We said goodbye to an old friend last week, a cat that had been with us for 20 years – talk about nine lives.
I know, he was only a cat: no need to overthink it.Credit:Shutterstock
For the last couple of months we’d kept him going with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and the occasional dose of opioid. But a growth in his head was displacing his right eyeball in its socket and he hobbled around on arthritic hips. He was in increasing discomfort and probably pain, though you couldn’t really tell: cats don’t let on until the end.
We knew we would have to get him put down sooner rather than later, and he’d already dodged a couple of final vet appointments by suddenly perking up.
Part of the problem was the timing: we didn’t want to do it too close to our son’s birthday (the cat arrived when he turned three), not too close to our daughter’s birthday (she’s younger than the cat, and hasn’t known a world without him) but before her VCE exams start, please, so it didn’t become a veterinary emergency the night before Maths Methods.
We wanted him to live while he still seemed to be getting something out of life, and to die before he suffered too much – exactly what we want for ourselves.
I kept hoping I’d get up one morning and find that he’d slipped away in the night, but every morning he’d be there by the door, waiting for breakfast.
I spent a lot of time wondering where exactly in the garden I’d bury him, when I’d dig the hole, whether the Merri Creek clay would be too hard to dig. Maybe, I thought, we could have him cremated, his body whisked away after the injection and returned, ash in a cat-shaped urn.
In other words, I practiced a lot of avoidance, worrying about the trivial in the face of the inevitable. It seems like a metaphor for the times.
Death can be just a hypothetical, and then you’re in the room and it’s happening: at which point you stop worrying about all the other stuff.
Our daughter fronted for the final vet appointment, stroked the cat to soothe him and gave the vet the nod when she was ready to let him go. She stroked him after he’d died, and carried his body home on her lap in the car, wrapped in his calico cat shroud. She cried, but she looked it all in the eye and didn’t flinch.
As I lay his body in the hole – miraculously the right size – she said, “I guess he’s gone to a better place.”
I didn’t tell her, but I don’t believe in the better place, for cats or people. I believe in this place: this backyard, this suburb, this city, this planet, this universe. We’re dust, the cat and I both, but it’s stardust, and that is awesome enough.
I know, he was only a cat: no need to overthink it. I will miss him, though I won’t miss having a small, needy creature around the house – especially one that will never grow up to make its own breakfast, or marvel at the universe with me.
Matt Holden is a Melbourne writer.
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