Baby Kitty may seem like
an odd name for a fifteen-year-old cat, but
we inherited her by odd circumstances. She
came from our previous cat Socks's
final litter that Socks
squeezed out just before we could get her
fixed. Baby Kitty was wild, the only wild one of
the six in the litter, and so was very shy around people. We
gave away all of the kittens except for her
only because we simply could not catch her.
By the time we could catch her, we'd already had
her for several months. She had long since
passed the adorable kitten stage and so,
well, I guess we were stuck with
each other. But because
we were ever hopeful in her early days that we would eventually find
a home for her, we never officially picked out a name. She was simply
The Baby Kitty by default, and the "The" fell off after a
while.
I was
the first to eventually earn her trust. By
sitting in the garage for several hours a day over
a few weeks' time, I waited
for her to approach me. After a while I
could pet her, and finally I could carry
her with only mild complaints and a few scratches. But she never did
totally lose her wildness; Baby
Kitty would only
let us pet her on her terms: we had to be sitting down, and once we
started petting her, if we stopped, she would bite us.
Baby
Kitty lived a good cat life, chasing tennis balls, birds, and
squirrels, and she
even bonded with our dog BooBoo when we trained him about a decade
ago to do Cat Round-up at bedtime. Of all
our cats, she was the most elusive, but BooBoo has a good nose and
always managed to find her hiding spot.
Once,
Baby Kitty pulled off a stunning feat
when she jumped from a sitting position to about the
five-foot mark as an escaped parakeet
swooped across the room. As much as we mourned
the unexpected and unfortunate passing of Sheila,
we had to marvel at the super-cat-hero leap
executed by the quiet and shy Baby Kitty.
She put up with us through
five moves but finally let us know that enough was
enough by refusing to come into our current house for the
first four months. She spent the entire winter in the
backyard. Within the past month, we noticed she had gotten quite
thin, and in the past week had become mostly bones. Then she stopped
eating completely, and her breathing worsened. As her health went
downhill, we debated what to do.
I remember ten years ago
when we lived in a lakeside neighborhood surrounded by trees and
wildlife, the
community took rabies very seriously, and once a year a local
veterinarian would offer rabies shots at the community center. We
took our pets down there along with Baby Kitty in a pet carrier. When
I brought her up to the veterinarian, she refused to come out. We
shook the carrier upside down but she managed to hang on. Both
the vet and I tried to reach in to grab her, but she came at
us swiping razor-claws
and hissing and biting.
Finally, the veterinarian
had me lock him in the car with the pet carrier. He bravely reached
in, grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, pulled her out, shot
her up, then thrust her back in the
carrier, all in about ten seconds. I think
he suffered a few scratches; the next year, his
rabies clinic was noticeably absent on the community calendar.
So when we discussed
our options as her health declined,
the thought of putting her in a carrier and taking
her to a place she feared and hated just
didn't appeal to us. I could imagine her getting chased around the
examination room until three or four of us
cornered her so she could get her
final shot. She would probably have
narrowed her
green eyes at us as if to say, “I knew it! I always knew you
would do this to me in the end!”
When we came home the
other night, her last night, she walked
around shakily and somewhat delirious with ragged, heavy breathing.
We tried to feed her bits of chicken by hand, give
her water with a teaspoon, but she
demurred. St. Pauli Girl held her in her
lap for awhile before passing her over to me. I held her and thought
her breathing was a little easier.
She seemed almost normal for
those few moments, albeit very skinny. She sat in my lap for
an hour then stood up, ready to leave
just like she always did. I tried to hold on to her, but she
had other plans. I put her on the ground, and she made her way to a
cool hiding place in the shed where she
spent the night. She passed away the next morning not long after
sunrise, as if she had purposely waited for us to wake up and come
say goodbye.
I'm not going to say that
she had a peaceful, painless death. But
spending her last few minutes in terror at a place she hated wouldn't
have necessarily been more peaceful. In the
end, I think the three of us agreed it was the right way to go. We
got to spend some quality time with her, and she got to go out on her
own, in her own home.
So the death of a
fifteen-year-old cat isn't really that sad;
it's the stress, the agony of those
final choices that you have to face. And
really, that's mostly a just a harsh reminder of similar decisions we
will someday have to make with our human loved ones.
