Coming up from the storm cellar has its drawbacks. Every conversation with someone close to me inevitably involves a moment of choke-and-swallow that I have to self-consciously get past, like some sort of emotional Tourette’s syndrome. One of the things that must have drawn me to cats in the first place was recognizing them in me. We are predators and prey, and as such, emotional stealth, depth, and timing are crucial to our survival. Allowing the anguish of what I feel to surface scares me as much as losing Benny. I fear the raw-skin scraping of loss like a feral cat in an open field fears a coyote he knows is waiting to pounce.
When the feral and the coyote decide to surface and begin their dance from the depths of the storm cellar, those moments of choke-and-swallow come closer and closer, like contractions. Then, inevitably, driving down Sepulveda from Brentwood to the beach, the walnut shell cracks audibly and all of the things I fear consume and taunt me in front of weekend commuters. I keep thinking that I should pull over so I don’t kill myself or someone else. But while the shell around my spirit may have cracked, being in the car with the windows rolled up allows insulation. The rain outside provides camouflage for the rain inside. I wail and punch the dashboard in peace.
Not to make a joyful comparison, but there’s a time, after particularly good afternoon sex and the kind of joint orgasm that you only read about in Penthouse Forum as a kid, where you roll on your back and look out the window… the greens are greener, the sky is beyond vibrant. The world is in high-def, your glasses are clean. Again, not joyful, but the breath I draw is blessedly potent and the exhale clean like a beginning.
I’m grateful for the moment because I am able to say to myself, “It’s not about you, genius. This is not about the meta, reforming the health-care system, formulating theories, and proving yourself right (or, conversely, wallowing in the misery of being proven wrong). This is about Benny in his dying days and just as you appreciated him at his most vibrant, appreciate him now.”
My friend, a house-call vet, is about to go away for a long weekend. I don’t know that Benny will make it till he gets back. There are more days than not when Benny doesn’t leave his “safe bed,” a brown fleece donut on the foot of our chaise where he has a good vantage point, surveying the comings and goings of all of the other animals and humans from a slight remove. In the few weeks since his condition began to worsen, the laundry list has seemed to compound daily. His eating is iffy even with the help of appetite stimulants. On bad days he doesn’t groom, so his coat is losing all luster, dry with flecks of dander. His condition has compromised his breathing so he’s constantly congested. When I hold and comfort him, he purrs, which sets off the snarfle reaction.
Amazingly, my friends Doug and Lindsay are going through the same thing with their beloved cat Barbra. Doug calls to see if I’ll drive over to their place just to observe Babs and help them gain perspective. “We don’t want Babs to suffer for three days,” he says, “just so she can die with a measure of peace at home on Monday.”
I tell Doug I can’t do it—I’m neck-deep in Benny. “But listen, you know Barbra. You’ve lived with her for fifteen years. You know when the time is right. It’s about her, not about you. If you make this about you, I can promise you that she will suffer more than your ego. Most important, live up to the bargain you made; you gave her a good life. Give her a good death, and don’t let the release happen on her worst day. Don’t let that happen.” Over the years, I explain, I’ve seen so many guardians bring their pets into the shelter for a private euthanasia, and they’ve simply waited too long, a product of their own denial. The thing that’s always struck me is that the person has been a portrait of emotional confusion and pain, living with the knowledge that they would have to decide When It’s Time. That confusion is constantly reflected back to them as physical pain to match their emotions.
And then I realize, as I hang up with Doug, that I’m talking to myself, too.
That night, we’re toweling the boy to give him meds, and I’m feeling nothing but angry. Angry is such an easy place to go. No matter how hard I’ve run from it my entire life, it’s in my DNA. Looking down at him struggling, with all of the meds carefully lined up in a row, it’s my turn to hold and Jill’s to administer. We surely don’t want him associating one of us with this twice-daily torture. I’m angry at the doctors—if they could only see the suffering they prescribed in such an offhanded way, if they could only see how they abuse the trust of their patients, both human and animal. And then Jill puts those nose drops in his nose—maybe one drop too many—and he jerks violently, gasping because we’ve momentarily cut off his precious breath. And I glare. An entire lifetime of being afraid of my own potential for violence, my ability to scream horrible things at others has made me very good at glaring. Silently, with that glare, I condemn Jill with precise and overwhelming ferocity. Jill doesn’t glare, she gets pissed like normal people do, and tells me in no uncertain terms what to do with my glare.
