What I Learned From My Cat’s Death
“Squamous cell carcinoma with bone invasion.” I kept my composure while the vet told me about the results from my cat’s biopsy the week before, and explained what it meant. As she talked, I felt fairly on top of things. This was big, but I was ready to deal with it. My cat was over 15 years old. I knew that she would not be with me forever. And then the the “E” word came up (“euthanasia”), and I lost it.
My brain stopped being cool.
First, I gave the very nice vet an earful (calmly; I did not yell), for suggesting I should kill my cat right after delivering a diagnosis without giving me a chance to think about it. Then I hung up and bawled for a good five minutes or so in the stairway at work. I went back to my desk with red, puffy eyes, shell-shocked and sad. I felt bad that Camilla was at home, alone, suffering in pain, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I knew that cats got cancers frequently. It had just never happened to one of *my* cats. Not even to any of our family pets, as far as I knew. But maybe some of them had cancer, and we didn’t know. We always just let our pets “go” when their time came. My parents never took an animal to the vet and then gave me a story about how “she’s happy on a big farm, now.” No.
We once came home from a family outing to find our big, male long-haired tuxedo cat, Foose — (His real name was “Footlocker,” but it was also short for “Fusbol,” because my dad liked to be clever, and he also liked German things) — cold and still on the bricks outside our house. I think someone poked him with a stick to be sure. Yup, he was dead.
My parents wrapped Foose in a towel, and we buried him the next day in the side of our yard where the tiger lilies grew by the garage. This was our pet cemetery, which over the years became filled with other cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, I think a gerbil, and some kittens who didn’t make it.
The death of animals was something that came on its own. We had no control on the timing of it. The best we could do would be to make the animal comfortable, if we knew it was sick, or deal with it when the situation arose. The possibility of choosing death for an animal wasn’t simply out of the question — the question never came up. And so, I had never been faced with the possibility, as a child or an adult, of making this choice. And suddenly I was having to ask a question that I had never asked myself: what would I do, if I had to choose?
Camilla was a very special cat. I adopted her in my senior year of college. While my three roommates had boyfriends or girlfriends (which I heard a lot of, because we had a small house), I became the resident kitten lady.
I adopted her from my manager at the art gallery where I worked. A retired ex-cop, Kyle lived in a log cabin in the woods one town over. At first, I thought I wanted to adopt her brother, a svelte grey-and-white kitten with perfectly symmetrical markings. But in the end, I was seduced by his sister’s big, watery eyes, and irregular spots (also grey-and-white), as she played under the piano, almost like she wanted to be found.
On the way home from my boss’s house, she sat in a corner of the dashboard of my old Audi 5000 wagon, and I thought to myself, “Your name is Camilla.”
Everyone loved her. I mean, everyone. She was affectionate, sweet, and extremely cuddly. She inspired more than one person or couple to adopt a cat who had never had cats before. When people met her who were unfamiliar with cats, they were surprised by how much they liked her, because evidently, they hadn’t expected to. Maybe they were told that cats were “evil.” I’ve heard this frequently, from dog- and cat-people alike. And I would always tell those people, “You haven’t met my cat.”
(This just in: Cats are not evil, and Other Myths.)
People who did already like cats would spontaneously say things like, “She’s the best cat I’ve ever interacted with.” And I swear I didn’t put them up to it. Obviously, I thought she was the best, because she was my cat. But I was biased.
When I first brought Camilla home, she immediately hid under a chair. When I found her and pulled her out, she started purring up a storm. I concluded that maybe she wanted me to find her. This became a ritual game/comfort mechanism that we would repeat any time I moved with her to a new place. She would run to a small, dark spot, usually under something, and hide. And when I found her and pulled her out, she would start purring extra loudly and let me hold her for longer than usual.
Most of the time, her limit on being held was around 5 seconds. She didn’t mind being picked up. She just didn’t want to stay there very long. She liked having her feet on the ground, most of the time.
The summer after college, when she was almost a year old, I lived with her in a giant house that I sublet for the summer along with two or three girls who were still in college — though not the college I went to. One day, Camilla snuck out when some of their friends came over, and didn’t come inside until I got home later that night. I was a bit mad that she had gotten out, since we lived in the city, but to be fair, she was very fast, at the time.
Up in my room, she did the thing that she always used to do, where she would lay on her back and look up at you with her big, green eyes as if to say, “Aren’t I cute?” And some cats might not let you rub their bellies, but she did.
This time, when I looked down, I saw a two-inch gash on her lower abdomen. The cut was smooth, and fresh like it had just happened. Somehow, there was no blood, just a long gash, pink on the inside. I cried when I saw it. She ended up needing six stitches for the cut, costing about $100 per stitch. We never did know what caused it exactly. But I loved her, and when it’s a pet that you love, you don’t mind the cost.
