Ending A Life

When me darlin' wife left this world, we had two cats. The younger one was one she'd bought at a local pet store that we really liked. He was special, as she'd previously sworn she'd never get another kitten at a pet store. She'd rather go to a shelter where there were plenty of perfectly good cats who were in much more dire straits and more desperately needed good homes. And yet, on this one day, somehow this little guy charmed her right away. As soon as I saw her point out to the clerk the one that'd caught her attention, when he brought him out and handed him to her, when the kitten just draped the upper half of him onto her shoulder contentedly....I knew we'd just gotten another cat. She named him Zen, and he's still with me now.

The older one was one we'd found as a tiny, timy kitten in the back yard about a year after we moved into the house. There used to be feral cats in the neighborhood, and our best guess was that a mother cat had moved her litter and somehow forgot this last little one. She was young enough when we found her that the vet wasn't sure she'd survive. Her eyes weren't open yet. At the time, she weighed about four ounces and was about half the size of my hand. We named her Moses because she was a foundling (and we didn't realize at the time that she was really a She). When we learned her gender, we just nicknamed her “Mo.”

Mo was my cat. Oh, she liked both of us well enough, and Ariel loved her, too. But she was my cat. At night, she'd sleep next to me. When it got to the point that Ariel & I weren't sleeping in the same room much anymore, Mo would almost always come and curl up next to me. She'd let me brush her out or clip her nails much more easily. And she got to be a big cat, too. At her heaviest, she weighed in at about 18.5 pounds, and it didn't feel like it was flab, either. It just seemed that she was a solid lump of CAT. When she'd come to greet me when I came home from work, it would always warm my heart.

Mo ended up developing diabetes. I've had to wonder if it had some to do with how we'd fed her from the get-go. The vet said it also could've been a genetic predisposition; there was no way to tell. But it was there. For awhile, it was controllable with insulin shots, which she accepted without any crying or complaints or resistance. For a time after Ariel's death, it even seemed to go into remission. She did OK without the shots, and I was just careful to feed her good food and control how much she got. But then the symptoms came back. And they kept getting worse, despite going back on the insulin and going up to some kind of scary doses. Toward the end, the vet said that there was more testing we could do to see if it was being aggravated by something else, but that it'd be expensive and honestly kind of a long shot. Not to mention there wouldn't be any guarantee that, if there were something else found, that it'd be something that could be corrected or at least controlled. And all the while, Mo was having a harder time getting up or walking around. The functioning in her back legs was failing. She was also loosing control of her bladder, which was making for some pretty spectacular messes. It was horrifying to realize that there were times her urine had gotten through the cracks in the wood floor and showered down on parts of the basement.

So about 10 months ago I had the vet put her to sleep.

I was very torn about it. On the one hand, I desperately did not want to lose someone else I loved. I'd just lost my wife; wasn't that enough? I didn't want to imagine what it would be like to come home from work and not have Mo there to greet me. Or to feel her flop down next to my calves as I was trying to sleep. I didn't want to have to deal with another major change that would require an additional painful period of adjustment. Hell, I didn't want to go back to having crying jags again. I know it's OK to cry and that sometimes it helps to get the feelings out—and yes, it's OK for MEN to cry, too—but I have never liked the experience of it.

And at the same time, I could see that Mo was suffering. It was hard for her to get up. It was hard for her to walk around. She couldn't jump up onto the couch anymore. She had to be lifted up, and it was hard for her to jump back down. Hell, she was having a hard time getting up onto the futon I sleep on, which was only about at her head in height. When she'd end up peeing on the floor somewhere, she looked so horribly embarrassed, at least at the time. She was as affectionate as ever, but her energy level was just not the same. I know she still loved me and was glad to be around me, but it was getting harder and harder to see the things that were making her unhappy, too.

It finally came down to it that I couldn't justify avoiding my own fear of more pain and loss by making her suffer to keep her around. I had to let her go. And one of the hardest things to accept about it was that it was as much for ME as it was for her.

Doing that changed some of how I looked at my wife's suicide. Oh, I still felt angry about it. And I still thought (and currently think) that she hadn't done all she reasonably could have to get help for what was going on for her. At the same time, it also gave me a glimpse of what it's like to see suffering going on that doesn't seem to have any good end to it...where there's no hope seen to be grasped. The details and circumstances are different, and in some very important ways. I can't help thinking, though, that the feelings are much the same. And when those get strong enough, they end up running roughshod over reason.

I still miss Mo, in some ways more than the person me darlin' wife had become at the end (and, boy, is THAT a bitch to have to admit!!). But I am grateful for the laughter and love she brought into my life...and the final lesson 'n' shift of perspective she provided when I let her go.

Thank you, Mo.