Shimmering ribbons of plastic stream down one of my walls from ceiling to floor, leftovers from a happy party that still give the living room an extra fix of fun. I don’t remember the official title of the product we ordered off Amazon but to this day I call these ribbons ‘disco spaghetti’, a name I came up with when our now-former cat Tinker sadly started tearing them down to knaw them while nauseous and hopefully induce vomiting. At first we gently but firmly told her to knock it off, with a firm “hey!” and a crisp clap when we caught her in the act, followed of course by soothing coos and pets to indicate that we weren’t deeply upset and it was only the consumption of plastic that displeased us. Before too long she was vomiting even without the disco spaghetti, so we took her in to the vet and learned that most of her teeth were terrible. She was 12 years old, and apparently after a certain amount of time old cats will just have their teeth collapse and her teeth-collapsing time had come. The thesis was that she’d been trying to eat her beloved hard food by gumming it a little bit and swallowing it mostly whole, which was irritating the shit out of her digestive system no pun intended. So it was time to say goodbye to most of her teeth, and she had a day-long procedure to have them yanked out professionally and during her surgery we endured the longest cat-less day at home we’d ever had.
Tinker was fed via an automated device that whirred every four-or-so hours from 7am to 9pm as it dispensed a reasonable bowl-full of food. You would hear an introductory wind-up whine and then a bunch of little clinks as the pellets hit the metal of the bowl and then a few clicks as the machine reset itself for the next dispensation - whatever else was going on, Tinker would be sprinting for the bowl the second that the first sound came out of that thing, and then she’d gobble the food down and then I guess forget that we existed. If we weren’t in the living room when she finished her meal she’d start meowing the loudest and loneliest sounds I’d ever heard from her until one of us emerged from whatever digital meeting we were in and made eye contact with her. Alicia’s a therapist, and it’s considered bad form to interrupt a patient mid-session while they’re baring their soul about childhood trauma, so the task of consoling the beast usually fell to me. I was happy to do so, it being one of the many ways that I’d learned to love on the cat and express my new identity as Cat Dad. The cat was a beautiful interruption, demanding attention when she wanted it and expressing zero shame about having and expressing desires and needs. Such wisdom was an inspiration to me. She had a particular kind of meow she’d make when she insisted on connecting with me immediately, and I miss that meow very terribly in our sadly-silent house.
After her surgery she needed to be coaxed into eating. We’d sit with her by her food bowl and give her patient pets and soothing coos and encourage her as she slowly figured out how her toothless mouth worked. She’d still leap and run over to the food, but now she started sniffing it with concern, as if she was now worried about poison. I thought she’d managed to associate food with throwing up, so we switched her food around - she ate here and there, but not nearly as much as before, and also kept on vomiting. The vet thought that maybe her surgery wasn’t healing super-well, since her blood work showed signs of persistent immune system activation - they gave her opiates to maybe numb the pain enough to help her enjoy food again, but all those did was creepily delete her personality. She acted drunk, staggering around and rubbing up against the food like it was a friend but not going so far as to actually ingest it. After a few days the opiates wore off and nothing was different - day by day, little by little, she reacted to the food dispenser less and less, running over slower and slower, now only raising her head and looking over at the food, now doing nothing at all. Before, Tinker would devour every morsel that came out of that thing, leaving a fresh empty bowl for the pellets to clatter into. As she stopped eating there would be a layer of uneaten pellets already in the bowl when the timer went off and the new pellets would fall with a lot of dull little thuds onto the old pellets and I’d be reminded once again that our cat wasn’t eating anymore.
We’d had some post-surgery blood work done, and the vet had called us that evening nearly-ecstatic to declare that Tinker’s results were healthy and normal and that she was on the road to recovery. After another week of no eating we took her back in for another examination, where a different vet felt her up and discovered a lump in her gut and ordered some new images taken. Tinker’d had some X-Rays prior to her surgery, but apparently they’d missed the lump! The vet called me later to discuss the findings and responded to my polite “hi how are you?” with a sigh and a little silence before “I’ve been better”. This vet went on to explain that these lumps grow very fast and that’s why the last vet might have missed it, and that the last time this vet had seen one of these lumps the pet had been dead in a matter of months. I made an ultrasound appointment to see if it was cancer as I entered the first stage of grief, Denial - this had to be nothing but a critical accumulation of Disco Spaghetti. She had a big ol’ ball of plastic in her gut that she’d shit out one of these days and we’d have our beloved cat back just like that.