Cancer is different. With the diagnosis of cancer, it wasn’t just the cost of treatment I was thinking of. It was the quality of her life. Sure, if I wanted to, and had all the means available to me that I could want, I could have spent tens of thousands of dollars on invasive, expensive treatments to aggressively treat the cancer that was growing so fast, it would probably keep growing anyway. Then, in addition to the discomfort of the tumor that was in her upper jaw, just under her left eye, she would have had the pain and sickness that humans have with chemo, or with surgery, plus the stress of going to more doctors. I just couldn’t even think about putting her through that. The pain medication was helping, and it was expensive enough. That was a price I was willing to pay for her comfort. Also, as I said, she was already 15 years old. Elderly, in Cat Years.
She moved with me to California and stayed with me there for the better part of six years. She moved back with me to the East Coast. She waited patiently during times in my early twenties when she couldn’t live with me for whatever reason — if I was overseas or my apartment didn’t allow it — and stayed with my parents.
Camilla got to be a little, *ahem*, bigger, after I took her to get spayed. Perhaps it was due to the change in hormones. Perhaps due to comfort eating from stress and pain, since she was staying with my parents at the time, and they had other cats, so they left food out constantly. All I know is, I dropped off my skinny little Camilla to the vet, and when I saw her a few weeks later, she looked practically spherical. It was almost funny.
I was astonished, and a little upset that my parents hadn’t done anything or told me (par for the course, for my parents, but that’s another story. Maybe a book-length one), but how could I blame Camilla? It wasn’t her fault. I loved her, fat or not. In fact, when she was bigger, I just felt there was more of her to love.
Over the years, she did lose some weight, but remained fairly large. I tried various things to try to get her weight down, but nothing really worked. At one point, I bought her one of those feeding balls, where the cat is supposed to play with it to get the food. The dry food pieces drop out of holes in the ball, while the cat bats it around.
Not Camilla.
I came home to find her lying on the floor with the blue food ball next to her, lazily tapping it with her paw, and then eating the piece of dry food off the floor without budging an inch. I laughed and picked her up to give her a big hug. At that point, I decided that, since she was smart enough to hack the feeding ball, she could be as fat as she darn well pleased.
And she remained generally healthy in spite of the weight. Before the cancer started, her worst health issue was arthritis, mainly in her rear legs. Probably it was connected to weight, but not unusual for older cats (or humans, for that matter).
In fact, she had a great checkup right after she turned 15. The vet check was in September. A few weeks later, in October, I noticed a single pink tear dripping from her left eye. I remember the date: October 12th. I remember, because it was Yom Kippur.
I took her back to the vet that week, and they tried treating her with antibiotics, but it did nothing, because her eyes were not infected. After three vet visits, they referred me to an animal opthalmologist. That doctor confirmed that her eyes were perfectly healthy. Miraculously, she let him irrigate the tear duct, and fluid did pass through, but the vet said that it seemed constricted. He could not say why.
I put two and two together. I knew that she’d had resorptive lesions on her teeth for several years, and I remembered our other vet saying something about tooth infections. It seemed plausible to me that an infection in the root of a tooth could cause pressure on the tear duct, and so I started to blame myself for never getting those lesions treated. But I did the next best thing, which was to call and schedule a tooth removal.
The day of that appointment, the vet called me in the morning to tell me that it was cancer, not an infection. And so, instead of removing teeth, they took a biopsy. That was December 2nd.
It took longer to figure out that it was cancer than I had to even decide what to do about it. When the vet told me, I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want to decide. I was hoping that I would not have to. I was hoping that Camilla would hang on for as long as she could, that I would take care of her for as long as I could, and one day she would just choose her moment and be gone.
In the end, I decided that I would let her “tell” me if or when she was ready to go. Not tell me exactly, in so many words. I decided to pay as much attention as I could to how she was feeling, how sick she was, how much I thought she could really take.
She was a very brave girl. People always say that about animals and kids when they are sick and/or have to have a surgery. But really, she was. I was the one freaking out, and crying into her fur. She was calmly sitting in the sun, like she always would, and purring like she always did, cuddling up next to my pillow at night.
Over the next three weeks, she lost most of the teeth in her upper left jaw. I never saw the teeth fall out. I just noticed that they were gone, and there was a little bit of blood on her fur by her mouth. She started drooling more on that side as well, and I frequently had to wipe it away with a tissue. I put a towel down where she usually had her head. Her eye was still dripping, and I would dab that away as well with a Q-tip.