I’m ready to boil over when I have a sudden and almost comical moment of recognition. I’m aping the exact condemnation I’ve always flung like so much monkey shit at the human medical industry: “Keep us sick, medicate us, keep your pockets lined; it’s your fault that I’m hooked on pills!” I’m back to being a rabid, steering wheel–grabbing addict. This isn’t anyone’s fault; this is the universe telling me to hit my knees. This is me resisting surrender. I look down at the helplessly swaddled being, emptied by human fear and his own body of everything that made him my best cat frenemy so long ago. “Done,” I say to Jill, carrying him back to the bedroom. “This fucking charade,” I hiss, not raising my voice in a vain attempt not to poison the air, “this godforsaken farce.” I walk in the opposite direction. Just to be away. I want to smash the table and the bottles on it, but for once I have to go directly in the opposite direction of my own best thinking. She knows that even my surrender usually looks angry.
This is over. It’s time to keep Benny comfortable. That means no more appetite stimulants. No steroids. No more torture disguised as wellness. Benny is dying and my job is to let him. The universe has our time together on a short leash. Let’s make that time free of artifice, I think.
And now that my ego is released from its cage so it can go crap in someone else’s living room, my true self is free to be with my boy in his final days. I tell him at our first moment of solitude that he doesn’t have to tough it out anymore, and I won’t either. In a move that surprises the shit out of me, in a time when everything seems to be surprising the shit out of me, I ask him for a favor: “Please, bud, just tell me.” I look around to make sure we’re alone. I don’t even want Jill to hear. “When it’s time, I promise. We’ll make it better before it hurts. You won’t ever hurt. You just have to give me something. It’ll be our special code. I promise I’ll listen hard. You won’t have to say it twice. Deal?”
Once given that talk, it didn’t take him long.
It’s 4:12 a.m. I know because I look. I look because Benny never wakes me up. But he’s head butting me. Head to head. Like a slow-motion woodpecker, it’s that rhythmic. Coming to, and going straight to a communicative consciousness, I say, “OK. Got it.” He cheek marks my lips and walks back to sleep between Jill and me.
Our house-call vet isn’t back yet, so as early as we can get an appointment, at 2:00 that afternoon, we’re in the clinic. We pull up; Benny is in my lap. Even though he couldn’t give a shit and is actually wary of what I show him, I present the world blurring past the car, and crack the window so he can smell the ocean. This is, after all, our final destination together. I have him wrapped in a purple chenille blanket that my friend Sorcha gave him back when she first met him. With all of the shit that I’ve “gypsied” out of our lives along the way, it’s this wrap, with loops of fabric pulled loose by the kneading of Benny and his many coconspirators, that will accompany him, the only piece of familiar traveling to this sterile place. Jill will wait in the car, as she does. She has never been able to stand the pain o
f this loss. It’s OK—she has cared for, saved so many; who am I to split hairs? This part of the job has always been uniquely mine and I’m more than fine with it. I take Benny into the side entrance of the clinic and straight into a room. I hate this room. The feel, the energy, the sympathy tinged with after-lunch sleepiness by the staff, the techs…. The vet gets rave reviews from my clients, and this still feels wrong. It’s setting off every alarm in my psychic arsenal. The bells, the sirens, the barking of the dogs that tell me the fortress is under imminent attack.
And it just gets more wrong—I hate feeling out of control, sure, but not having choices? Being told this is the way it HAS to be? Tremors of panic seep through every fight-or-flight muscle in my body. I want out, not because I don’t want to live up to my end of the bargain, but because I just want this to be‚ I don’t know, better.
It’s not going to be better.
