What My Cat’s Death Taught Me About Life And The Living
Reflections on grief, guilt and moving on
The death of our cat Misty
It’s been eight months since we had to let Misty go. She was our beautiful 12-year old Ragdoll cat, whom we had since she was given to us as a kitten.
When we found out that the cancer in her head could not be cured or operated on, we had to make the most wrenching decision of our lives.
It was the first day of August, and she had been on morphine for more than a week. The night before, our dear Misty had stopped eating. Both the eye and the cancer surgeons advised that there was very little chance the operation could succeed and even if it did, Misty’s quality of life would be poor, losing not only her right eye, but much of the right side of her face.
We spent the next couple of hours holding and calming her. Our dear girl was purring as we cradled her, partly because of the sedation that was numbing her pain.
After she seemed to have quietly fallen asleep, we nodded to the eye surgeon. And just like that, with a quick and painless injection, our dearest Misty, light of our lives, was gone.
As my partner held Misty’s cooling body, both of us speechless with grief, I felt an utter and overwhelming desolation. It was the worst day of my life.
Reflections on Misty’s death
There is a process by which we grieve that is well-known to counsellors called Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief, encompassing Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
I do not think they fully described my feelings, except anger at God for having made our gentle Misty succumb to such a cruel cancer, and at myself for being so helpless to do anything about it.
Worst of all was my guilt at the awful decision to end her life, correct though it was to deliver her from the terrible pain that we knew she would have no further respite from.
In not having been able to stop the cancer from consuming her, I felt that I failed her in her greatest time of need.
In the ensuing weeks when grief displaced everything, I had ample time to reflect on what the death of our cat Misty meant.
I marvelled at how much pain I could feel over the death of this pet, compared to the lesser grief I had over the deaths of even those who were close friends, such as an older friend a year before, whom I had even accompanied for his chemotherapy sessions.
Yet, in the depths of my sorrow, I realised that such deep feelings of loss for one’s pet were hardly uncommon, as this old poem and illustration from the New York Times recognised:
After Misty died, I continually reviewed our decisions and kept second guessing why we had not acted faster, why we had not changed vets earlier, and so on.
In due time, I realised that the guilt I felt over having failed my cat and for not acting fast enough to fight Misty’s cancer was something called “hindsight bias,” which clouds our judgment about what we actually knew in the past and the extent to which an event could have been foreseen and avoided.
The New York Times writer Karen Fine wrote a recent article that explains what I felt much better than I can. Her words also assured me that my feelings of guilt and failure over Misty’s last month with cancer were not the whole story of her life.
We all feel that our own cats are the ‘the best cat in the universe’, and this is not hyperbole, for our cats are certainly the best cats in our own private universes. Our grief demonstrates the great stature they had in our lives.
Mulling over our relationship with Misty, I now fully recognise what Ed Yong argued in his excellent book An Immense World:
‘Animals are not just stand-ins for humans’, and that ‘they have worth in themselves’.
Even as I worked through my grief, I tried to remember that for the 12 years that Misty was with us we loved her dearly and were kind to her. It is a fact that we tried our best to give her a safe and good life.
She roamed our home and the gardens around it freely and once even jumped into the swimming pool, alarming my partner so much he jumped in after her, only to find that she had managed to swim to the other side and gotten out herself. The circumstances of her death did not negate the good life we gave her.
This realisation was a great comfort to me, once I accepted its validity.
Learning from Misty’s death to care for the living
After Misty’s death, I surveyed the rest of my life with a gimlet eye, finding imperfection and emotional distance everywhere.
By coincidence, my dad had recently fully recovered from a minor stroke and had been requesting a family holiday trip with my two brothers and I, along with my sisters-in-law and nieces.
But you know how hard it is to get ten persons’ schedules aligned for a holiday. By such benign neglect, my dad’s family trip had faded into afterthought.
Misty’s death catalysed my resolve and I realised that I hadn’t gone on a trip with my parents for more than 25 years. It just hadn’t seemed urgent or necessary.
