Blog Archives

“Summer came like cinnamon, so sweet”, I wrote a few weeks back. Instead summer has turned into a searing, bitter season, a season like no other. It’s already a week since Kitty died. I have walked in a fog of pain and memory through most of it, knowing that this loss is permanent. Nothing in my life has had this sort of permanence, this finality which I cannot alter. Tomorrow is not another day, it’s another day that he’s not coming back and that I can do nothing about.

The doctor who treated him made an exception to come home to euthanize him. I was grateful because I could not bear the thought of putting him in a cage to take him to the hospital again. She said that she’d arrive at about 2:50 PM and had about 45 mins to complete the procedure. She had retained the catheter that was used to transfuse fluids, which avoided subjecting Kitty to any further pain. “The effect is instantaneous”, she said, “You inject the drug and the next second his heart stops and he’s dead”. No gradual fading away, cinematic or operatic style. No time for famous last words once the drug is injected.

That morning when the sun came out, we asked him as he listlessly rested in the corner, “Do you want to come out into the sun, sweetheart?”. “Uh”, he responded a little more eagerly than we anticipated. We carried him into the sun and he stretched himself for the last time, with pleasure albeit with some discomfort. After a couple of minutes, he picked himself up and walked back to the corner and collapsed. Shanthala and I had gone back and forth over whether we wanted to euthanize him that day or the next. Finally, after seeing him so spiritless, his eyes tired and glazed, we decided to end his misery that day itself.

Around noon, I picked him up and put him on the high chair perch in our bedroom, where in happier times, he’d spy on the goings on of the birds and the squirrels in the surrounding trees. His eyes regained some clarity as he looked out at the life outside. After a minute or so, he became listless again. I put him in a small bed and used that to carry him to all his favorite spots in and out of the house. At each point, his eyes perked up for a few seconds before he collapsed back into the bed again. I prayed that I was not hurting him and was highly sensitive to his reaction, willing to put him back in his favorite corner if he showed signs of being hurt or upset with this adventure. He seemed to have enjoyed the whole thing.

When Hobbes saw the doctor walk into the room and sit down next to him, he hissed at her, the cause of all his misery the previous day at the hospital. We smiled through the tears, but seeing him collapse back into torpor and based on the doctor’s advice about his condition, we decided to continue the course. I held my hand over his head and Shanthala rested hers over his body. I bade him goodbye and the doctor pushed the plunger. Shanthala, wisely, was looking at his eyes and later said that his pupils dilated immediately. I couldn’t believe that he was gone. The doctor put a stethoscope to his chest and said that there was no heartbeat. His tail then flicked and swelled up. I thought that he was alive, but it was only rigor mortis. Life as we knew it was over.

Carrying his body back to the hospital was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, it has ravaged my heart and left an indelible mark.

The humdrum events of daily life intruded throughout the day, adding a touch of the surreal. We were having our bathroom fixed and the workmen trooped in and out all day, interrupting my time with him with questions. Our telephone had stopped working a few days back and a repairman showed up at 2:30 and I had to steel myself to listen to him and point him out to where the connection box was, the jacks were etc. The sun was shining brightly and it was a beautiful day. “It’s a beautiful day to die”, said Shanthala. But it really was too beautiful a day to die.

Even in his death, that lovely furball was touching people and making them do acts of unusual kindness. My mother has arthritis and her knees ache badly if she climbs or descends stairs. Kitty lay dying in our bedroom upstairs. She loved him so much that she climbed the stairs five or six times, leaving in between to give us some private time with him. It was also her gesture of motherly love towards me, I thought and was very touched. I felt reconnected with her.

I spent time going over those three fateful days wondering if I had missed something, something that could’ve prevented this ghastly turn of events, but I’m none the wiser even in hindsight. I have no regrets about how much time I spent with him or any of my actions with him. I gave as much of myself as I could and how he reciprocated.

My eyes keep searching for some trace of him. His hair is still on some of my clothes, on some of the furniture, on the stairs, one edge of the sofa is still indented from being a favorite perch, the ground near the air conditioner outside still carries the imprint of his body from the long summer hours he spent there, the grocery plastic bags that we collected to scoop his litter, the high chair in our bedroom which used to be a favorite lookout post, his name tag and the chain that went around his neck. But his smell is almost gone and each week the cleaners remove the last vestiges of his physical presence.

We changed the bedsheets finally today. I had resisted changing them for the last few days. I gathered them up and smelled every inch of them hoping for some fragrance of him and I was rewarded. For the first time in nine years, the sheets will not be caressed by the smooth, silky fur of that little bonsai tiger. I threw away his litter box as well.

