I agreed to have my cat of 15 years euthanized the other day. This was the first time I’d ever had a pet euthanized. The other three long-term pets I had in my lifetime all died naturally by my side. They just slipped away asleep after periods of having gotten weaker and more lethargic. It seemed as if this cat was going the same way.
She had been diagnosed with a hyper-thyroid condition, apparently common in cats. Vets said if that condition couldn’t be corrected with the pills they prescribed, her various systems would just shut down.
That’s what eventually seemed to be happening. She just stopped eating. She wasn’t tempted by any of her favorite tidbits. With increasing feebleness, she would just get up to drink water and then go back to sleep. After the second day of this, I thought the end must be near. I’d go in quietly and check on her every couple of hours. But no, she was always still there. My checking in on her would rouse her to get up, go drink some more water, then retire again.
Into the fifth wrenching day of this, I felt that just perhaps I had been wrong about the inevitability of her demise. So I took her to an emergency clinic, thinking there might be something that could be done to turn her condition around.
But no. The vet there found my cat had some other compromising condition on top of her hyperthyroidism. She said that cats can live for amazingly long periods without eating. But that didn’t indicate there was any hope for real recovery. Correcting both of my cat’s conditions would have required more than heroic measures, and then would have resulted in a brief, sluggish life under medication. So we decided to euthanize.
My cat didn’t make that decision any easier in those last minutes though. As emaciated as she was, she rallied into kittenish animation. She thrived on the stimulation and attention the vets and their assistants were giving her. She played with the scale on the examining table. She explored the examining room with keen interest. She purred in sheer delight at all the patting and praise she was getting. However I knew if I took her home, the wasting would just continue apace. So we went ahead.
I didn’t think I would break down at the prospect of this ending. Frankly, Gammon had always been more of a duty for me than a chosen delight. I had first seen her as an apparently abandoned kitten cadging food in the bushes of the Post Office across the street from me. Every time I went out my front door, she would bounce out of the foliage and attempt to follow me back home. I resisted this forced adoption for some time. I then had an elderly dog whose last years didn’t seem likely to be made any easier by having a bumptious kitten around. But the cat’s persistence began to affect me. I started to worry about her.
I’d look often out the front window to see if I could glimpse her darting through the Post Office shrubbery. Was she still there? Was she alright? If I didn’t see her for a day, I worried she might have gotten run over. Once around midnight, my heart almost stopped in fear for her. I saw a group of 18-19-year-old boys who had all the earmarks of being members of Hell’s Angels sauntering down the street. Their jackets were emblazoned with skull and crossbones; one had a dragon tattoo fuming an inky coil of smoke around his neck; one had a length of heavy tow chain dangling from his belt. As they passed in front of the Post Office, the little cat darted out, stood square in front of them blocking their path, and meowed a plea that was at once both piteous and commandeering. Oh no! I almost wretched at what I thought would surely be the ensuing cruelty. I pictured the gang gleefully twisting the cat’s head off, sadistically pulling out a knife and cutting her legs off.
When the boys didn’t immediately do that, but instead stopped, sat down on the Post Office steps, and extended pinched fingers out to her while cooing and meowing a come hither encouragement, I was not immediately reassured. I thought they were probably playing cat and mouse with her, teasing her with the prospect of friendship – so that they could all the more cruelly surprise her with some horrible pain. But they didn’t do that.
They took turns gently stroking her, talking baby talk to her. Then one of them left the group. When he came back a few minutes later from the 7-Eleven a few doors down the street, he was carrying a can of cat food. He crouched back on the steps, popped the lid off the can, and set it down for the kitten. The boys looked on with good-deed grins of satisfaction as they watched her gobble up what was probably the only decent meal she’d had in days. So they weren’t going to hurt her, all their appearance of brutality to the contrary.
But then after a while, it was plain the boys were starting to get bored. They had meant this to be a one-night stand, no long-term commitment. They got up and started to walk away. The kitten followed them. They looked back, clearly worried that this demanding little creature might attach itself to them. They picked up their pace. The cat matched their speed. Soon she had them on the run! It was the climaxing chase scene you find in every proper action film. It was The French Connection all over again. Except this time, the hooligans being chased weren’t in a car – they were on foot. And their pursuer wasn’t a cop in a souped-up Fury, but a10-ounce kitten intent on finding a home.
