to know that they were going to be okay. But I still hesitated. I still felt so ashamed of the way I had failed my first two pets, that I started asking around immediately about other people who might want to take them permanently. I didn’t deserve these cats. They were intelligent and funny and so loving, so docile. They loved to cuddle. They wanted to meet everyone who came to the house. They got along with every dog they met, and they charmed the pants off of anyone who met them. They loved belly rubs and the belly was never a lie.

But when push came to shove, I just didn’t want to give them up. I don’t know when they became my cats, but they did. It happened gradually. There was still some question of my best friend taking them back if and when she came back to town. But it quickly became apparent that her path lay elsewhere. She moved out of the country for several months, she came back to town briefly, and then she left for Appalachia permanently, where she had left her heart on the Appalachian Trail.

We became a family, me and those two cats. I loved them the way I’d never let myself love anyone before. I took care of them. I proved to myself that I deserved them. I took them to the vet when they needed to go. If they needed medicine, I gave it to them as scheduled. I bought them the expensive food. I got them a fancy water fountain. I stopped buying clay cat litter because it was bad for them. And I cuddled the shit out of them.

Creature was a very self-sufficient cat. She and Styx cuddled often, a big pile of black fur where you couldn’t tell where one cat ended and the other began. She sometimes liked to sit next to me, but didn’t prefer to be held or cuddled too close. I respected her needs and we had a lovely cordial relationship. But I wasn’t her person. Styx was her person.

I, however, was Styx’s person. Everyone in my life joked that she was my familiar. From the time she came to live with me, she was my little shadow. She slept on my pillow or as the little spoon with my arm around her. She loved to spoon. I didn’t even know cats could love to spoon. She sat in my lap or next to me any time I sat down. She followed me into the bathroom. She sat by me while I had my coffee, or while I ate. She was always there. She had to be with me if I was home.

Creature was the one to go first.

I had seven wonderful years with her before she started vomiting a lot and making strange tortured sounds when she did. I took her to the vet and they gave me furball medication for her. I also thought she might be losing weight, but the vet didn’t seem concerned. I was skeptical, but I trusted him to know what he was talking about. I took her home and started giving her the fur ball medication. It didn’t seem to help. Not long after that, I caught her trying to poop in my room. Something she’d never done before. I carried her to the cat box and took the lid off and found black, tarry stool that made my heart stop.

I took her the ER immediately because I knew something was deeply wrong and I was furious with myself for taking the vet at his word, even though my gut told me differently. The ER vet found that she had lost weight since her last appointment only a few weeks before, and discovered a golf ball sized mass in her intestines which she explained to me gently was likely cancer. She sent me home with some steroids and gabapentin for palliative care and instructions to follow up with my regular vet. I brought her home that night and carried her around the house, sobbing and singing Blue Christmas to her. Christmas was just weeks away and I was afraid she wouldn’t live to see it.

I took her back to her regular vet and he scoffed at the idea that she had a mass. He said he couldn’t feel one. He did an xray and said he couldn’t see one. He insisted it had to be pancreatitis or something of that sort. He told me to take her off of the medication the ER vet had prescribed. Then he instructed us to follow back up in two weeks. I was beyond relieved that she didn’t have cancer. Over the moon. Crying I was so happy that it was something medication could fix.

My husband took her to the follow up appointment two weeks later.

He called me crying to tell me that they’d done another xray and, whoops, this time they found the mass.

The vet recommended we do an ultrasound and referred us to a vet in town who could do it.

Gutting.

There are not words to describe that kind of whiplash. It was so intense that I started sobbing at work and had to leave the floor for twenty minutes.

I took her to the ultrasound the next day and the very kind, compassionate vet explained to me that she had a mass in her upper intestines that was essentially causing her to starve to death. He said even if we wanted to subject to her surgery at the advanced age of 13, it was essentially impossible because of the location of the tumor.

At first we thought, we’ll just treat her with palliative care. We’ll just see how she does. Then we conceded that maybe in a couple of weeks we’d call the vet. Then, we said a week. Then, just a few days until after Christmas.