Still, she slept by my pillow and purred, seemingly all night. In the morning, she would roll over and just look at me, and stretch out her paw toward my face, like she used to do to wake me up. But now, it seemed, just to do it. And I would linger in bed, trying to catch a few more minutes with her before having to go to work.
I was her nurse, not only wiping her face, but giving her pain medication twice a day, and antibiotics for the sutures where they took the biopsy.
In the second and third week, her jaw seemed to chatter sometimes, probably from pain, and she would shake her head, as if she could shake the cancer out. I noticed one day how the tumor had pushed her eye socket higher than it used to sit. The eye itself was still round. The entire orbit had moved, and I could feel the bone protruding on the top of her head. And yet, she was still somehow adorable. She was also eating, using the litter box, and moving around by herself. And I knew that this could not go on much longer, but that it would, because she was nowhere near dying, yet increasingly uncomfortable every day.
I guess that’s what I mean by brave. She never really complained. She did not act like she was in pain. She just pushed through, and it was almost like she was the one comforting me, knowing what was happening.
Seeing the cancer progress to quickly, I made my decision. Even after I felt she had “told” me she was ready, I guess I wasn’t quite ready. But after a few days, I emailed the vet. I had gotten a referral for a veterinarian who made house-calls for end-of-life care — I preferred that term to other options, and I liked that this vet used it, too. I objected when people said “put down,” because it sounded like the kind of thing you did for a wounded horse or a rabid dog. But she was nothing like that. She wasn’t a burden or a danger, she just needed help. And the vet understood.
On the day the vet came, I took the day off work to spoil Camilla as much as possible. I let her eat as much as she wanted. I fed her chicken right off my plate, and more than a few nibbles. When the sun hit the rug on the front porch, I opened the door, so that she could sit there, and I sat with her, knitting a scarf. I spent the day also recording sounds of her purring, in case I wanted to listen to them later.
A friend of mine came to my house after work to be with me for the procedure. I was so grateful for that, because I had recently broken up with my boyfriend, and he was out of town anyway. I did not know how I was going to get through this alone. I didn’t know how I was going to get through it, period.
When the vet arrived, she was a petite woman with blue hair in a pixie cut. She looked almost like an actual pixie, carrying an old-fashioned leather doctor’s bag. In my room, she met Camilla and explained the procedure. My friend waited in our living room.
When I was ready, the doctor administered the first drug, which was to “relax” her. It took a few minutes to take effect, and as soon as she had the injection, instead of “relaxing,” Camilla got up, very wobbly, and made a beeline for her food dish, while I helped her so she didn’t fall. She immediately started eating, as she got sleepier and sleepier, and finally just lay down with her face on the plate. The vet and I laughed, and she said she had never seen an animal do that before, but that the meds could cause a sudden increase in appetite. “Well, she’s special,” I said.
So then, we were ready. Or almost. I got on the bed with Camilla in my lap, and stacked pillows behind me, so that I could be comfortable. I held her in my arms, kissed her head and talked to her while the vet prepared the next step. Camilla’s eyes were open, but glassy. She was there, but not like usual. “Are you ready?” Yes, I was ready.
The pixie-haired vet said it would take about a minute. And she took a bandana that she had brought just for this purpose, and covered the syringe and the tube that connected to Camilla’s femoral artery. I was grateful for her consideration.
I wasn’t ready, really. I had only had four weeks to get used to the idea of my cat dying, so no, I wasn’t really ready. I had loved her for 15 years, and she had become probably the most stable element of my life, and no, I wasn’t ready to lose her. I would never be quite ready. But I thought I had had a few more years to come to terms with losing her, and now I only had a few minutes. So I had to be ready, out of necessity, for her. I had done all that I could.
And as I held her, her body became loose and seemed to sink into gravity. It felt like now, she was fully relaxed. She was so relaxed, her body became almost like liquid wrapped in fur. It was hard to lift her, to carry her to the box I had specially prepared to bury her in, because there was no resistance at all. I cried openly, unashamed, because it was how I had to feel. As soon as I put her in her box, nestled in with a few toys and covered with a white cloth, my friend was there to give me a hug.
I had been so afraid of this procedure. I had been so afraid that choosing to end my pet’s life was like some kind of Hubris that I wasn’t qualified for. It is possible that I had even judged people in the past for doing this, thinking that they were just giving up on their pets too easily. And now I know for sure that this is not the case. Now I know that, in most situations, it is not giving up. It is humane, it is caring, and it is one final loving thing that you can do for your pet. I know that is how it felt for me with Camilla.
