The cat can die and my gut clenched with grief and what is all that about?

 

The dying of the light. It isn't death at all.  Just nightfall.

After my retirement I went into the business of seeing but not being seen. In the bustle and hustle of making a living and keeping a job, an enormous amount of self-promotion just comes with the territory.  Only after you have retired, and gently removed the sword from over your head, do you realize what it is like to sit still and just look at what is going on around you.

This is the era of feral isolation, wherein every single person is mandated to be like a dying cat. Sensing its own imminent death, the cat goes to ground in a blind corner of the lot or house or woods, and stoically awaits its death in a pure form of isolation. It is the purest form of isolation, because there is no pity involved.  No awe or blame or curiosity.  Just isolation followed by lights=out. Some cultures have elevated this mischance of biology to a spiritual category.  Zen monks, supposedly.

Shrug.

I don't know about that.  I know that my actual cat actually died on Monday because we provided him a lethal injection.  He didn't ask for it.  He couldn't shit or piss anymore.  He drank water and leaked a bit after sitting in a box of litter.  But he couldn't really pee like he had before, and his blood tests showed stressed liver, kidney, heart, bladder.  His abdomen was bloated to the size of a regulation football because his little heart couldn't pump fluids the way it was supposed to.  He nibbled at his food and pushed it around.  One thing seemed to interest him, and that was to sit on my wife's lap each morning for half an hour or so.  She held him, framing his big cat fur mass with her small perfect body.  She rocked him.  He stared at the carpet.  After a few visits to emergency vet services we began to realize that he must have been in considerable discomfort if not pain.  Nothing was working for him.  His back legs became paralyzed and he barely moved a body length from his gone=to=ground spot.

Because we are human and stupid about everything to do with being a mammal, we kept moving him, feeding him, adjusting his rugs and pillows and water and litter.  We couldn't leave him alone to just quietly die and be done with it.

Because we are human and stupid about everything to do with beginning and ending of life, we nurtured our own growing grief and covered it over with sheer busyness.

So before I go on, I want to acknowledge this.  I am sorry, Leo. You had a good 15 years and showed us a gracious presence at the end.  You remained friendly to strangers prodding and palpating you.  You did not complain.  Once you performed a miracle by rousing yourself with enormous effort and limping across the floor to flop at the base of the rocker where my wife sat, her sadness now mixed with awe and horror at the thought that you were suffering, and had made a supernatural effort to sit on her lap one more time. Surely one last time.  Surely you knew that. But the instinct to connect, despite everything, with a gesture that resembled love, finally silenced us, and sent us to ground, where we could finally, silently almost, leave you with the elegance that only a feral cat in his death moments can show.  You showed us.

And we saw it.

Here we are in our feral isolation.  We've had our shots.  We want to connect.

But because I am human and stupid about mammal things, and first and last things, I sit in an impure solitude, sullied by grief and self-pity, before dawn, after the fact of your passing.

My grief is impure, my self-pity a thin disguise for the disappointment I feel.  If my isolation were truly feral, I would shut up.

Apparently I still want something from this life. While the tides of grief rise and fall, and don't quite rise so full and terrible each time, and until the real silence has a chance, I want something.  I miss you, Leo, as I didn't know I could miss anything in the long autumn of life.

But it was good.

What you gave us was good, and beyond good, and we tried to give as good as we got.  We'll never know about that, I suppose.  But we love you.