With Misty on my mind, I considered how much I would regret not having gone with my parents on the family holidays they wanted, if anything should suddenly happen to them.
So I spoke to my brothers and we agreed that I should quickly take my parents on a trip by myself.
Bringing My Parents To Western Australia
That’s how I ended up walking slowly in the breeze with my parents, marvelling at stone sentinels of nature called ‘The Pinnacles’ under a blue and cloudless Australian desert sky.
My mum walked slowly. Because I only saw my parents at their home once a week for the family lunch, I hadn’t realised how much she had aged compared to the vigorous woman I always saw her as in my mind. She wasn’t up to walking distances that would not have bothered her just five years ago.
My dad had become absent-minded. He lost his boarding pass for the flight to Perth in Singapore while waiting at departures, and on arrival in Perth, walking from the plane to Australian passport control, he’d misplaced the fishing rod he’d brought and couldn’t remember where he’d lost it.
Their impending mortality troubled me.
And yet, my parents remained game for the road trip I’d planned, and after a while, I accepted they were nearly 80 and that I should ensure our trip be a success on their terms, rather than mine.
Despite my annoyance at some of my parents’ habits, such as Dad overbuying snacks at every Coles and Woolworths, it was a good road trip, and we got along far better in the confines of our car and shared rental apartments than I’d initially anticipated.
Because we see so little of the outdoors in overdeveloped and skyscraper heavy Singapore, I brought them to wide open spaces along the coast, staying at the seaside town of Geraldton, before driving on to the magnificent Kalbarri National Park.
All in all, my parents found Western Australia a lovely place and I found myself bonding with them in a way that wasn’t really the same as our weekly family lunches.
I pined for Misty during that trip, but every time I did that, I tried to re-direct my sorrow into doing something that would make my parents’ day as good as I could possibly give, for her sudden demise had brought into sharp and painful relief how quickly a loved one could be taken from you.
In due time, I saw how important and enjoyable this trip was to my parents, and suspected that they craved the company of my brothers and I because they knew that the time they had to travel with us dwindled by the day as they aged and became less mobile.
On my part, I learnt to enjoy those quiet moments in the car, when my parents were dozing off, remembering how they’d taken care of me, and reminiscing about the past trips they’d taken my brothers and I when we were kids.
When we finally ended up in Fremantle, in front of a preserved Australian WWII submarine and my dad thanked me for the trip, I recognised that how much I had to be grateful to Misty for, because her death had spurred me to appreciate this time I had with my parents.
Misty’s Last Message
In our time in Western Australia, when I wasn’t busy making sure my parents were enjoying themselves, Misty was a constant presence in my mind.
I kept thinking of her during the long drives between the places we visited. But slowly, in the wide open spaces of the desert and the seaside, I began to let go of my grief.
Then one day, while driving along the quiet West Australian roads, we came across a most poignant pet cemetery.
I’d had the barest glimpse of it from the road, its novelty so startling me that I missed its entrance, and then immediately turned back.
There, a most wondrous sight of row upon row of neatly laid out pet tombstones greeted me. They were so tiny, and yet you could see the heartfelt messages and tokens of love left on them.
My breath caught at how it was that here too in rural Australia, the type of deep grief that I’d felt for my Misty was clearly universal, felt across an ocean by people here too, for their own pets.
It’s silly of course, but I imagined that my coming across the pet graveyard was maybe Misty (but more likely my own mind), trying to communicate to me the finality of her death.
Telling me that I was not alone and that all humanity shared and acknowledged the joy and light that our pets brought into our lives.
I was so glad I took the trouble to organise this trip with my parents. After a cat’s lifetime of brightening my life, bringing joy to my partner and myself, this was perhaps Misty’s last gift to me:
To do what we should for those we love, while we still can.
Dear Misty,
You were the Best Cat in the Universe.
Rest In Peace our Dear Girl,
And know that We will Never Forget You.
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