My cat Cassie died last night. I took her to an emergency vet and had her put to sleep. It was a kindness: she was no longer enjoying her life, and a tumor that she'd had in one her feet since at least last autumn, which had not been bothering her much at all, suddenly became infected. She was suffering, and I was haunted by the fact that she had been suffering, for at least a couple of days, and there was nothing else to do.
(That picture -- the most recent one I have of her -- is about a year and a half old. She'd gotten quite frail and not terrible photogenic lately. And she'd stopped having much desire to get up on the couch, where this picture was taken, or my bed, though she rallied herself to it once in a rare while. The last week or so, she'd taken to hiding under the bed: a bad sign.)
Eighteen is old for a cat. Really old. (Her sister died at eight, and the vet then said that that was quite a normal age for a cat to die of cancer.) And I'd had Cassie since she was a kitten -- or, really, a young adult cat of about five months old. I know she had a good life with me. And she'd been in a decline for several years: she was increasingly senile, for one, though not in any way that seemed to impact her enjoyment of life -- her personality changed, in fact, a couple of years ago, so that she was much more affectionate with me, and much more open to affection, than she had been.
So I'd been ready for this for years. And in recent months, every time I came home after being out all day, I would not at all have been surprised to find that she had died in her sleep (she did little other than sleep recently).
But you're never really ready to let a pet go. Yet, I'm relieved, too, because I had been living in a constant terrible suspense for months, knowing that Cassie's days were severely numbered. Still: I'm alone in this apartment for the first time ever since I moved in six years ago. I'm alone for the first time ever, anywhere that I've lived, since I was 21 years old (I'll be 39 in August). In the last year and a half, I've lost all my pets: three cats and two birds. I'm not used to having no one underfoot, no one who needs me to feed her or look after her.
It's kind of weird. And yet, I'm not at all ready to take on more animals, and not just because of the reasons everyone says that when their animals die. I've been thinking for a few years that it would be nice to spend some extended time overseas -- in London or maybe Paris -- which would be impossible to do if I have pets. I feel a tiny bit the way that parents say they do once their kids leave home: that it's the start of a new chapter of their lives. Of course I don't mean to compare having pets to having kids. But maybe there's a teeny bit of similarity in how we expend our energies for a finite time, and then, when those energies are no longer needed, we move on.
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