Goodnight, Good Girl

About sixteen years ago, a few months after I graduated from college, I acquired a cat. I say "acquired" because I had not exactly been in the market for a cat. Rather, my mother had called to tell me about a teacher at her school whose cats had given birth to three litters of kittens at around the same time. Apparently there was one last kitten they couldn't find a home for, the runt of one of the litters.

I remember going down to this woman's basement, linoleum on the floors, dim lighting, and seeing the tiny black and white kitten with what I later realized was a very unusual face. I had brought a box with a folded blanket inside, but in my mother's car the kitten launched like a rocket ship out of the box and careened around the backseat like a bumblebee trapped in a jar.

Once she was home, at our little two bedroom apartment in Central Square, she began asserting her dominance immediately. One swipe--claws bared--at Johnson's nose, and he was on the floor in submission, despite the hard-to-ignore fact that he was about sixty times her size. After a month, they were crafty partners in crime. We finally caught them in action: Rory up high on a kitchen cabinet batting down snacks to Johnson below. In her first few weeks, she shredded a thick plaid flannel shirt (it was 1992, okay?) of Ben's when he tried to give her a bath, proving to her and me that he needed some lessons in the ways of cats. That bath was her first and her last.

She liked to curl up in small containers, a basket, a bowl, in a little cat ball, her striking face peering out at anyone who got close enough. She had white eyebrows, and her yellow eyes were rimmed all around with black, as though she were Cleopatra in kohl. Both ears were black, but the tip of one was white, and a black marking that took up most of her white face looked like a question mark. After a dozen comments about her unusual markings, I named her Rorschach, after the famous ink blot tests, to be called Rory.

One morning I woke up and pushed open the bedroom door to find two shearling mittens on the threshold. I put them back in the basket downstairs that held our winter things, but the next morning they were just outside the door again. Our indoor kitten had "killed" them and deposited them there for a gift, the way my childhood cat, an outdoor huntress in her youth, had always left us birds and moles. Although I kept putting them back in the basket, she kept gifting them to us, over and over, until spring came and the basket was put away for the season. Some would call this instinct, but I say love.

Rory followed me to New York in a roundabout sort of a way, to the teeth-gritting tolerance of my roommate. Like most cats, Rory was highly selective in her tastes, and when she did not like someone, she made it known expediently and effectively. It occurs to me now that she was quite talented at sussing out her own fans and naysayers; in Caitlin's case she made a sneaky beeline for her dresser drawers any time they were so much as a wedge open, lounging in full furry glory amidst neatly stacked clothing, in spite of the fact she knew she had been banned from the room.

When I lived alone for a year after graduate school, Rory was my most loyal companion. She greeted me at the door every evening, winding around my legs, and slept on my pillow, wrapped cozily around my head. When I moved in with Nicole, she came too, expressing her dislike for the also disdainful Nicole by scratching her handily across the face a few times. "She knows you don't like her?" I offered weakly, in Rory's defense. When that didn't work I was forced to remind Nicole that as a college student she had once been surprised when her mother told her, in my presence, that her childhood cat had died...four months before.

And although Ben is allergic to cats, he had grown to love Rory, and she moved with us, too, to one rented apartment, then the next. The summer I was pregnant with Lily, she grew weak and refused food and water for days on end. The vet took x-rays, ran tests ad infinitum, and finally told us she had cancer of the messerole and would die within weeks. I will put her to sleep now, she said, or you can take her home and bring her back the moment you believe her to be in pain. I could not bear the thought of her being in pain, but she looked up at me, and licked my hand. She was purring. I brought her home. The vet's office was across the street. I could get there quickly if I needed to. The next day she polished off breakfast and never looked back.

When Johnson died, that summer I was pregnant, on the morning of the Fourth of July, Rory was bereft. She walked around in a daze, sniffing at his places and things. Then, for the next few months, she attempted to take his place, for us--for our benefit--of this I have no doubt. When we sat on the couch watching television, she assumed his spot between us, making sure she was touching us both. When we moved his dog bed down to the basement, she sat in the spot it had lain for a full afternoon.

The three of us, Ben, Rory and I, moved into our current building on 16th Street on the night I went into labor with Lily. Sadie, who had been picked up in North Carolina two months before, came too. Like Johnson, one swat was all it had taken. Until this morning, even, Sadie viewed Rory with a certain mischievous worship. I will always regret having no video footage of their hilarious boxing matches. They would quite literally face off in the middle of a room, circle each other, until Sadie lovingly nosed Rory in the side, launching the festivities.

