Letting Go

Another December day, another Reverb10 writing prompt, and this one gets right to the heart of things.

It's about letting go. What or whom did you let go this year, and why?

Our biggest loss of the year was our old lady kitty, Selene.

Important sidenote: It is wicked hard to photograph a black cat, particularly when her eyes are closed. Nothing to focus on. In the sun, her fur had a slight brownness to it. In every other light, she was black, jet black, with only a whisper of three or four white hairs on her chest. She was double coated, her fur was like velvet, although this proved to be a liability as she aged and didn't keep up so well on the grooming front. Double coats get matted in a much more spectacular fashion.

We got Selene a hundred thousand years ago, or sixteen, when she was a tiny kitten. It was summer and John was living in Indiana, I was living in Evanston. We had been dating more than a year, we were starting to talk about marriage. I've been a cat person all of my life, though my first two cats didn't come into my life until I was 10 (and, as is so often the case where you get something other than what you intended when you go looking for a pet, we were only supposed to get one but this pair was in a cage curled around each other. I picked up one, my mom picked up the other, and we turned to my dad and said "Can we get two?" Those kitties made it to the ripe old ages of 19 and 20, and I still miss them.)

It was important to me that whomever I marry be at least accepting of cats, understanding that not every person is going to be a cat person. At least this is how I remember it. I think John also just wanted a buddy, so we looked in the paper and found a farm cat who got herself into a tough situation and the humans in her life helped find homes for her kittens. John wanted a black cat, so we hadn't even looked at others. We got her when she was small enough to fit into our hands, I remember we took her home in a shoebox. She was a spaz from Day 1.

She used to climb his tacky grad-school apartment curtains, and would pull the posters off the wall by jumping up at them. She would attack his feet while he slept by creeping under the futon and pouncing. She was a spitfire, and hilarious.

She was evicted after about a year, his apartment complex *did* have a no-pets policy, oops. She came to live with me and my cats in Evanston, and then a succession of Chicago apartments and, eventually, houses.

My cats tolerated her, in the way a big sister tolerates a little one who wants to play ring around the rosie a hundred times. They'd play twice, three times, then give Selene the smackdown.

Later, after the first of my cats went off to the Great Catnip Patch in the Sky, we were joined by Mr. Utley, who is the big fat white cat. His addition to the household ensured that nobody's clothing was ever safe (the surviving cat of mine was gray, it was just hilarious - black, white, gray, no matter what you'd wear you'd get the OTHER color cat fur on you.)

Selene and Utley held an uneasy truce. Selene had claws, Utley is a fatty. He would regularly sport new scratches across his face, dealt out by our sweet little Selene, who grew cranky as she aged, losing her previous spazzy edge.

Her illness was long, she was diagnosed hyperthyroid last year August and so began her slow decent. Watching kitties get old is very sad, but it's part of the path we take when we bring these little things into our lives. I was grateful to have my two first kitties show me the way 9 years ago.

In the end, it was a series of complications - hyperthyroidism, advanced kidney disease, high blood pressure. The last few days she went basically blind, and the way she'd bump into things was killing me. I felt she was in pain, this shot of her in the front room silhouetted with the light from the front window shows how she was uncomfortable and wouldn't quite sit all the way down (although I still think it's a magnificent shot of her, such a pretty girl). She seemed to be waiting. I guess waiting for us to be ready.

The ending was hard, I don't like the ending. She's gone now, and we miss her, but she'd been sick a long time and everyone in the family was aware of that and ready, in as much as we can ever be ready, for her departure.

While we've already moved on by adopting Hestia, Selene goes into the Family History as one of the Great Cats of our lives.

Goodbye my pretty black beauty. I miss the way you were a constant black blob in the hall. There's still a lot of your fur in the spot you always sat by the front stairs. I hope you're catching lots of mice or feathers and getting some catnip, but not too much, you know that shit can melt your brain. Love you, mean it. XOXO

Comments

[Janean]

What a beautiful tribute to a well loved pet, Karen. We had to make the same decision for our smokey gray kitty with big green eyes, Ashley, in June of 2006. It was so hard after 14 years of love form kittenhood, through apartments, both our houses and the birth of our sons. But it felt like the right thing for her and that was what mattered most. She had a double coat too with similar issues at the end. I never knew there was a name for her type of fur.

[Kaye]

Im very glad you got to say your goodbyes and appreciate her in her last days.
I lost my bestest (canine) friend when I was on the other side of the country and it really really upset me to be so far away.
When they go slowly it gives you time to prepare, and like you say, I really think they know when youre ready to let them go. And theyre always ready long before we are.
I lost Conni almost 3 years ago but blogged about it for the first time this year. Im fairly sure I havent let her go yet.
A lovely tribute, I feel your loss. x

[Karen Smith]

Thanks Janean and Kaye. It was good to be able to say goodbye, but oh man I wish I could hand off the final parting, as I was a basket case. I thought I would be the stoic one, because I knew what had to be done, and I had been doing all the medical care, vet appointments, and daily monitoring of her for so long. But in the end, once I made that last appointment I was a wreck.

As it turns out, I'm glad I went during the day while the kids were in school, not because I think they would have been too sad, but because it let me be free to really really grieve, really let go in a big, dramatic, wailing kind of way. I'm not sure my kids need to see me like that, and I'm not sure I could have given in to the sadness like that if I were trying to hold it together for them, so it worked out for the best even while it was awful and sad and I hate it.

As much as I might have liked her to hold out one more day to the weekend so my husband could take her in, I think perhaps I let go best this way, as wrenching as it was.

I'm so sorry for both of your losses. It seems to me that once you start sharing about pet losses, everyone has a special pet story to share.