The death of the cat

I’d been away from Australia for three months – much of it in England where my 96 year old mother lives in a care home now.  When I came back Jack was predictably quite changed, taller, more dexterous, more dark and complicated.  Both his mother and I were a bit afraid he’d reject me after such a long time away.  I think he’d been primed to be nice on our first encounter when I got back but  he was cross with me after the initial pleasantries.   “Go way” he said.

Coming home after such a long trip is difficult at the best of times.  The house was dank and gritty with dust and  the garden deep in leaves and the plants either dead or rampaging. The lush passion fruit vine was now just basketwork on the wall.  They don’t live long anyway I’m told.

 But the worst thing I had to deal with was Fergus the cat who had been boarding for some of my time away at a place she’d always thrived in before.  She’d   come back to us plump and purring.  Not this time.  She was skeletal and her eyes were wild.  We took her to the vet and he suggested we send her to a more comfortable place, as he put it.

“You mean a dead place?” I said.

“Well some people see it another way”

I had a  grotesque vision of cats with wings and it was absurd.  Anyway  it seemed all wrong to kill her without her consent.  Nevertheless I grew to dread getting up in the morning to be met with her huge eyes and diminished frame and clear up the night’s mess.

Jack saw her once when she was so sick and stroked her head with a gentleness he would  have been incapable of three months before, and this time she didn’t run away.  “She wants milk” he said with accusation in his voice, “She wants more food”

We anguished for about a fortnight and fed her delicacies which she just  picked at. She grew weaker. She started licking ash from the fireplace.  Every morning I hoped to find her dead, and not by my murderous hand, But  in the end I gave in.  A friend said euthanasia was the last gift you could give a really sick pet.

Graham and I took her in together.  Her little leg was shaved and we stroked her as she was injected with the poison.  It was a bit like an addict getting a hit.  She looked relieved, relaxed for the first time since she’d come home.  But it felt like a terrible thing all the same.  We took her body home in a pillowcase and buried her and cried, both of us.

It began to be OK after a few days.  I reconsidered my position on euthanasia and started to think it would be the way I would like to go if I were as sick as Fergus had been.  A hit of bliss and the vet checking my heart until it stopped.  A pillowcase burial organized by loving mourners.  Perhaps it hadn’t been such a crime, what we had done.

Jack came over about a week later and we made jam tarts and I was   in his good books again.  Our rituals were back on track, the cuckoo clock, the battery powered dog that warbles “singing in the rain” – and then he said,

“Where’s the cat?”

I’d been expecting this sooner or later and told him that she’d got very sick and died.

“She’s sick.  She needs milk.  She needs food”  There was pain in his voice now.  I again said she’d died.  “She ran away”  he suggested.  I couldn’t let that go, especially in the light of having just run away for three months myself.  “No she didn’t run away.  She loved us”  I said.  “She was just very old and she died.”

On and off, all day, he interrogated me about the matter.   We have an attic which has got a bit sinister the way attics get to be as the detritis of decades gets piled into them.  Fergus loved this attic.  It was her bolt hole when Jack was after her or she knew we wanted to chuck her out.

After his bath Jack pointed up the attic stairs with a smile and said with a note of conviction

“The cat’s up there”

“No Jack, there’s no more cat”

“She’s run away”

“No she got ill and died”  

I was weary with Jack and my sorrow and guilt and then I remembered a lesson my mother taught me when I was In England with her this last time.  She has short term memory loss now. She can discuss poetry and feminism but anything new doesn’t stick.   In the early days of my stay this was hugely taxing.  I used to pick her up every day and take her to the cottage where I was staying and she’d quite reasonably ask where she was-

“Could you tell me – where exactly am I?”

“We’re in the cottage I’ve rented for my stay with you”

“Ah”

Then five minutes later

“Where exactly am I?”

In the beginning I would try to vary my answers because it seemed more respectful, more like normal conversation.  So my answer would be perhaps

“”Not far from where you live.  It’s called Cradley”

And then not long after she’d ask again

“Where am I?”

“In a holiday cottage in Worcestershire”

After a while though, I learnt to see the questions another way. The problem of where she was could not be resolved for Mum , but asking was as necessary as breathing.  To stop asking would be a sort of giving up, giving in.   And so her questions became like a sort of birdsong to me.  I stopped trying to vary my answers and just gave back my own simple response to her call.  It began to be part of  our way of getting on.  Nothing to do with information exchange – just reassurance and affection.

I realized Jack’s questions had no answers that he could process either.  Where indeed was the cat?  But he needed to go on asking just the same.  He had to confirm her going and his staying.  He’d loved her after all.  And so I began to answer not with my mind but like a grandmother bird with the same soothing song.

 I should have left it at that but I’m afraid I didn’t.  I suppose I was tired and it was the end of the day.  I half remembered the vet and his attempt to reconcile us to the cat’s death.   I am not a believer in the afterlife but Jack’s parents are.  So what the hell, I thought.   When Jack asked again “Where’s the cat?” I answered “She’s gone to heaven” and immediately wished I hadn’t.  It seemed another sort of lie.  Jack liked that answer though and savoured the word “heaven”

Rachel and Miles were rightly a bit shocked at me  making free with their belief system when it was convenient  and I was ashamed.  But I am left with a lot of confusion in my heart and my head.  Why are answers to questions so problematic? Why don’t they work? Which is the higher duty – to tell the truth as one knows it or to provide comfort and closure of a sort even if it requires  a compromise with sincerity?  What are questions for anyway?  After all some are downright rubbish like “How are you?”  Or is that really so?  Is it another instance of human chirruping – question and answer just to be nice?

 At this moment I wish that somewhere there could be some nice mother bird to take me under her wing  and sooth my soul with a few answers.  I don’t think I would really care if they were true or not just as long as they were there..  And I could ask again and again.