The ultrasound confirmed that yes, it was indeed cancer - Lymphoma on her intestines, something that could maybe be managed but definitely couldn’t be cured. We made an appointment for the kitty oncologist for their next available slot a few months out, but I had a feeling Tinker wouldn’t make it until then.
On a whim I bought a new brand of soft food, and she ate little bits of that for the first part of the next week. She ate less and less of it but we kept leaving it out, along with her hard pellets, and then we also tried making bone broth, and our house really started to stink of uneaten cat food. She sometimes ate when we coaxed her, less and less, and we felt truly helpless - we wanted more than anything for her to eat, and she wouldn’t, but even knowing that she probably wouldn’t eat we couldn’t just not serve her food. I bought her a bunch of catnip and toys, but she stopped playing with them - she didn’t get excited even when I comically dumped a pile of catnip right in front of her. Her normal flow of life stopped - she no longer lept up and slept in her normal places, instead crouching on the floor in unusual spots and always being ready to throw up a bunch of colorless spit. In this way my mourning process began well before she actually died, when the life I shared with her was over. Our rituals and routines would never happen again, even though she was technically alive. She existed now as this strange chimera of living and dead, teetering on the precipice of eternity - we hoped that she would curl up and pass in her sleep one night, but a checkin with the vet about hospice care convinced us that she had weeks of worse-by-the-day agony ahead of her, so we made the call - the one call that no pet owner wants to make and the one call that every pet owner is guaranteed to make.
It’s to their great credit that the service we used - Lap of Love - didn’t answer the phone with any customary “how are you?” or “how can I help you?”. If I’m calling you then you know how I’m doing and how you can help me, and some part of me would prefer to not acknowledge it even as I make it happen. We arranged for “the procedure” the following morning. As we were on the phone, Tinker sensed our agitation and weakly tottered her now-skeletal body over to be closer to us. Alicia’s therapy-powers gave us the ability to have Tinker legally classified as an emotional support animal, which saved us some money on rent but was also no-bullshit - that cat was emotionally attuned to us and was ever-available for soothing touches if she sensed that we needed it, and indeed we often did. Her working to console us about having her put to sleep was a beautiful twist of the knife, one last moment of love, one last reminder of what we had just committed to lose.
I was expecting to feel and process grief throughout all of this, but another emotion surprised me - guilt. We were responsible for Tinker’s life, and we had to make the call as to when to end it. Would we make the call too early, cutting her and us off from happy moments together that had never felt more precious? Or would we make the call too late, stringing out her suffering for our sake, keeping her alive and in unimaginable pain only because we were too self-centered to let her go? The moment itself managed to feel both too early AND too late, with her relational quality of life being strong and her physical quality of life being terrible, which probably means that we made the right call at the right time. I’ll never know for sure.
We both took the day off of work and spent as normal as possible a morning with her. My favorite ritual, long since ended, was when she’d burst into the bedroom and meow at us until we sat on the couch with her as we drank our coffee, her curling up next to one of us and falling asleep and staying asleep until food time rolled around again. I called it tucking her in for her morning nap, and some part of me hoped we’d have one last go of it before saying goodbye, but we found her crouched in the dark in our guest bathroom. We did try and spoil her, but that opportunity seemed to have gone when her appetite did. We layed around on the floor with her, took pictures of her and looked at old memories we had of her in full health, and then shortly after 10:30 the vet arrived and by 11am she was gone. 10 business days later we picked up her ashes in a tasteful little box and the events of her life were over.
We’ve since gotten relatively-used to living in a catless house, but I haven’t gotten used to entering one. Every time we’d walk in the door she’d trot up to greet us with a happy bounce in her step, her bell tinkling and her meows sounding extra percussive with the trod of her feet, vocalizing like crazy until we pulled down the treat container from the pantry and rattled it and shook out a treat or two onto her scratching pad and stroked her with her fur brush and watched her scratch that cardboard with wild animal passion, full of energy and life, filling the world that we shared, ever familiar and ever surprising, a beautifully-mysterious flavor of consciousness, connected until the end. That greeting, that joyous reunion, is how I’ll always remember her. However sentimental and irrational it may be, some part of me will be forever hopeful that after all of this is over and my time in this world is done that I’ll have that joyous reunion waiting for me one last time.