A week ago Cowboy and I euthanized his cat. I use the word “euthanized” in place of “put down” or “put to sleep” because it seems to own the act of killing that we were engaged in.
Her name was Kiggles. She was about 17, maybe 18. She had come from a house in Cambridge where Cowboy lived for a while, and, according to the neighbors, she had been there all her life. She suffered a life of street scrounging and neglect. She had no kitty litter, no cat entrance; she wasn’t fed. The people next door had gotten her spayed. She was left out in snowstorms. Cowboy started feeding her and she sought refuge in his room. When he moved back to Portland, he stole her and brought her with him, curled up and sleeping on his lap under the steering wheel the entire way. No one ever asked, no one called, no one noticed. The vet gave her six months when she arrived. But she lived two years.
In the end, it was a horrible decision. She had gotten sicker with a thyroid condition, heart disease, high blood pressure, blood in her urine which no bout of antibiotics could fix and therefore indicated something more grave, failing eyesight, and she was deaf. And she was getting worse. These are the reasons. I list them here more for myself, it seems, than anyone else. There was also the ugly truth of mounting vet bills and the quicksand feeling that each test gave way to another, each illness another, and before we knew it we could hardly pay for any of it.
But the gavel fell because we were moving in together. And Kiggles was too sick to come. She’d have to be quarantined from the other animals to lessen her stress and be medicated heavily — at least three meds a day. What could we do? We have a puppy and my cat who hates other cats. It would have been impossible. And yet.
We tried to find an angel, someone, somewhere, who could take this cat and give her a life of quiet, not stuck and closed into my tiny study, but who could sleep with her, feed her, nurse her . . . and that angel never came. We put off moving Cowboy’s apartment until the final days of the month. We didn’t sleep. We didn’t know what to do.
Finally, we called a vet who comes to your home and we cried and then we couldn’t do it. We agonized for another four days and finally, we did it. And it was the worst thing I’ve ever done. My heart literally broke inside me — I felt it thump and I had to lie down because I thought I might faint. It was the sound Kiggles made as she died, the last sigh of breath that was almost forced through her jaws and the look on her face: for all her dignified suffering, her end was with her tongue hanging out and her eyes rolling back.
