April 5th, 2022
We’ve just made the call to the vet to bring Vincent in to be euthanized. So here I sit with Vincent in my lap, me weeping, him calm, relaxed and unfazed.
We humans love to torture ourselves, but I refuse to allow myself to think that I haven’t done all I can for him or that I made the decision too soon. The specialists cannot see him until Thursday morning, and he has not eaten anything solid since a few licks off a spoon last Wednesday. I’ve given him subcutaneous fluids a couple of times, so at least he isn’t dehydrated. He’s getting anti-nausea meds, but he still can’t eat, so he continues to lose weight. He has lost a pound in a week. Can you imagine losing 1/10 of your body weight in seven days? I know, it could be great for some of us from a vanity perspective, but entirely dangerous, especially for a cat who you realized had already just lost a pound since the week before. So in two weeks he lost almost 20% of his body weight. Even if the mass in his abdomen was benign and operable, his body has been starved of energy for two weeks and he’s so still and weak that recovery would be a highly unlikely and difficult road. Add to this the fact that our house is in total upheaval as we prepare for a house sale and for Stephen’s trip to Buenos Aires to visit the boat factory. It’s all just too much.
Humans put so much emotion into our life passages, and we make everything about us – our pain, our guilt, our second-guessing ourselves. Cats just do their thing; they don’t have any emotional thoughts around what’s happening. While I try to give Vincent tuna, or anything to make him eat, the other cats are crawling over him to get it, they don’t give two hoots that Vincent is in a bad way. I assume there will be grieving for the other three, and that they will miss him, but it’s not in the same way that we grieve, where we focus on the past and the future so that we miss what was there and worry how we’ll manage without them, instead of just missing that friendly housemate to snuggle or wrestle with at the moment.
I really do wonder how this transition to the east coast and then onto our boat will go without our mediator, peacemaker, referee, comforter, and all around sunny kitty. But I do think that this situation will be so much easier on Vincent. Of course we worry about the stress of not just selling all of our stuff in our house, packing everything up and driving everyone to New England, but the big move to a boat in September. I worry and worry and wonder if my worry has rubbed off. I can’t take blame for this, but I can be thankful to Vincent for easing my mind as far as his anxiety is concerned.
April 23rd
I couldn’t bring myself to post about Vincent until now. I can still cry at a moment’s notice. I still think a box in the other room is him, or expect him to walk through the room and jump right on my lap, uninvited, but always welcome. I threw out his favorite ratty toys, and I was sad to bring home green garlic and chives, which he loved to play with. The best was garlic scapes, which somehow he knew whenever I brought them home. As much as I love them and always look forward to them, they will bring a bit of melancholy from here on out.
I am already seeing the shift in the dynamics of the other three cats. There’s a lot more crabby chatter and occasional yowling and hissing than we’ve seen since we brought a new family member home. Vincent was never alpha cat–he was support cat–for all three of the others. Was it his ability to subordinate that made the other three feel they didn’t need to try to be number-one-cat?