Day 728; The Difference Between Buster And Me

(On the TV, with the sound down low, 'The Black Stallion', on TCM, so no commercials.  The ship has just sunk; the boy is picking himself up on the beach, and washing off the pen knife his dad just gave him the night before.  I'll probably watch for a while, at least peripherally, until Mickey Rooney shows up)

Buster the Dead Cat keeps coming into the bathroom when I'm there, and butts his little head against my left leg, until I pick him up and put him into the bowl of the old pedestal sink that's one of his favorite places in the house.  I turn the cold water to a thin drip, and fill a red plastic cup all the way to the top, and put it in the flat-bottomed basin too.  Sometimes Buster keeps his spinkly back legs propped on the lip of the sink, sometimes all four paws are on the sink's bed.  Sometimes he drinks from the tap, sometimes he laps up water from the plastic cup.  I use an old decommissioned hair brush of mine, to groom his thin sides, astonished that his spine is so pronounced.  He purrs while he drinks, and I brush.  I try to be gentle, but also try not to miss the hollowed-out places along his flanks, where he's wasted to almost nothing.  He purrs anyway.

The vet told me that cats can't possibly drink enough water every day, to meet their hydration needs.  So it's at least a bit extra-poignant, to attend to Buster's doomed efforts to satisfy his thirst -- a thirst he couldn't quench, apparently, on even the best of days.  But a thirst now magnified by the progressive failure of his little kidneys, to do their designed interior work, of purifying his blood, and pulling toxins from his system.  He drinks and purrs anyway.

He'll be dying soon.  The vet (why does it bother me that the man refers to Buster as 'she'?  Buster is a neutered, dying cat.  Why do I always want to mutter 'he', in correction?) says that Buster is in incurable, progressive kidney failure -- apparently, the death of choice for cats that live past the age of two.  It's a peaceful, relatively painless death, the vet says -- dogs of his own have died at home, stricken down by the same ailment.

(The boy just woke up on the beach, facing a huge coiled hooded cobra, reared to strike, for no apparent reason.  The music assures me that this is a dire situation.  The black stallion -- which the boy managed to save from drowning in the shipwreck -- comes up out of nowhere and kills the snake with his own hoofs.  I'll have to look up cobras on Wikipedia, I guess)

I'm supposed to hydrate Buster once a day, with 100 cc of saline solution, and feed him somehow, so he'll ingest 1/2 tsp of powdered potassium supplement, to help offset the malign effects of creatinine in his blood -- standing, now, at about six times the highest levels regarded as healthy.  To get this medicine into him, I have to mix the powder with wet food, drag Buster from his hiding place, wrap him securely in a bath-towel, hold him on my lap like a little cat-headed rag doll, and force his jaws open with my right thumb, wiping a bit of powder-bearing food into the back of his tongue.  It's the only food he gets, as he won't eat on his own.  I keep my fingers alongside his mouth, to keep the food from slipping out the side.  His ordeal lasts maybe three or four minutes, and then I allow him to struggle loose, and sustain his self-image as an independent creature.

While I was brushing Buster this morning, I thought -- he doesn't know his kidneys are failing him.  He doesn't even know he has kidneys, or that I think of him as a cat.  He doesn't recognize his own reflection in a mirror.  I question whether or not he has what I would consider a self-image -- his world must pretty much end where he stops feeling its impingement on his own body, or as far as his nostrils will take him, when he's sniffing for squirrels from the upstairs bedroom window.

Though I know this about Buster -- his essential ignorance about his own body, whether when it's functioning properly, or as it betrays him -- I would still tell him, if I could, about what is happening, doing my best to convey some awareness of what these physical changes mean, how they're unfolding, and where they're taking him.  I would love to give even this painful news to him, as it's currently the only news I can contribute, and if I were him, I believe I'd want to know this.

I would explain to him everything I know about dying, and about death.  As I see and feel it, now, this would be the only faithful thing for me to do -- completely in line with daily hydration, and efforts at providing him with nourishment, even if against his will.   I would try to be as careful with this news, as I am with the honkin' big hypodermic needle, with its dire point that I have to slide under his skin, between his shoulder blades.  I would tell him, the best way I know how.    

If, in fact, I knew anything about either of these things, myself, other than their inevitability.

And here's where I get into trouble with orthodoxies of every sort, I think.

Because if I -- poor, fault-ridden, sensorially-deprived, myopic and error-prone human that I am -- would try to explain death to my cat, in the possibly deranged hope that my explanations might bring him some sort of solace -- or, at least, give some structure and meaning to what I am supposing to be his suffering -- then what does this say, with regard to God's monumental silence, at least so far as I know, on the same topic, with regard to me and all my human relatives?

Or, to be a bit more focused on questions I rarely hear asked, what does this say about the motives and means of the countless (mostly) men and women, who for centuries have told themselves and anyone else who'll listen, just what it is that God will or won't do, does or doesn't like, might or might not provide, if only...  (Insert some human activity here, often including the donation of money).

I'm tempted, by language and culture, to rail about a careless God, or perhaps about the nonexistence of any kind of deity at all.  But, given the barrage of ever-emerging facts about the enormity of what we try to think of as our universe -- given the imponderable expanses, and the inconceivable quantities of distance and time involved, in merely trying to explain, in mundane terms, where one particular galaxy might be located -- I am prone to making the possibly counter-intuitive leap -- if there is, say, a Designer behind all this, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that some entity with such a vast playing field might not, at the same time, have the keenest awareness of the tiniest cluster of neurons in the lower part of my right heel?  To me, the possibility of such an apparent contradiction is unquestionable.

The evidence of such an awareness -- or, perhaps I need to be really specific here -- the evidence of a caring awareness -- is slender to non-existent.  And it's certainly a waste of my dwindling time, to go around shaking my fist in frustration at what a dumb God we've gone and gotten ourselves.

What I can lament, however, and with more justification -- though to as little effect, of course -- is the relentless egotism and self importance of those other mere error-prone, sensorially-deprived, myopic and fault-ridden human beings who've told me, in any manner of ways, to expect something that plain observation, and the merest rudimentary grasp of human history, must show to be ludicrous at best, and pathetic and cruel at worst.

And here I am, trying to keep my eyes open, while feeling my stomach churn at the unthinkable, and feeling lonely as ever -- facing the great terror, with not even the poor assistance, the simplest of kindnesses, that I would, if I could, provide for my poor, stupid, abandoned, and now fatally ill, trusting little red cat. 

Who somehow manages to purr anyway.   And, silly though it seems, in this, he's providing far more comfort for me, than I could ever hope to do, equipped as I am, for him.

(Uh-oh -- Mickey Rooney's turned up.  Time to iron shirts and stuff...)


©  Walter Zimmerman   2014