Although Rory had not been thrilled by Lily's arrival--there was some territorial marking in carriages and on clothing, a nip here and there when pushed--the arrivals of Scout, and then Annika, unnerved her irrevocably. When I was pregnant she set out to destroy all baby-related items in a variety of upsetting ways. I was determined not to be one of those people who tosses the pet with the bathwater upon arrival of the baby, and for months I hustled around covering her tracks so nobody would notice how destructive she had become. She was not as strong as she used to be, on top of her mental distress. She had one enormous kidney stone, then another. By the time Annika was a few months old she was angry and incontinent. She had once weighed as much as 12 pounds, but she had become simultaneously insatiable and skinny. At five pounds, the vet gave me a look as he prescribed an antibiotic. "If this doesn't work..." he said, leaving the sentence dangling.

People kept telling me I needed to "take action," by which I knew they meant "put her to sleep." This is a very odd euphemism, I have always found. It is not used in reference to the euthanasia of humans, which is largely illegal. Because we sanction it in animals, we need it to sound softer, I suppose? I wracked my brain for solutions and finally proposed she relocate to Connecticut, where she would spend weekends with us, and nights during the week when Ben was there, and our friend--and Rory's--David could stop by after work and check in.

This worked well for a while. Although she was clearly lonely, she gained a little weight and perked up measurably when we walked in the door. David was good to her--talked to her in a soft voice, kept her water dish full, gave her spoonfuls of canned food when he arrived and sat with her for a while for companionship. And then recently, early in the summer, a family member staying at the house mid-week called to say she had had some kind of a seizure, that she was walking funny, lilting to one side. It happened again, but when we arrived out at the house she was fine again, a little subdued perhaps, and not quite as steady on her feet, but certainly nothing to get alarmed about.

Then, every weekend, she seemed a little bit worse. A little less steady on her feet, a little skinnier. She was having accidents everywhere, and again I tried to stay ahead of anyone noticing, and I never minded doing so, but I was worried. I knew she hated being alone all week, in spite of David's visits. I knew she hated the indignity of the accidents, the fact that she, such a meticulous creature by nature, could not keep her own fur clean.

On Sunday morning, Ben and Lily went downstairs, and she was on the kitchen floor, immobile. Somehow she managed to drag herself a short distance to the triangle behind the door, where she lay, breathing with much labor and audible rattling, when I was summoned from bed. I lay beside her on the cool tile floor, my arm around her limp body, my hand under her wet face. She had drooled, a lot, as though she couldn't control the flow of saliva at all, and I didn't want her head to be lying in it. Lily came and sat with me, too, bringing her special blanket for Rory, crying herself in fear and confusion; I'm not sure she'd ever seen us cry before, that she could remember.

It seemed like a stroke to me. Her back end, in particular, seemed not to be functioning, and as I wiped up a puddle under her tail, I felt she was dying, and although I did not want to admit it to myself, with a tremendous wave of sorrow came a streak of relief. I did not want to have to decide whether she would live or die. This way, I could hold her. I could always know she was not alone when it happened. This, I could bear.

An hour later, she lifted her head and looked at me, around the kitchen. It was Sunday. The vet in Connecticut was closed, but there is a twenty-four hour animal hospital near us in the city, and as gently as i could I lifted her damp, nearly weightless body in my hands and placed her in her hated cat box, for what I thought would be one last ride. When we arrived at the apartment, Lily and carefully unscrewed the top of the box, one screw at a time, so I could lift it off with the least disturbance to her body.


When I lifted the top, she stood, gingerly, as Lily and I watched open-mouthed, and walked directly to the kitchen, where her food had always been kept. I gave her high-quality tuna in oil on a china plate. I borrowed litter from the neighbors and spread it in a pan. I had brought nothing for her from the house; frankly, I was skeptical that she'd survive the hour drive. For the rest of the day, and this morning, I focused on the good. She was walking, mostly. I ignored the fact that her back legs would occasionally give out from under her, causing her to sink gently to the floor on one side. She was affectionate, following me around in the old way, purring as she sat on my lap, having her head and her back stroked. I ignored the jutting bumps of her spinal disks, the thick mats of of fur on her back. She used the litter box once; I ignored the five, six times she did not, tucking a few paper towels in my waistband to catch errant leaks. When I saw her squatting on the couch, I scooped her up and ran to the litter box. But when I placed her in it, her back legs gave way. I could not ignore the defeat I imagined I saw in her face, was feeling myself.

