TheBanyanTree: Our Cat is Dying

[Margaret R. Kramer]

Our old cat, she’s 20 years old, is preparing for death.

Her body has become all twisted and frail over the past couple of weeks.
She stopped using her litter box and will occasionally pee on the carpet.
She still drinks from the water dish I keep in our upstairs bathroom, but I
imagine it’s quite a struggle for her to get there.  She refused food last
night for the first time.  Her eyes are clouded by cataracts.  She no longer
sleeps on Ray’s pillow, because I don’t think she can jump up on our bed
anymore.  I made a nest for her with a large beach towel on the floor beside
our bed.  I cover her with it, because she hates being cold, but she’ll kick
it off within minutes.

So we wait for death to come.  We decided to let her die on her own clock
instead of taking her to the vet to have her put down.  I haven’t made death
’s acquaintance, but Ray has, and he isn’t as nervous about death visiting
our home as I am.

Death is a part of life.  I know that.  But I am afraid of dying.  So I’m
watching our cat die in order to get to know death a little better.  And
hopefully through shaking hands with death I will lose my fear for my own
death which is lurking in the future.

My son found her in the woods when she was a kitten.  Obviously, someone
dumped an unwanted litter in the park.  He named her Cinnamon and she became
a part of our menagerie of dogs and cats.  I know we had one dog at the
time, Rex, a killer German Shepherd, and we had two cats, Flick and Sampson.

Cinnamon was not a cat who cultivated a dog’s friendship.  She enjoyed
antagonizing them instead.  But as she got older, she decided to ignore
them.  Age and wisdom taught her that they weren’t worth the trouble.  She
really didn’t go out of her way to befriend cats either.  She tolerated the
cats who came and went in our household.  In fact, she tolerated us.  She
loved to have us pet her and would purr loudly, but she didn’t really seek
us out and demand our attention.

Years ago, she ate a string and it got caught in her intestines.  I noticed
her dragging around the house and had my husband at the time take her to the
vet. The vet got the string out and also had her spayed while he was in
there.

I never had her declawed, so we have areas of the carpet in the house where
she chose to sharpen her weapons.  She was not a mouser or a birder.  She
loved going outside and continued to do so even this fall.  She’s blind from
the cataracts, but she would wander around the house’s perimeter, lie on the
deck for a while in the sun, and then go back into the house, and back up
the stairs to our bedroom and find Ray’s pillow again.

I’m not sure how death will stay with us.  It might be a few days or it
might be a few weeks.  I’ll use what time it’s here to try to get to know
death and understand that it is not to be feared, but endured.

NaNoWriMo word count = 33,011

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net
margaret.kramer at polarispublications.com

Thanksgiving is the holiday of peace, the celebration of work and the simple
life... a true folk-festival that speaks the poetry of the turn of the
seasons, the beauty of seedtime and harvest, the ripe product of the year.
~Ray Stannard Baker