The tech feels inexperienced, or at the very least I think I’m making her very nervous. And that makes me very nervous. If my energy is dominating this space, then I am forgetting who is in charge here; the universe is in charge. God, grant me the serenity… She forgets the elementary step of warming up the injectables by rolling the refrigerated bottle in her hands so when she sticks Benny with the “take the edge off” sedation, the freezing liquid poke sends him convulsing, and, of course, hacking. Out comes my glare. The tech is wise and leaves without a word. Folding myself around the top of him like a human tent in the predawn frost, I realize that this will be the last time I ever get to protect him from harm, from pain, from confusion, from anybody who considers him “unbondable.” What an amazing universe, I think. Two broken-winged magpies collided and rebuilt each other. This has been his first spin around the incarnational merry-go-round as a cat. I could teach him a thing or two because, as I’ll discover, this is my first time around on two legs. We found our way.
I also realize this will be the only chance I have at a proper sendoff to the next life. I want him to know one thing, something he can clutch like a piece of my clothing with him as he wakes up next time; I want him to remember being loved so much that all else will be forgotten. No episodic memory; just an unbroken lifetime of embrace. I lean in tight as I hear the vet enter behind me: “I will tell your story. You hear me? I promise. I keep my promises, right?” The vet is hovering. I already don’t like her. I tell him so, but say it’s OK—just another shot. You’ve seen plenty of those.
And I hold my center. He knows me so well, as has every animal who has passed through my hands in this lifetime. This isn’t about showing off by lying my way past the cat polygraph; this is aligning with the will of the universe, surrendering to it, allowing its water to bathe us both. I’m not, at that moment, sad; I’m overwhelmingly grateful. So many animals I’ve known for such short periods of time. So many I’ve tried to comfort like this in a dark room, after they’d been abused, discarded, or just ignored by humans. My story with Benny is, in comparison, an embarrassment of riches. And after all, as the song says, love is stronger than death.
The vet and the tech (a different one—the first was rightly scared for her life) do what they have to but my arms are around him the whole time. They are literally moving through the gaps in me like a macabre game of Twister. A quicksandy voice is asking me to move. I have way too much experience doing this. Again, I’ve become expert at communicating with looks. I’m giving you plenty of room. Work around me.
I need to protect him from the fluorescent harshness of the unknown. I am full of guilt about not letting this happen at home, so I create a home so big with my body that he will see and feel it, like I’m holding up an IMAX panorama on my shirt.
“I keep my promises, right?”
His breathing slows. I have to give him permission. Like your children shoot you one nervous glance as they put their feet on the school bus and with a slow blink you tell them that the ride will be a good one. The purple blanket will keep you safe. On cue, mercy descends; with my lips on his head, he takes a clear, unsnarfled, untumored, unwheezy breath.
He takes another.
“I keep my promises,” I whisper. “I told you when we moved here that the ocean would cure you.”
And then, with a gentle spasm, the school bus drives off, taking my brave Benny to the next beautiful stop. Leaving me holding a reminder that bodies are just experiments. Glass to hold the mercury.
Momentary consolation for those watching the bus, waving the gravel dust from their hair.
I’m not breathing.
“You can stay here as long as you want, and then we’ll blah blah blah blah….”
His voice fades into the background.
Not breathing.
Please leave, please leave, please.
Not breathing.
The door clicks.
Breathe.
In my lap, wrapped in chenille, we took him to the pet cemetery to have them perform a private cremation. I was very specific to the very understanding woman working the desk; please burn half of the blanket with him and keep the rest for his burial. If one thing was planned to the letter it was this. When I was in Colorado, the five cats I buried were all in the same place, up along Boulder Creek, before the tunnel carved out of Sugarloaf Mountain. It brought me bits of comfort every time I would drive past and blow five kisses. I couldn’t do that for Benny; I didn’t know my new surroundings well enough to pick the right place. California law requires cremation of dead pets, given the chances of some critter digging them up as quick as they’re buried. But I didn’t like cremation, so I had to create a picture that would comfort me, that I could live with.
