Art of the Odd

This is my very last picture of Schokie. There were two more, and I think one was better than this – you could see our eyes, at least – but somehow this was the only one that stuck. The other two just vanished.

My ex-husband and I found Schokie at the Animal Shelter – more often called the Pound – in Laramie, not long after we moved in together. We’d gone to look for our roommate’s cat, who’d gone walkabout while she was out of town. We didn’t find him, but while we standing in front of the row of cages, this tiny, obnoxious brown kitten climbed the wire door, snagged her claws in Mark’s pantleg, and screamed at us until we took her home.

She was always pushy. She’d wedge herself between us and shriek when Mark tried to kiss me. The first time she ever met a pizza, she landed in the middle of it, sank her claws into the molten cheese, and hissed when we tried to remove her from it. The first night after I brought Thryym home, she chased him around the apartment and tried to bite his balls off. But all that aside, she was affectionate, she was smart, and she always knew exactly who she was and what she wanted.

That changed a few years ago. “You’re getting senile,” I’ll tell her, when I found her staring at a wall, or watched her sit down suddenly in the middle of a room, lift a leg to scratch herself, and then freeze, with no idea what she’d intended to do next.

Last year, she went blind. High blood pressure, due to high thyroid and kidney failure, had detached her retinas. They give cats human drugs for those things; there are no veterinary drugs for them yet. A week later, she could see again, and the vet was amazed. (She even mentioned it today: “I was so proud of her,” she said, “for coming back from everything like she did.”) She had a urinary tract infection, which we got cleared up, and then she had another, and another. She weighed less than half as much as she did in her prime, and she got crankier, and scrawnier, and more and more vacant. Getting enough food into her was a struggle, and she rapidly rejected every new flavor.

This past weekend, while NovySan and I were at Maker Faire, she hardly ate at all. Or rather, she hardly ate her own food. She was, instead, determined to eat her despised neighbor’s food – Spooky, our housemate’s cat, gets Friskies, and Friskies, for whatever reason, are ever so much better than the Evo that she loved when I first got it for her. She lost weight, and when we came home, she’d hardly get off the bathroom counter. Her abdomen was distended, and under the fur and the dust (she loved to sleep in the bougainvillea litter outside) I could feel a hardening lump where I imagined her liver ought to be.

I wondered whether to take her to the vet. “How much more can we do to you?” I asked her. But she was miserable, I could see it. So, today, I took her in.

It was, as I thought, her liver that I could feel. That, and a mass in her abdomen that wasn’t there three weeks ago. She’d had lab tests that recently, with no sign of liver failure – just the anemia we’d been battling for months. It might have been lymphoma – that moves very quickly.

“We could do a lot of tests,” the vet said, “and do chemo.”

“She’s 18 years old,” I said, “and I don’t want to do that to her.”

I took her to a room with a soft couch and low lighting, and the vet clipped a sign to the door that said, “Euthanasia in progress. Please be considerate.” I spread a towel across my lap and held her. There was a purple bandage around her left right front paw, to hold the catheter in her vein. She went limp before the last of the solution entered her body. A moment later, I felt her heart beat against my fingertips for the very last time.

I don’t have any pictures of Schokie as a kitten, but on my way out with my empty cat carrier, I saw this little creature, who looked so much like her that when I went back to the photos I’d taken this afternoon, I wondered for a moment how a picture of that obnoxious little furball Mark and I brought home from the Pound had made it onto my phone.

She wasn’t my first cat, and she’s not the first I’ve lost. But she’s the first one I had for so long, and it’s the first time I’ve lost an animal without another one waiting at home. I’ve cleaned out her catbox already, and thrown out her medication, but NovySan just told me we should keep her bowls, and I will. They’ll be there whenever we need them.