I remember saying goodbye to our cranky cat Buster, who was suffering from leukemia, through the grate in his cage at the vet. I drew him a picture that my mom still has and wrote a note saying how much we would miss him.
Then there was Boots, my first cat that I was solely responsible for. She was my best friend and would wait for me at our front gate everyday after school. When we moved to a different, busier street, she was hit by a neighbor's car while crossing the street to explore, two days after we had moved in. I screamed and sobbed for days, cursed my parents for making us move and kept replaying the scene of the neighbor jumping out of her car, waving her checkbook and offering to buy us a new one, then of my dad walking into the street with a shovel and a garbage bag. We buried sweet Boots in our new backyard and held a funeral for her where we all said what he had loved most about her and how happy she had made us.
Sufi scratched at the screen door one night when my dad was out of town and I was visiting my mom for dinner. I opened the door and she just stared at me with her big, watery, ice blue Siamese eyes and cried. She wasn't the smartest cat, so I chided her and pretended to slide the door shut, a surefire trick to get a stubborn cat to make up her mind. But her crying became panicked and I felt adrenaline rush though my chest and knew something was wrong. I scooped her up and her hind legs and tail were limp. I thought that perhaps she had landed weird jumping down from her perch on the fence or was just cold, but when I brought her into the light of the living room, I saw a terrified, confused animal and I didn't know what was happening to her. She continued a low yowl and I did my best to comfort her, but she had gone into that place were sick animals retreat -- the outside world disappears and pure instinct takes over. I called my dad and he was already on his way home from wherever he was. He said to keep an eye on her and make her as comfortable as possible. I wrapped her in a blanket and sat with her all night next to her favorite heater vent. Sometime after I had fallen asleep, she Army-crawled her way into my little sister's bedroom and was shivering, crouched under her desk when I found her in the morning. She had gone completely slack, but still impossibly difficult to move. She kept up her Army-crawl and tried to wiggle her way into a small hole in the bathroom wall that had yet to be patched over after a renovation project. I blocked the hole and then sat with her in the bathroom until my dad came home. We took her to the vet -- me driving, my dad in the passenger seat with Sufi wrapped in swaddling clothes. She had x-rays taken and blood drawn. The vet said she had suffered a massive blood clot that had lodged near the base of her spine, causing the paralysis in her hind legs and beautiful tail that looked like an elegant ink drawing brought to life. He said he could perform surgery to remove the clot, but due to her age (she was 16), she was likely to develop another clot, which would require blood thinning medication, which would in turn put her at risk for bleeding out where we couldn't find her, since she spent significant time outdoors. We are people who go to great lengths to care for our cats and had surgery totally fixed her, we would have gladly scheduled it. However, poor Sufi was confused, in pain and exhausted. In the calculus of quality of life, she would have been uncomfortable and frustrated after any surgery. With tears streaming down our cheeks, falling into the rivulets of my father's wrinkled face, we made the decision to let her go. The vet asked us if we'd like to hold her as they administered the lethal dose and though we hesitated at first, my father reliving past trauma of letting faithful fur companions go, we decided that we owed it to Sufi to be there until her very last breath. Still wrapped in her blanket from home, I held her first as she received the first shot and then my dad cradled her as she received the second shot and drifted away. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do for another living being. As I write this, there is a lump in my chest and those same tears are falling down my face again.
These three losses have made me realize that our animals look to us for everything. We provide love, comfort, food and shelter in exchange for their companionship. They are not objects we own, but equal members of our families and sharers of our lives. When you bring a pet into your life, you make him or her a promise to care for them compassionately and fiercely. Refusing care or abandoning a pet facing major health issues is breaking that promise, but making the hard decisions and sticking it out until the bitter end is living up to that promise. Saying goodbye to a pet is incredibly painful no matter how prepared we may be to face the end. We can find peace in the little life we have given love, comfort and happiness to.
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