His time with us has become the way I mark time now. Every day I connect up with those three fateful days. “It was last Tuesday at this time that he became a spirit”, “It was this time last Saturday that he vomited the fourth time”, “It was this time last Monday that he took his last ride home in the car”. I can’t remember how we were before he came into our lives. He came unexpectedly one evening on a moonbeam, about nine years ago, and left on a sunray. In between, he changed our world and gave us more joy than we had ever known. Anatole France, the French Nobel Prize-winning author said, “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened”. He just didn’t awaken my soul, he’s now merged with it.

June 25, 2007. How beautifully the day began and how miserably it ended. The night before, after Shanthala had left for the hospital, I pushed the food bowl with a little of his favorite food (rather than his regular multi-renal diet food) under the bed, where he had hidden for most of the day. He came towards it readily and munched a little of it. He then came out from under the bed when I asked him to, walked sluggishly to the nearest corner and collapsed there, his head not touching the ground and his body all tense, tight as a coil. I sat next to him and asked him if he wanted me to massage him. I started a very slow, gentle massage, whispering loving words to him or saying “relax”. After about a half hour (or was it only 10 mins ? A week later I can’t remember), he relaxed enough to rest his head on the floor. Another half hour or so later, he seemed to fall asleep.

I was quite tired myself from having been tense about his condition all day and not having slept much the previous night. So, a little while later, I climbed into bed and turned out the light. Within a few seconds, with a nice thud, he jumped on the bed and walked up to me. I was so happy, I felt my heart would burst. “Oh, Kitty, I love you so much, my golden sunshine”, I said. He then started to groom himself. As he bent over to lick his belly and his groin, I saw him spasm in pain, like he had done all day. But he closed his eyes and continuing lowering his head till he could lick the areas he wanted to. Finished with that, he groomed the rest of his body and hugged me and we went to bed. Things were looking up.

Summer nights he typically hugs me for only part of the night because he gets a little hot, at which point he sleeps on my leg until he feels less warm and crawls back upto me. But that night, he hugged me through the night. They say animals have a sense when their end is near. Was that why he did what he did ?

The doctor’s call at about 7:15 that morning had me rushing him to the hospital. The blood sample they had drawn yesterday showed that his blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine were very high. They withdrew a little more blood again to verify that BUN and creatinine had stayed high, they had risen even higher. When the doctor told me that he had to be hospitalized, I broke down for the first time since his illness. I knew something was terribly wrong.

By the end of the day, the doctors had declared complete renal shutdown and that they had been unable to make him produce urine. We were allowed to take him home. When I saw him lying in the ICU, I broke down and asked him if he wanted to go home. “Uh” he meowed to me and stood up. He was a little unsteady and tired. As we drove him home, we opened his cage and allowed him to look out of the window as he was wont to do. Despite years of pleading, he never came to the front of the car. That day, on his last ride home, he came to the front and sat next to me. Do animals know that their end is near ? Was that his parting gift to me ?

He spent the night with us in some discomfort. We hardly slept that night, crying much of the time. The following picture was taken that night. How normal he looks. But he hardly changed position.

Failure to produce urine. That sounds like the antic of a kid who is forever using the excuse of going to the bathroom as a way to escape the boredom of class, the punishment for which ought to be something like making him write “I won’t lie” fifty times. Instead, it was the death sentence in the case of sweet Hobbes. Cursed with a misshapen and malfunctioning kidney since he was a baby, he nevertheless breezed through life on a single kidney. For some strange reason that we may never know, that kidney shutdown sometime on Saturday or Sunday, June 23 or 24th.

I didn’t realize how embodied the mind is. I’ve had an upset stomach since last Monday, I haven’t slept more than three to four hours.

It’s been a week already since the beginning of the end. Last Saturday around 6 AM, Kitty vomited for the first time. How completely normal that event seemed. “He’s just regurgitated his hairball”, I thought to myself, “Why can’t he vomit on the hardwood floor for once and spare me the effort to clean the carpet ?” By midnight that night, I was rushing him to the vet since he had vomited five times, but still only mildly worried. Shanthala found another vomit a day after he had passed away. He had not even managed to hold down his morning food which he ate with his usual gusto.

My eyes have been aching constantly since last Monday, maybe as a sign of how much they miss seeing him.

I don’t miss his presence when I’m out of the house. It’s when I turn back towards home that I begin to feel his absence. Anywhere I went, the moment I turned to face home I unconsciously felt a little joy knowing that he’d be waiting at the door for us. Now, it’s a place that terrifies me with memories of happier days. How little I knew what losing meant!

We may solve the puzzle of dark matter, decipher how the brain works and even resolve for eternity whether He exists. But I’ll never know why his kidney shut down when they did.