Goodbye, Autumn
A few weeks ago, I killed my cat. I know: that’s a brutal way to put it. Not the accepted way. I felt this keenly when I called up the vet to ask for the “service.” I didn’t know quite how to phrase my request. I said, “I have this cat, um. This 18 year old cat?”
I wanted him to say it, but he gave me only silence.
“Maybe 19?”
More silence.
“And I, um, I think…the time has come. You know?”
“Does the animal have any underlying health problems?” he said.
Which I heard as: prove it to me. Prove this has to be done. And the answer, of course, was yes. Poor Autumn had lost control of her bowels. She drank constantly. She peed practically nonstop. Something was clearly wrong. She staggered when she walked. She couldn’t fully stand up on her back legs anymore, she walked on her knees as it were. Often, she broke into heart-rending yowls for no reason, yowls that must have been expressions of some unknown pain.
So yes, it had to be done, absolutely, and yet—she was still alive. She still took an obvious interest in food. The sight of it clearly made her happy. She still sought the comfort of a lap. She still purred when she was stroked. Who was I to say her “time” had come? I felt this.
The vet said bring her in. I got the carrying case. Autumn had never liked the sight of that box. It had always made her anxious. It made her anxious now, for better reason than she knew: she meowed the whole time were in the car.
At the office, the vet explained to me what would happen. First, he would give her a sedative to calm her. Then, he would give her a stronger sedative that would put her to sleep and eventually stop her heart.
Ah yes, now I remembered the phrase I was supposed to use: put her to sleep. We were putting Autumn to sleep. He gave her the first shot, and she sat there, looking merely thoughtful. After a bit he gave her the second shot. Still she just sat there, pensive and silent. The vet said, “It will take about half an hour,” and then he left me alone to be with her while she died.
I stroked Autumn’s back. She settled into a lying position and began to purr. But the purring stopped after a while. Her head drooped.
Then I felt the full force of it. Autumn was going to die. At that moment I remembered the kitten she was when we acquired her from the neighbors. I remembered my daughter Jessamyn as a little girl, playing with baby Autumn. Eighteen years ago. I remember the young Autumn nosing around my new-born younger daughter Elina’s crib, curious about this new arrival. I remembered the sleek adult Autumn—how perfectly her calico coloring went with a certain couch we once had. I remembered when she went into her first and only heat and we kept her in the house and she lay by the outer doors, trying to stick her paws under the crack, so utterly did she long for sex, sex that she would never have. I remembered her at all her ages, matched against 18 years of my own lifetime and my family’s lifetime, set into images of my daughters at all their ages. I found myself helplessly weeping, and I feel the same tears now.
For a long time she seemed dead. Then I would notice that her sides were still moving slightly; she was still faintly breathing. She did indeed slip into death so gradually it was an imperceptible segue out of sleep, which itself was an easing out of the pain that her life had become.
Yet none of this mitigated the underlying fact. I could say we euthanized her. I could say we put her to sleep. Neither phrase would be exactly false. Yet both feel like avoidance and denial of the core fact.
I killed my cat.
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Oh man, that was hard to read. I loved her so much, I keep thinking I hear her around the house. I miss her annoying presence around my room, although admittedly, it does smell better in here.
Sad, but the alternative? Isn’t it more cruel to keep a pet around when they are in pain, when they can no longer stay as clean as a cat likes to be? When life is reduced to a smaller and smaller world with less and less pleasure? You did the right thing.
You had the courage to stay with your cat throughout the session. I could not bear to do that, so unlike Autumn, Valentine died alone. You did the right thing on both counts.
This poem by WB Yeats gave me comfort when our cat died:
“Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone
Man has created death.”
Animals can suffer and fear, but they don’t know they’re going to die (as far as we know). Autumn thought she was falling asleep in your arms. It doesn’t make you miss her any less, but I was comforted to realize our cat Peter lived in each moment, Zen-like, until his last.
What you describe here so eloquently brought me right back into the vet office with my own cat several years ago. My cat had a tumor behind his eye and the other eye was affected as well. It was bulging and the vet said it could actually burst, so there wasn’t much of a decision after learning that little detail. Even so, it was a very sad thing.
On a lighter note, here is how I found your site: Class assignment to respond to one-another’s teaching blogs. I liked the fact that “Doug,” who sits behind me is #1. Older than I am (58 maybe to my 45), while the rest are twenty something. #2. Idealistic enough to go into teaching after a career in law. So, dum-de-dum…I am reading the postings…and find one criticizing you (not that I had ever heard of you.) It also said, and I quote,
“Poor George W. Bush, the educator-in-chief, is kicked around rather severely for signing NCLB into law.” That’s when I knew I must check things out. Here is how I responded to Doug’s posting:
I couldn’t take yours on right away, so I warmed-up elsewhere first : ) I don’t think I’d want to sit across from you AND my brother-in-law at the dinner table! While my lifestyle, core personal values and practices are conservative by any standards, I am (paradoxically perhaps) a free-thinker and I love free-thinkers, so I hate to see them villified. That said, “a very big thank-you” for introducing me to someone fascinating. He probably is not always right about everything, but then none of us are. By the way, people, if you are not out making college mischief…check out Ansary’s fact, factoid and quote tab. Coincidentally, the security word up in the box is “chill.” Do you think it was meant for you or for me? If something comes flying at me from behind in class, I’ll look your way first, Doug. : )
Just to lighten things up…still drying tears.
Autumn’s dead? I can’t believe I didn’t know. Condolences.
Your neighbor
When I was 6 I went into the vet’s office with my dad and our family’s 15 year old cat. She was sick, but not as sick as Autumn. With all the unneccesary violence in the world and in movies, it is amazing (and wonderful) how impossible it still is for us to accept that death can sometimes be the right thing.