I bargained with myself all morning. I'll wait until Wednesday, then take stock, I decided. Then, as long as she's not in pain, I will wait until the end of the week and bring her back to the vet. She had come back so many times before, from even a certain death proclamation. Why should I think this was different?

Then, as Lily emerged from her bedroom, and I headed into the kitchen with my coffee cup, she suddenly flung her body into the wall. A sound emerged from her that was not just uncatlike but otherwordly, a wail from some place I did not know and could not imagine. Go back to you room, Lily, I commanded, trying not to sound hysterical, and she did, but as I watched helplessly for at least a full minute, Rory's body jerked violently as she spun in drunken loops around the entryway, the sounds emanating every few seconds.

When she stopped, her legs were splayed behind her. She could not move her body, but she lifted her head and looked at me. I went to her with the cordless telephone, stroked her bony back as I dialed the vet. Sure enough, in indomitable style, she was up again ten minutes later, weakly limping from room to room, but I knew now that I needed to take her to the vet. I think I knew more than that.

I don't really want to write much about the rest, and not even because I am so tired I can't see the screen clearly in front of me, and have cried so much today that I burst blood vessels in both of my eyes. There are two types of people in this world: the people who think all this fuss over a cat is a little bit silly, and the people who know all too well how I feel right now. Although I have never before had to make the decision to euthanize a beloved pet myself, I have lost beloved pets before, watched them die, even, and the dying itself is fairly anticlimactic.

Suffice it to say I arrived at the vet's office in essentially pajamas and my "Bush's Last Day" baseball cap, unwashed hair pulled back in a ponytail, eyes already red, reeking of cat urine and tuna fish and covered in clumps of fur. I used a full box of tissues, was treated very kindly by the vet and his assistant over the course of several hours as I tried to think my way out of making a decision. I asked technical medical questions, I held Rory close and whispered to her; I set her down and watched her walk, then freeze in what was likely a mini seizure, then sink to the ground, softly, soundlessly.

Her face looked exactly the same as it always had. There, the fur was not stained or greasy, but shiny and plush. Her eyes were clear and bright. I held her close and stroked her fur from head to tail, shaking the loose fur onto the ground, as I always did. She settled into me, trustingly. When the vet gave her the injection with the sedative, she flinched and then relaxed. They left me alone, and she threw up all over me, twice. I grabbed a towel and placed in between her body and my T-shirt, praying she wasn't sedated yet so her last conscious thought would not be of feeling sick. When the vet came back, he asked me to place her on the table. I held her as he gave her the second shot.

And then we were alone again, and I held my hand on her head as I lay my own head on her body, listening to her heart beat, feeling her chest rise and fall, lifting my head and watching the breath rumble from her chest further down. The vet came in with his stethoscope. A few minutes more, he said. When he was gone I grabbed a pair of scissors from his desk and snipped a little piece of black fur and a little piece of white fur, wrapping them in a Kleenex and stuffing it into my bag. I shook the scissors clean of fur so they would not notice what I had done.

And then. And then he said it was over, and left me alone again with her, and I kissed each paw and the top of her little black head and smoothed her eyes closed. And I walked out to the desk, where the kind assistant did not blink an eye at the sight of me, and waved me away, saying, we will take care of it now. And I picked up the cat box, with a padded piece of sheepskin in the bottom, and Lily's now soiled special pink blanket on top of that, and I walked back out to the car.

And tonight, for the first time in my adult life, I will go to sleep without a cat, without my cat, whose fortunes, whose very existence was so dependent on the whorls of my life, and I will go to sleep not knowing that I "did the right thing," as people keep telling me, but that I did something, and that I didn't do it mindlessly or foolishly or rashly.

People always say: I have a pet, but we don't "have" animals. We are theirs as much as they are ours, and we carry their lives and their deaths in our hands. I don't know if I will ever fully come to terms with this, or the decision I made today. But I do believe in the concept of a soul, as the essence of a living creature, and I believe that animals have them too. And today, on this eleventh day of August, sixteen years after acquiring a cat, I see how much reverence that soul, this relationship, this responsibility, deserves.

Thank you, Rory, for always being my good girl. I loved you, love you still, but never as well as you loved me.