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| Amethyst. Last Photograph in life. 7-20-2009 |
Amethyst the cat died sometime between 3 o’clock and 5:30
o’clock in the morning, Central Daylight Savings Time, July 23rd,
2009. She was born sometime between 1986 and 1988, making her something like 22
or 24 years old at the time of her death. I am on somewhat firmer footing when it
comes to identifying her breed: she was a traditional, or “Applehead” Siamese,
with tortie points. She had a kinked tail, which might take some points off if
she were a show cat. She wasn’t a show cat. She used her kinked tail to great
expressive effect. Like many Siamese cats, she had a full voice and a large
vocabulary, which she also used to great effect. No matter how you add it up,
she lived a good, long life. For this reason, show or no show, I’m giving her
all the points I’ve got. She was an extraordinary, amoral being.
Given her advanced age, my wife, DeLann, and I knew she was
going to die. Eventually. Del would not infrequently say, “I don’t know what
we’re gonna do without that cat”! We knew, towards the end, that it was, in
fact, getting towards the end. I did not keep track, as the end unfolded, of
the series of ‘lasts’. The last time she went up the stairs, the last time she
called out after eating or using the litter, these events were not noted at the
time. They were not significant until her death made them so, and by then it
was impossible to fix them in time and make a fetish of them. Certain events
were more clearly markers of decline, if only in retrospect. I notice she took
to spending time in a room she rarely ventured into, not hiding exactly, but
staying out of the usual path.
In her last year or so, her normal paths were well
established. She spent most of her day in a front room. Most of that time, she
slept on her own bed. She always was up when we were around in the mornings and
evenings, and she always wanted a taste of what ever it was we were eating. She
always made the trip from her front room to the litter box in the bathroom.
From the box, it was usually to the TV room next. That was where the humans
hung out. Amethyst always liked her human company. She always purred when
petted. It was a clear sign of decline when these routines were altered in any
way. After she took to ‘hiding’, I started observing her more carefully. She
had difficulty getting into the elaborate cat box, which featured a ramp and an
enclosure. Her urine ended up pooling in the ramp. The first time this
happened, it was right before I was going out of town. I mopped up the spill,
cleaned the box and took my trip. Amethyst straightened up and flew right for
the few days that I was gone, and for most of the few weeks of her life that
remained. But the cat box manner deteriorated rapidly in that last three days.
I noticed that she was not eating as much as she usually did. Next, she refused
her nutritional supplement.
So I took her to the vet. The vet was outside waiting for
us. “There’s not much left of her”, I said. “No. There’s not much left of her”,
he echoed. I took her in to the little room and placed her on the metal table.
She didn’t like the vet. She gave me a pitiful look. He said she was
“Cachexic”. “It’s from the Greek, I think”. He had to look the word up in a
dictionary. He decided that, although he “did not have a magic wand”, he would
give her “something to prime the pump”. He thought if she could be made to eat
again on her own, she might bounce back as she had done before. When we put her
on the floor while I paid the bill, she made a beeline for the door to the clinic.
She sat looking out at the world beyond the door while I asked about
euthanasia, cremation and such. He embarked on a lengthy description of the
medical process of pet euthanasia, describing in his customary detail the
location of the injection into the pleural cavity. He explained the rationale.
He described the location of the pleural cavity, the space around the lungs,
drawing the shape of a small animal’s chest cavity in the air with his fingers.
He said that he ‘often ended up serving as funeral director.’ He showed me the little wooden box that the
cremains would be returned in. The things I liked this man for in earlier
visits had now somehow become sketchy in my mind. I did my damnedest to hold my
composure together. All the while, Amethyst sat patiently, looking out the
door. She did not lie down on the doormat. She was on alert. It was the last
time she looked out at the world through a door.
Home from the vet, Amethyst conked out on her bed in the
front room. Not too long after I returned home from his office, the vet called
to say he’d been looking over her charts, and had some ideas about how to
proceed. He wondered if I could bring her in at the same time, next morning. I
made the appointment. 10 AM. Somehow, the endgame had been set in motion.
