Liz Grieving in Real Life

My cat, Hank, went to sleep for the last time on Thursday, December 10, 2009, at 10:55am, at the vet's office. He was twenty-one years old. I found out that morning, at an 8:00am appointment, that he had developed a severe heart murmur and had suffered a stroke at some point since March that left him mostly blind in his left eye, and seeing only poorly out of his right. He had arthritis making his back so stiff that he couldn't groom himself properly, and finally, that he had a mass in his abdomen--almost certainly cancer, and in any case, totally inoperable. I made the decision to euthanize him because I couldn't bear the thought of him gradually declining, being in pain, and slowly...unraveling and losing all of his considerable grave dignity, becoming more forgetful and vague, until he was only outwardly the cat I'd known and loved for so long.

I took a pillow off of my bed--the one he had been sleeping on most--and put a clean pillowcase on it. I took a thick towel, and took them both to the vet's office. I settled him down on the pillow, and wrapped the towel around him. He didn't want to snuggle at first, until I wrapped the towel around him, and started scratching his chin and neck. Then he started purring, and kneading.

The vet had already put an IV port in his right foreleg, and while I held him close and sobbed uncontrollably, the veterinarian injected the clear pink solution that stopped Hank's indomitable heart. He shifted once, started to sit up, just as the veterinarian started to inject the drug. I don't remember clearly what happened, except that the veterinarian said, “I know, it feels strange, Hank.” I wanted to tell her to stop, and realized that there was no going back.

Then he just...went limp. The vet listened with her stethoscope, and nodded. His head lay on the pillow between his paws, which no longer kneaded--something that had so often annoyed me in years past (especially when he did it on my bladder) now seemed to be terribly absent and wrong. I couldn't look at his face. I was afraid his eyes would not be closed, and there would be some kind of accusation in them, a betrayal that mirrored what I felt I'd done to him. I felt that I'd used his trust of me to calm him while the vet ended his life. I felt like there should have been some kind of struggle, that it shouldn't have been so easy to erase him from existence. That there should have been anger, rage--something or someone crying out that this was so terribly, horribly wrong, no matter how much sense it made, or how merciful it was to end it this way. How could there be dignity in this, any more than if I had let him suffer and finally fade away to nothing?

The vet and her assistant left me alone with him, at my request. For a long time I simply sat and stroked his head, his ears, his neck, under his chin. I kept expecting him to lift his head and start purring again, to shake his head the way he did when someone found his 'sweet spot' around his ears, and made him cant them at a funny angle, something that had always made me laugh. I talked to him; I don't know what I said, other than “I'm so sorry.” I kept saying it over and over. And I wept. After awhile, I could smell urine on the pillow, and as I reached around to resettle his weight, trying, without thinking, to make him more comfortable, I brushed the damp spot where his bladder had released. It made me cry again--Hank would never have dreamed of lying in his own urine. He had too much dignity.

After a long time, I thought I had finally cried all the tears that were in me for now, and I placed him--still on the pillow and in the towel--on the counter in the exam room, and finally went around to look at him, at his face, one last time. I'd always loved the way he looked so unwaveringly at me when I spoke to him, his wide green eyes somehow so honest and straightforward and uncomplicated--how he was so trusting, so loyal, and completely unaffected. There were no guessing games with Hank, ever. Now, just as I had feared, his eyes were indeed open. But there was no Hank behind them. There was no condemnation—I had plenty of that all on my own.

Instead, they were dull, seeing nothing. And somehow, that was worse than if I had seen betrayal and hurt in his eyes. It meant he was finally, forever, gone.