We dug a hole in the backyard and bought a tangerine tree, to remind me of the lush promises I had made Benny when leaving the mountains. I placed the piece of blanket in the hole and then emptied the ashes on top. Finally the dirt and the tree. Long after we left this crumbling old beach home, tangerine gifts would be here for anyone who wanted them. The backyard also had a lemon tree, and we planted plum trees that day as well.
My ritual wasn’t complete; there is a small matter of the “ridding.” Just like I gypsy my belongings whenever moving on, it was important to me to remove Benny’s stuff. This is something I’ve always done to assist my grieving process. I also do this to help the animals left in the home begin to move through their own reshuffling of the societal deck. Benny’s scent, and the markers that uniquely symbolize his presence, needed to go. That meant his food dish, the last vestiges of his dry food, and the airtight container that held it, the brown bed, each and every prescription bottle, syringe, and pill crusher. His collar was all that was left, and that was wrapped in a swath of purple chenille under a new tangerine tree. Love is stronger than death; I need no souvenirs.
As anyone knows who has lost an animal companion, the immediacy of the loss blows through you as if you were an abandoned farmhouse. I began to summon pictures: Benny entering a room like the newly reincarnated bus driver, or even smacking Jen upside the head for daring to bring tension into his territory. The image of the spot on his nose takes me back to the first time I opened that cardboard box on the way to have him X-rayed. Every internal sketch contains a loose thread that unravels me. That first couple of days seesaw from the workaday to the devastated in seconds.
We all say to one another, “It never gets easier.” Well, of course not; I would hope not, anyway. If it did, it would mean that it wasn’t the companion that died, but something inside us along the way.
No, it doesn’t get easier, but grief does become predictable. Having gone through the incredible depths and suddenness, and, yes, the guilt that you feel for caring more about the passing of a four-legged than some two-leggeds—at the very least you don’t stop midbreakdown to wonder “What’s wrong with me??” You just experience the inconsolable present, and move on to the next moment. Walking to school growing up, I would go up 82nd from Broadway to the park. When I hung a left at Central Park West, especially in the fall and winter, an incredible
blast of wind would hit me as I cleared the last building on the corner. It ran through you like a car and took your breath completely away. Now, nobody likes having their breath taken away—but once you realize that it will happen, and with clockwork regularity, you give into it, prepare for it, and remember that breathing returns to your body, regardless of whether you panicked about it or not.
At the end of the first day in more than thirteen years without Benny, I had Velouria in my lap and could, for this first moment in I don’t even know how long, sit. I could hear the sea lions barking in the distance, coming in and out of audio focus like a tornado siren. The way in which I give touches to the top of Velouria’s head is as subconsciously appreciative as the way in which she receives them. If I weren’t so exhausted, I might actually feel guilty. The chair consumes me and I am peaceful. Sad. But peaceful. I begin to think about the incredible walk Benny and I took together. Mostly I begin to think about the nature of love and my sudden awareness of my ability to experience all of it.
When I began this journey, I was determinedly in the “off” position. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even recognize that a journey needed to be taken. I had a job to do; I had to get my songs out to the world. I had a plan. But, as the Yiddish proverb says, “We plan, God laughs.” All along, I gathered passion-shaped puzzle pieces, putting them in my pocket until the universe decided I could handle the real picture. My fascination with the ghost in the machine was the reason I had to write verse and chorus, then unhinge my jaw like a snake to sing them; the reason I had to write these songs sitting on New York sidewalks, watching the gait and tics of the strange bodies in extreme motion; the reason I needed to speak or sing to audiences, feeling the divine between all of us; and, of course, the reason, when the universe decided I was ready, that animals electrified my core, suddenly bathing the road behind and ahead with a halogen-tinged hallelujah.
In those days of flailing for connection with the divine without knowing or acknowledging such things, I was tattooed, pierced, punched, kicked, kissed, licked, and stroked in increasingly desperate ways, until finally I fell backward into the waiting arms of a shelter full of homeless animals and they began peeling away the bulky sweaters I had covered myself in. It had taken years—but it started on that first day of work at HSBV.
Cat Daddy Page 19
