Smatterings...

Hmmmmm. 

Well, according to my mental math, I'm down to about 703 days, in the countdown to my personal Biblical End Times.  I've been less than dutiful, or faithful, or regular, or disciplined, about this blog, which I find I've been treating exactly as I would a dear old friend:  I think about you all the time, but am too damned lazy to pick up the phone...

And it's not as though I've been sunk in some state of blissful denial, regarding My Personal Finality, et al.  Far from it.  If anything, I've been perhaps a bit too face-to-face with The Inevitable Last Date.  I just didn't want this to turn, so soon, into a blog about cats.  Because...

Buster the Dead Cat, which appellation I began using when it became clear that no amount of brushing or force-feeding or subcutaneous hydration was going to restore his kidneys, is now actually Buster the Really Dead Cat.  As in, post-mortem, cold as a popsicle, stiff as a board, on his way to being cremated Dead.  As in, the no longer peeing in the downstairs hallway, or pestering me to drink water from the bathroom sink, or walking around at night, howling meaninglessly at nothing in particular, cat. 

I tried my best to be faithful, as almost any other pet owner would instantly understand.  After it became clear that a daily session of being wrapped in a bath towel, and being laid in my lap, and having his jaws pried open, so I could ladle expensive, medicine-laced yummy cat food onto his tongue without shoving it into his lungs, was both pointless for him, and stressful for both of us, I fell back to the daily hydration routine.  Which, I was relieved to see, required no bath towel (I did drape a dish towel across my knee, as his bladder control came into question), no prying, and no ladling -- just the quick and determined insertion of a honkin' big needle into the loose skin high on his back, and then flipping the stopper, to allow sterile saline solution to drip into his failing body, 100 cc per visit.  He was almost always calm about it.  Early on, he would even purr a bit, as I stoked his sides and tried to see how low the water level had sunk in the suspended plastic bag hanging from the ceiling in the sun room.  Usually, he would start to squirm a bit, at just about the 85 cc mark, but sick as he was, and indulgent as I wanted to be, I was strict, in keeping him in place, until the prescribed volume of liquid was safely inserted beneath his skin.  Besides, squirm as he might, he wasn't really strong enough to go anywhere, except maybe to fall sideways onto the sofa, and fall asleep on the nest I'd made for him, of t-shirts I'd recently worn, perhaps mistakenly believing that my scent might comfort him.  It certainly didn't keep him awake.

He died in our bed, four nights ago, lying on his ad-libbed cushion of bath towels and hand towels and a wash cloth and a pillow case (he seemed to prefer the smoother fabric, to terry cloth), between John and me, as we slept.  Earlier that evening, I'd held him on my chest, for a couple of hours, either stroking his emaciated sides, or resting a hand gently against him.  Whether I was comforting him, or myself, I may never really know.  What I do know is that it was difficult to believe, that Tuesday morning, that he'd really stopped breathing, finally, after nearly two weeks of no food intake, and near-total inertia.  John checked for a heart beat.  I touched Buster's ears -- that I always thought were so smooth, and darkened at the base, like a tree-ripened peach that shows you just where the nearest leaves used to be -- and there was no immediate twitch.  His cold paws were limp.

Dead.

I'd decided, weeks ago, when the diagnosis was still fresh, that we would be burying him in our back yard -- I mentally pegged out a space, next to our redbud tree, a gift from our dear departed friend Irene, and which had been split in two, a few years ago, by a falling oak branch, but which had healed itself after I tied and taped it back together.  It's a shame I didn't know what I was doing when I planted it.  In any event, the plan was to dig a hole about four feet deep, inter our little red cat, and then fill the hole again.  Maybe place a marker, if I could ever make up my mind what to use, and then actually create it, that is.  I'd made mental note of where the mattox and the spade were, in the garage -- digging down through the underlying clay would be no picnic, I knew.