And I also was surprised by how intimate it was. This was a pleasant surprise. Maybe, because I elected to have the vet come to my home, it felt more that way. I did this because I knew that it would stress Camilla out to bring her to the vet’s office, and I didn’t want that to be the last thing she experienced. It was also better for me, because it got to be so private, and so personal.
And that is what death is, really. It is a private, personal experience, the last thing that you do with your body, and no one can do it for you. We often forget this, because we are too busy being afraid of death. We are afraid of the uncertainty of what happens afterward. We are afraid that the manner of it might be unpleasant. We are afraid because we don’t know when. We are afraid because we don’t know what it will be like. We are also afraid because we don’t like to lose the people we love.
There is an entire movie industry built around the fear of death. People spend billions of dollars on “anti-aging” products and procedures because people generally want to get as far away from death as they can. The global anti-aging industry was valued at $281.6 billion in 2015 and is expected to surpass $300 billion by 2020. But all of that money cannot keep us from what we think aging represents — the fact that we will one day pass away ourselves.
Holding Camilla in my arms, I felt the energy, the resistance go from her body. “She is at peace,” the vet said. And she was. And as she melted, my fear melted with her. I realized that dying was nothing to be afraid of. It is not the enemy that we make it out to be. It is calm. It is peaceful.
Death is — stay with me for a second — death is the ultimate relaxation. Literally, in fact. It is the only way that a body can be fully relaxed. Even in sleep, we carry tension. We carry it all the time. And I know, because I used to be a massage therapist. It was my job to help people feel relaxed. And it is not an easy job to do. People need their tension, for all kinds of reasons.
We say “rest in peace,” because somewhere in the recesses of our language, we know that death is peaceful. Only when we are not living, do we completely rest from the turmoil and strain of our lives. And that turmoil and strain is not all bad. We live for that resistance. We live for that struggle — to do better, to be better, to get what we want. The stress of life is what keeps us going, most of the time. We resist gravity. We resist other people. We resist ourselves. And one day, when we don’t resist; we are at peace.
The truth is, we need tension in order to be alive. We need it to stand, to move, to breathe. We NEED tension. But we do not need ALL of that tension.
And part of what tenses us is, ironically, fear of death. That uncertainty, that not-knowing. It scares us. But the truth is that death itself is not that scary. It’s just a thing that happens. Like birth: also just a thing that happens.
Heck, BEING ALIVE is scary. Life is uncertain. Life is not peaceful. Life is full of resistance. Life can hurt you as much as it can uplift you. Perhaps it is life that should give us more fear. But instead, we focus our fear on the end of life. And I don’t say this to be pessimistic. I say this because it is true. Things and people in life can and do hurt you. There are things in life that you very well should be afraid of. But that does not mean you should live in fear. We know this. You just have to learn to live *with* fear. And so, we can learn to live with a knowledge of death.
We tend to think that our life is bookended by birth on one side, and death on the other. And this is mainly true. I felt that the vet with the blue hair was like a home midwife, but in reverse, and for pets. And the experience felt a lot like that. Except that birth, whether “naturally” or by C-section, is a violent, traumatic experience for everyone involved. There is no way to enter the world without blood and screaming. But it is possible to leave with one quiet breath.
Once everything was done, and Camilla was gone, I had a moment of clarity. It struck me that, to say that “death is a part of life” means more than we think it means. It really means that death is present, not just at the end of life, but throughout, just a little bit, all the time, while you are still alive. That in order to live fully, you need to have a little bit of death with you — not in the scary way. But in the sense of relaxation; meaning peace, not resisting. Death does not simply end life, it *facilitates* life. Death and birth are not merely bookends. They are events that are present throughout our lives, whether we think about them or not.
Many spiritual practices might support this view, though I personally have never heard anyone say it as such. Buddhist meditation, for example, seeks to quiet our overactive minds. Christianity celebrates “resurrection” from death; and also forgiveness, the ability to be continually reborn. In order to experience that rebirth, logically you would have to die a little bit first.
Judaism tells us to “choose life.” But life also INCLUDES death. You can choose death without life. But you can’t choose life without death.
And so, in order to choose life, we have to opt for the whole package. We do not really have a choice, except that we can decide to accept a life that has death embedded in it, whether we like it or not. But it is real, and not as scary as you might think.
So yes, resist. Yes, stand, yes, move. Because you can, today. But remember to stop. Remember to lose some tension. Remember to die a little bit, just a tiny little bit, as you go, to keep yourself alive.
That is the final lesson and parting gift that Camilla gave me.
As she sighed away, she gave me the same message she had been communicating to me all her life: “It’s okay to relax”
Text and images property of the author © Taylor Maurand 2017
