An Approaching End

It doesn’t seem like a day that holds much promise. Consider: a beloved cat, Kitty, has stopped eating, and for anyone who has had a cat, and who has heard the veterinarian say, “it’s his kidneys,”—well, you know how the movie ends. You will spend large sums of money providing the cat with the feline equivalent of filet mignon. You will sit with the cat—in the evenings—or lie in bed with the cat—in the mornings—and shoo away the other cats who are rapturous to eat the food the ailing cat is lacklusterly eating. And the cat will go on, pulled by the strength of your love, and because, well, the life of a housecat is not so difficult. How hard is it to spend a day lying in the sunlight on the floor?

The day will come. Or rather, the night, since it was at about three in the morning when Raf told me, “I think Kitty is dying.” I said what you say—we’ll see how he eats in the morning, and I’ll take him to the vet if he doesn’t. Yes—that sentence was badly cast, but that’s how you speak at 3 AM.

He’s always been Raf’s cat, though it was I who was on my stomach, beside the parked car on which Kitty had—not too intelligently—taken refuge. But on second thought, perhaps it was intelligent after all. How was he to know that the dark, warm, and especially hidden shelter would roar, spin, crush him? And he was smart enough to yowl, in inverse proportion to his size.

Forget crying babies—it’s that feline distress sound that gets us every time. “There’s a cat who needs help,” I will tell Raf, and he’ll prick up his ears. And then we’ll open up the tuna fish that somehow we never eat, but that we always seem to have.

Let no one tell you that he or she has selected a cat: they select you. OK—there are some disordered individuals who actually go out and buy a cat—probably a Persian or Siamese—but no true cat-lover would think of it. Ours is to wait until the call comes—either from under the car or from a friend.

That’s how Madame came—the only female cat we’ve ever had, and so-called because she was a calico, which meant that she could teach imperiousness to an opera diva. There was only one way to sell her on us, and the “friend,” seized on it.
“Marc says he wants her,” said the friend to Raf. “Raf says he wants her,” said the friend to Marc. And Madame sailed in the door.

So they arrive, and we take them in. They have been astonishingly beautiful and ordinarily ugly. They have—mostly—been stupid as posts, though in the case of Kitty, Raf is convinced that Kitty could talk—and discuss Kierkegaard—if the necessary anatomy were there. They allow themselves variously to be petted, and shed copious amounts of fur.

Not able to have children, we got into the habit of always having four cats. And so, when I take Kitty to the vet in half an hour, the familiar ritual will begin. Or rather, it has just begun, since I have just called the vet.

One of the odd things about learning a language because you’re living it instead of because you’re studying it is that you develop a special vocabulary and set of tasks. And so I knew what to do—say “salud” when the receptionist sneezed over the phone—and tell her that Kitty was bien viejito and having trouble with his kidneys. This elicited the classic response in Puerto Rico: dito!

It can be used variously, this “dito” which is as common as a horn in a traffic jam. Here, it was quite sincere—“aw, poor thing.” But with a sarcastic intonation, it becomes, “yeah, sure…” In any case, I hung up the phone—though how one hangs up a cell phone I can’t quite tell you—with that strange feeling. To the receptionist, I am one more call, one more task to get through her day. But at 3:30, I will be a parent, with a sick cat, with the prognosis quite sure, and with the certainty that the lab results will be bad, and that “hospitalization” will be necessary. Not so bad for dogs, I will think, since after all, aren’t they the ones barking? But how will it be for Kitty?

Worse, how will it be for Raf, who will “visit” Kitty after work? Our nerves are already frayed from a street festival that took place underneath and a little to the right of us, in addition to the worry about Kitty. Now, Raf will be standing next to a bank of cages, in one of which will be Kitty, whom Raf will be stroking. He can do this; I cannot.

Paradoxical, really, since I am the “strong” one in these matters, or so my reading of the dynamics of our relationship goes. But however often it has been I who said, after an imploring look from Raf, to the vet, “yes, we think it’s time,” I cannot stand—in either sense—next to a caged pet and comfort him. Raf is the greater of the two of us.

It may be in a day, or we may get lucky and have another month or two. Kitty, however, is completely misnamed, since he has to be near twenty years old. And that, for a cat, is long in the tooth indeed.

It will be worse for Raf than it will be for me. Also, it will be worse for me than it will be for Raf, since to see someone grieve acutely as you grieve slightly less is painful. And yes, that word “grieve” stands: I have had two parents die on me, as well as four or five cats. And the experience, if not the same, is similar. What’s different?

No one in the world would dispute the justice of a writer quietly crying in a corner of a café, as I am, if the tears were for a dying parent. But the work of growing up means that we keep a certain distance, physically, from our parents. In the week before my mother’s death, I had a lingering wish to crawl into the hospital bed in which she was lingering and hold her. Did I? No, though why I can’t say.

But this cat, this Kitty who is not Kitty, has jumped into bed every day of his life with us, to be stroked by Raf even as Raf sleeps, to be fed in the morning as I struggle not to wake, and especially not to smell his food. Raf will leave, and Kitty will remain, sleeping on Raf’s pillow.

Why am I crying?

This time, it’s Kitty who will leave….