And then we had to take a good hard look at her, at her quality of life, and the fact that she was literally starving to death and likely in enormous pain and admitted that keeping her alive for another single day was fucking cruel and wanting her with us for the holiday was a horrible justification to subject her to more suffering. More than that, if we didn’t do it the following day, we would have to wait more than a week until the euthanasia home services were open again after the holiday and that was out of the question.

I called everyone, desperate to find someone who would make a last minute appointment all the way out into the country where we live the day before the holiday weekend.

And finally, I succeeded. A small startup mobile vet service run by a young woman was willing to come out and perform the euthanasia for us.

Styx seemed to sense what was happening. She laid down next to Creature on the couch and wouldn’t move. The vet was kind but seemed a little inexperienced. I sincerely doubt in retrospect that she had ever performed a home euthanasia before because of how uncomfortable she seemed.

If you didn’t know, when euthanasia is performed there’s a two-step process: first, the animal is given a sedative shot that puts them into a deep sleep. The second step is that they are injected with a fatal cocktail of drugs that will gently but decidedly stop their heart.

With the first sedative shot, my exhausted and suffering cat sprang two feet in the air and landed on the back of the couch. She was furious. The look she gave me was complete shock. Anger. Betrayal. And then she slowly slumped over and fell asleep.

Having that be our last moment together was fucking traumatic.

Styx had stayed where she was on the couch, so I laid Creature next to her again. Styx refused to move even as the vet worked to find another vein to administer the second injection.

Creature died quickly.

When the vet said, “She’s gone,” my husband and I started sobbing.

I screamed. And I screamed.  I said, “But how can she be dead? How can she be dead?”

Agony. Profound agony.

When Creature was dead, Styx put her arm around her sister and put her head down and went limp like she was dead, too. And even though I gently tried to stir her, she didn’t respond at all for close to an hour. It is the saddest and also the most beautiful expression of grief I have ever seen.

Though my husband was a little skeptical about the whole thing, I told him I wanted to hold a wake. I’ve been doing volunteer hospice care and doing a lot of my own personal work around death for a long time and I have very strong beliefs about how unhealthy a relationship our modern society has with death, and how I had no interest in sweeping her death under the rug. I wanted to honor her. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to have time to say goodbye and to accept her death.

We prepared a beautiful table where we laid her out. I harvested acorns and winter berries. My sister brought flowers that I arranged around her and I lit candles. We held a wake for her until the following night, when we buried her in a grave we’d dug in the cold frozen earth.

It was beautiful.

And it made me feel really good when my husband turned to me and said, “You were right. This was the right away to do this. I was a little freaked out when you were describing having a wake and all that, but it was the right thing to do. It helped me accept it. Feel better about it.” I couldn’t be more grateful that it turned out to be such a positive experience for him.

I always joked that Styx wanted to be an only cat. She was very jealous and possessive of me. In spite of the fact that she loved her sister very much and they cuddled and groomed for hours every day, she wanted me all to herself. I wanted to believe that Styx would be okay without her.

But she wasn’t.

She was never okay.

Her depression lasted for months. She lost a huge amount of weight because she basically stopped eating. I started feeding her rich wet food and started to get her to stabilize again. She started to come out of her depression a bit. She started eating regularly and looking forward to her wet food.

At least for a little while. And then her eating slumped off again.

Almost a year had passed since Creature’s death and I was beginning to suspect that having some cat companionship might be good for her again. Though it was a gamble, I felt in my heart that it was the right thing and that she was ready. I think she missed cuddling and grooming. We adopted a couple of little kittens. She hissed at them at first and was pretty annoyed with the whole situation, but they loved her completely and wouldn’t be dissuaded from trying to give her their affection.

Of course, she was won over. And pretty quickly, to my delight. She especially loved cuddling with the little boy, Wyatt Scratch aka Chicken Nugget.

But even with this positive change in our household, she still wasn’t eating the way she should be. It became obvious that she had lost more weight, so we took her to the vet. After the whole hideous misdiagnosis debacle, we had fired our last vet and continued to see the vet he referred us to for the ultrasound. Our new vet told us she had lost more than a pound and that he felt a thickening in her abdominal wall. I went into that ultrasound, certain it was going to be a tumor.

