Loss & Grieving Revisited

It's been more than six months since my post of euthanizing my cat, Hank, and it wasn't until just a few minutes ago that I reread what I wrote in December 2009. It hurts just as much now as it did that day. I wonder if perhaps I was wrong to have included every detail I could remember about that small part of just one day, because it made me cry all over again. I am still crying as I write this.

I've had to discipline myself to think of other things, to avoid even speaking about my old friend, because there have been times when it would have been entirely inappropriate to burst into tears just from a casual mention of his passing.

And I still feel like a murderer. Guilty. Logic doesn't help. Emotion just is, and isn't either right or wrong, but I can't help but wonder if I should have waited an extra day, spent time with him, said a longer good-bye, instead of doing it quickly so I would still have the courage. I don't know. I just know that it still feels horribly, horribly wrong.

I'd had him since he was a kitten. I got him when I was thirteen years old, and he and his brother Frank were so wild they wouldn't let anybody get within three feet of them. They lived in the hay barn, and hunted. Hank was a particularly prolific hunter, and learned how to catch moles. Frank was the more mild of the two, and was the first one to become friendly.

Frank was killed by coyotes sometime during the time while I was away at college. Hank was lonely, and getting careless--he had two narrow escapes with coyotes himself, and came to me (even not entirely tame) to get treated. It was the most amazing and humbling experience: this big cat voluntarily lying down on a clean towel and letting me pour hydrogen peroxide over these horribly stinking abscesses that had formed from coyote bites. I didn't have to hold him in place. I didn't have to confine him. He came every day and laid down to get the hydrogen peroxide poured on, and then the antibiotic ointment, like clockwork.

Inevitably, during those clean-and-medicate sessions, he couldn't lie still any longer from the pain of getting out the dead, infected skin, and he'd get up and pace. Then he'd come and lie down again; sometimes I'd have to call to him and pet him and help him calm down, but I never had to force treatment on him. It never ceased to awe me, the way he trusted me without question.

He'd been staying at my parents' place, and he was getting older. He started having urine crystals causing urinary tract infections, and I knew if he didn't come inside permanently that he would eventually get sick and not get help in time. So I brought him home with me. There was absolutely no adjustment time. He went from being exclusively outdoor to exclusively indoor, and never tried to go outside again, for the rest of his life. I guess I wasn't the only one who had decided that he'd needed to "retire."

I don't think I'll ever quit missing him. He was a calm, steady, affectionate cat who I loved as a very dear friend for twenty-one years.