I also cleared a space in our freezer, as a temporary feline morgue, in case Buster died at a time that John wouldn't be able to attend the burial.  Most of the frozen foods I simply crammed into another crowded space; the small packages of sausages I shifted to the fridge, where I let them thaw, and then tried to turn them into some sort of sad bachelor's dinner -- pan-fried links, with some loose meat squeezed from their casings, drizzled with maple syrup, and served with the remains of store-bought potato salad.  As a meal, it served its purpose, in terms of clearing out freezer space.  I added the uneaten sausage to a desperate batch of pasta sauce, which I hastily stirred up, and mixed with two other containers of left-over marinara, to make a barely acceptable companion for some squid ink linguini, which meal I gulped down while watching an old black-and-white movie on TCM, with Buster zoned out on one flat surface or another, breathing shallowly, his eyes dilated, the tip of his tail occasionally giving a little twitch.  Who would expect, I wondered, that the impending death of an adopted house pet would have a material impact on my dining habits, for at least two meals anyway?
But John voted strenuously for cremation, which meant that I could forget where the mattox was lodged (actually, its yellow plastic handle makes it pretty easy to spot.  Extrication is another matter), and not worry about getting callouses on my dainty hands, while digging and digging and digging, and cursing myself for insisting that the hole be just a bit deeper...  Buster never liked being outdoors anyway.  So I wrapped him yet again, this time in a plush dull-lavender-colored bath towel, and John drove us to the vet's office, where I stood for a few minutes with this inert bundle in my arms, as the vet's assistant talked dog food with a feisty youngish woman dressed in aggressively athletic attire.  Then, we took Buster into one of the non-public spaces, and laid him on the chest freezer/morgue, to be picked up later and taken somewhere else for his final makeover.  John quibbled a bit about leaving the towel -- he's never used it, so he doesn't know how uncooperative it's always been, in terms of actually removing moisture from a wet body -- so, before unwrapping Buster, I took off my dull red waffle-weave rugby shirt, which I've never liked that much anyway, because I was not going to leave my dead cat lying uncushioned and exposed on an old Amana chest freezer.  Turns out, John likes the shirt more than he likes the towel, so that's how we left it -- a small oblong bundle of loosely folded terry cloth, that may or may not have had something inside it.  I was a little weepy, and the vet's assistant gave me a bit of a hug. 

Now I'm thinking of renting some glassblowing time, down in Newark, at GlassRoots, to see if I can make a blown glass urn for Buster's ashes, and also for the hair I've compulsively kept, from all those years of brushing him, while he was crouched in the upstairs sink, drinking the same water, from the tap, as I'd put in his bowl downstairs.  Brush, brush, brush, while he lapped and purred, and every two days or so, I would pull all the cat hair out of the brush, and put it in a red plastic bowl I'd placed on the otherwise useless shelf that former owners had created, when they took out the original claw-footed tub, and built a shower.  Only recently, due to a Facebook comment made by a former student, did I realize that I'd in fact accumulated a lifetime's worth of Buster's hair, in little bundles, packed into that dark red bowl.  If it would spin, I might consider making some kitty fur drink coasters, but the urn seems a more fitting destination.

A blog about a cat.  In spite of myself.  In spite of having the following writing ideas: doing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, and the way it impacts the things I think about each day; a further breakdown of the remaining time, into hours and minutes, and musings on same; a kind of 'bucket list' of projects or goals I might have, for these last weeks and days -- even though the term 'bucket list' kind of makes me shudder; further musings centered on the daily crossword puzzle, this time focusing on particular words, or on experiments of a long-entertained writing project, of creating a story, which must incorporate every single word in the solved puzzle; different musings altogether, on what I might choose -- or not choose -- to do, during this last stretch of life; questions about what other people, reaching or having surpassed this watershed, do with their lives, and how do they face getting out of bed every day?  Stuff like that.  It may yet be that, with the melodrama of Buster the Dead Cat pretty much over and done with, I may actually follow one of these conversational paths.  Stranger things have happened.

Now, though, I believe I'm going to take advantage of the splendid mid-November weather, and go out into the garage, to pull out the lawn mower and attach the cutting-collector bag (I've never used it), and see if, instead of raking all the myriad leaves piled up in our front and (to a deeper extent) our back yards, I can mulch them, and put them around the base of the ornamental cherry tree, and my newest addition to the landscape -- the old ornamental weeping cherry tree, which needs to have suckers trimmed from its main trunk, and the clumped black birch tree, which also needs to be trimmed of its lower branches, once we've had enough sufficiently cold weather, to make the sap run downward, and stop attracting birch beetles.  I can't throw these trimmed birch wands away just yet -- as usual, the mere presence of these objects prompts visions of future art projects, the realization of which lies, in terms of scaled probability, somewhere on the outer reaches, along with having a second date with a Sasquatch, and taking a long weekend on a UFO.

Dealing with the lawn also gives me complete immunity from having to write any more of this -- instead, I can go back to imagining all the wonderful things I could be saying, if I weren't stuck, outside, raking the stupid leaves...

I think we may need to get a kitten.



©  Walter Zimmerman  2014