But to our relief, he said it seemed to be IBD, which would explain why she wasn’t eating. It could be managed with steroids.

What a fucking relief.

And she immediately started eating again. With gusto.

At least, at first.

But it became apparent that even though she was eating, she was still losing weight.

After a few weeks, we took her back to the vet. She had lost another pound. And, much like her name sake, she was now a pile of Sticks.

During the initial appointment, he had opted not to do bloodwork. It seemed unlikely to him, he said, that she would develop kidney issues so quickly between then and the last appointment she had.

This time, he did bloodwork.

And surprise, surprise, it was kidney disease.

He said it was at an early stage and that her quality of life was totally manageable as long as we gave her fluids two to three times a week, which we immediately proceeded to do.

She started eating again, something we were delighted by. She started gaining a little weight. She was eating multiple times a day.

But she started pissing on the carpet in our bedroom, something she had never done before. And the smell was horrible, overpowering. The smell of rotten fish. A pretty good indication of a UTI.

My husband took her to the vet to get a shot of antibiotics the day before yesterday.

When she came home, she looked miserable and seemed quite weak. She curled up on the bed next to me and stayed there all day.

I had a feeling even then that she was going to die soon.

I’ve volunteered in hospice care. Animals and people both have a look to them shortly before they die, and she had that look. She also slept much harder and much longer than was typical for her, another usual indication that death is near.

I woke up in the middle of the night and she had finally moved off of the bed, but I didn’t think anything of it.

When I got up yesterday morning and started calling for the animals to come eat breakfast, she didn’t come out. I knew even then that she was gone.

I got down on my knees and looked under the bed.

Just under where my husband sleeps, she was stretched out neatly on her side, arms and legs together in a neat line, facing away from me.

I called her name and reached out to touch her, knowing what I would find.

She was cold.

Cold, just starting to turn rigid. She had been dead maybe only a couple of hours.

Devastating.

Absolutely fucking devastating.

It takes time to absorb the enormity of that kind of loss.

My husband and I cried and cried. I have never seen that man cry the way he cries when an animal he loves dies. He went to the store for her and got roses. We arranged them around her and have put out little LED candles so the kittens don’t catch on fire as they come near to look at her. They’ve been trying to understand what’s happened since she died. Chicken Nugget has been tense and scared and hiding in corners since she left us and occasionally walking over to look at her again. The dog keeps sniffing her and whining.

My husband has been out digging her grave on and off all day.

I keep turning around and expecting her to be there, and that’s the worst feeling of all.

To be perfectly honest, I am at peace with her death. Creature’s death was shocking. It was sudden. It hurt to be in the position to make that decision for her. Having the vet basically botch her ending was fucking traumatic.

But Styx went on her own terms. She had been on a steady decline since Creature’s death, punctuated by a few small plateaus. Her arthritis was also really bad. Every time I looked at her I could see her suffering. I didn’t even realize how much anxiety I had for her until she died, and now I keep finding myself trying to worry about her and realizing that I don’t need to worry anymore.

She was the best cat. Everyone says that about their cat, but to me she really was. She was the best cat.

The first time my sister met her she said, “Oh my god, that cat is looking at me.”

I said, “Yeah."

She said, “No, she’s looking at at me.”

And I said, “Yeah, I know.”

She said, “No, like at me, like into me. Like into my soul.”

And she really did have a way of making you feel that. She had a no bullshit croaky little meow and genuinely seemed to understand everything I said to her. She didn’t have an aggressive bone in her body. She was the friendliest cat I’ve ever met. Rubbing her belly wasn’t an option if you came to our house. She pretended to be surly and had the most magnificent RBF, but she was a radiant ball of love and companionship. And she was always, always there for me.

We had eight beautiful years together and they’ll never enough. I told her constantly that she wasn’t allowed to die before she was thirty and the stubborn little monster fucking dipped anyway. Very like her to do what she wanted to when she wanted to.

I don’t know what I’ve done in my life to deserve the absolute unconditional love that she gave me, but I’m glad that I did it. She was the most wonderful friend I could have asked for.

I only wish she could have stayed longer.