The boys ran full tilt to the end of the block – checked and saw the cat was still coming on strong. They shot around the corner and fell silent. They were likely using every evasive tactic in the book. I could picture them cutting through the alley, down the pub’s gangway, then falling in hushed caution under Mr. Bandera’s back porch. “Shhhh! Don’t let her hear us. Maybe she’ll go right past!”
Whatever they did, they succeeded in eluding her, because in a little while, I saw her straggling back into the Post Office bushes - defeated, unadopted.
But not for long. A few nights later, as I coaxed my dog through the front door after our nightly perambulation, I thought I saw a gray flash of something shoot past us into the house. I dismissed it as some trick of my eyesight though – until I saw the kitten sitting in full proprietary possession of my computer desk. I had been in the middle of a computer backgammon game with myself when I’d taken my break to walk the dog. As I watched in amazement at the sheer assurance the kitten had of its right-of-way – she leaped onto my keyboard, brought the computer screen back to life, and made the decisive move that won the game for me. So I dubbed her “Gammon” - and that was that.
As I suspected it might, the cat’s presence in the house probably harried my elderly, failing dog to a somewhat earlier-than-otherwise grave. The dog took back seat to this new arrival’s needs, although Gammon was never very active or mischievous. She was fairly self-contained from the start.
Still, my caretaking of her tended to be done more from a sense of obligation than from the heart. When my dog died, I very much would have liked to have adopted another shelter dog. But the timing never seemed right. When I bestirred myself to do something about it, the potential adoptee’s biography mentioned that it should be an “only pet,” without any other animals in the house, especially without any cats. Then I procrastinated. Then I became the official guardian of a feral colony of cats who have stuck close to me in my back yard. It seemed it would be too much to try to introduce a dog into this reign of cats inside and out. And so fifteen years slipped away.
Because of what I thought was my partial detachment from the project of Gammon, I didn’t think I would cry when it came time to euthanize her. I had fulfilled my commitment to her – better than those Hell’s Angels had been prepared to do. I had given her a good life. So I was surprised when I started to sob uncontrollably in the vet’s examining room as we closed in on our conclusion.
But then the worst of this overwhelming sadness passed. After the decision had been made and it came to actually giving her the injection, I was even able to muster a calmer, scientific attitude towards the procedure. I chose to stay in the room while the vet administered the shots. They first inserted a catheter just above her paw first. Then two quick injections – one to anesthetize her, one to stop her heart. It seemed she was gone even as the first needle approached the port of the catheter.
In my newly becalmed (or benumbed?) state of scientific curiosity, I noted how absolutely painless this passing had been. By contrast, I remembered some of what I’d read about the occasional failure of lethal injections given to Death Row inmates. I’d read that there had been unseemly delayed reactions, and that even a few recipients of this form of capital punishment had had time to report excruciating burning sensations as the chemicals coursed through them. But none of that had happened here. I wondered, if animals can be so humanely dispatched – why can’t they always find the right chemicals and dosages to dispatch humans equally humanely?
By this time, with all the long worry about what to do about Gammon’s failing and when to do it behind me, I became almost inwardly jovial at elaborating the analogy I was making between euthanizing an animal and giving a prisoner a lethal injection. I patted Gammon on the head and silently speculated, “What did you do to have it come to this? Were you a little serial killer? Too bad, you couldn’t beat the rap.”
I guess none of us will beat the rap in the end.
The clinic had made an imprint of Gammon’s paw in a clay medallion – a token they gave me to take home and bake as a permanent remembrance.
I put it on the seat next to me in the car as I pulled out of the clinic’s parking lot. I’d driven a few yards before I realized that I was in the middle of a thick fog. This uncharacteristic daytime fog in Chicago, juxtaposed with that paw imprint medallion resting on the passenger seat - inevitably called to mind Carl Sandburg’s poem:
The fog comes
On little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
On silent haunches
And then moves on…..
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