Eulogy for a Cat

Brandy hard at work on the scratching post

"Eulogy for a Cat" is a repost from an earlier version of Assorted Nonsense. 

Two days after Christmas one year— one of our cats died. 

Brandy was named after the song "Brandy" by Looking Glass, just because I liked the song, and the name suited her somehow, or came to. We can’t remember exactly when we got her, but it was something like fourteen years ago. 

About three weeks before we had noticed she wasn’t looking great. She had an unusually skinny tummy. Her chest looked slightly enlarged, but perhaps this was just in contrast to her tummy. We attributed the way she looked to her not eating her food. The food consisted of crunchy pellets. We thought she might have sore teeth, and just wasn’t able to eat the food. So we switched her to moist food, which she took to right away, and we thought okay, now we’ll see some improvement. 

But while she continued to eat the moist food for awhile, she eventually started eating less and less and started spending virtually all of her time sleeping in her cat bed. Still, we didn’t really think the end was nigh, because she continued to move throughout the house, upstairs and down. But perhaps that was my own naiveté. 

So far a relatively straightforward story of the death of a cat. Here’s where it gets slightly more complex. It did occur to us to take Brandy to a vet. We have friends that are vets. But we didn’t want to, because we were afraid that it would cost us a fortune. A fortune we do not have, especially just after Christmas. 

We were afraid the scenario would play out like this. We’d take Brandy to the vet. The vets are our friends, but we can't really expect them to give us a break. It’s a business, after all. There would be a fee for examining Brandy. A fee, or several fees, for a series of tests. Maybe something could be done for Brandy, maybe something couldn’t. But our collective gut told us that Brandy was fourteen years old, clearly she was not well, and we could easily envision spending a fortune having her looked at only to have her die anyway. 

Our decision meant that she died at home. 

Well, actually she died en route to the Emergency Animal Hospital where we took her when it became evident that she was in obvious distress. And my intent there was to do what I could to reduce her suffering, had she not died en route. 

Ultimately her death cost us just over forty dollars. 

As I stood in a private waiting room with her lifeless eyes staring reproachfully at, well, not exactly me, but somewhere near me, I had to ask myself if we’d done the right thing. Initially I thought no, we screwed this up. The cat suffered needlessly. It had been dying for days, probably lamenting its inability to speak English, thinking you fools, can’t you see I’m wasting away here, don’t you care, DO something, HELP ME!

But apart from switching its food and petting it more than we usually did of late we did nothing concrete to help our poor cat. 

I was angry with the vets, because we could not count on going to them for assistance without incurring potentially exorbitant fees, with little or no hope for a positive outcome save assuaging our guilt. 

I thought of my grandfather, who once gave me a potato sack full of kittens and asked me to take them down to the cow trough to drown them. I was eleven, the age my daughters are now. Thinking that I had to do as he asked, I dutifully tried to drown the kittens through a vale of tears, but I didn’t think to put a heavy rock in the sack with the kittens, so when I placed the sack in the cow trough, the kittens just cried piteously and scrambled en masse to stay afloat. 

“Can’t do this,” I told my friend June Forrest, and I freed the kittens and ran away to hide until my sister found me and brought me back to my grandparent’s farmhouse, where my mother and grandmother asked my grandfather what the hell he was thinking, before baking June and me cinnamon apples to make us feel better about the whole unfortunate episode. 

My grandfather clearly had a completely different attitude toward the fate of animals on his farm, and almost certainly would not have paid the forty some dollars I paid the Emergency Animal Hospital to dispose of my poor, dead cat. 

Forty some dollars. I was upset. Not at the forty dollars, but at the death of my cat, and at the way I felt I had failed her, and as I stood there wiping my tears away I was fairly certain that when I die it will be equally miserably, or ought to be, because this was a living, feeling being, and why should I get to die any better? Having failed her. 

While I was wallowing in my abject misery a representative from the Emergency Animal Hospital came in and tried to sell me my cat’s ashes for eighty bucks or so. And when she failed to sell me my cat’s ashes she tried to sell me my dead cat’s paw-prints in an attractive memorial ceramic tile for something like two hundred bucks. WTF? 

They blatantly tried to profit from my cat’s death and my sorrow and my guilt. 

I paid them the forty bucks to dispose of my cat and that was all. I donated two towels to their cause. Two towels that I had brought along ostensibly to make Brandy more comfortable, but really so that we wouldn’t have to touch her soiled body as we placed her in the cat carrier to take her to the hospital. 

I was mad at the Animal Hospital for trying to profit from my cat’s death, and I was mad at our vets for creating a climate where we were afraid to take her in to be checked out for fear of being bankrupted. And I was mad at myself for not being willing to do that and for feeling guilty about it. 

It’s only a goddamned cat, my grandfather would have told me. 

But dammit, I had liked that cat. 

That afternoon we bought pet insurance for our dog, because we don’t want to go through this with him. We didn’t buy it for our surviving cat, because she’s also fourteen, and also because we can’t afford it. It’s over forty bucks a month for the dog alone, and there’s STILL a five hundred deductible for each accident/condition the dog suffers!*

My grandfather would no doubt have a word for sentimental, animal loving folk like myself. 

That word is fool. 

Rest in peace, Brandy. 

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do more for you when you were alive. 

You were a fine girl. 

*We cancelled the pet insurance after a few months.