These are a Few of My Favorite Things: Two of Our Dead Kitties, Pat's Dog Rose

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A Year Ago Today Kitty Oliver Died: Three Ghosts of a Christmas Past (In Reverse Order)

I Need to Bury the Cat

I'm not going to put it off any longer. The earth is soft, and the sky is blue.

I read this poem a long time ago. I looked and I found it. Dickey does not write of domestic animals, but I am still glad I found it, not believing in heaven for anyone but glad to play at believing.

The Heaven of Animals

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains it is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these, it could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle's center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

-- James Dickey

Posted by ....J.Michael Robertson at 4:21 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: death, James Dickey, Oliver, poetry
Sometime Between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. This Morning


Our cat Oliver died in bed with me, pressed against my side as I slept fitfully. After all the syringes full of food, medicine, laxative, minerals that I gave him late last night -- after the successful squeezing of his bladder -- I put him in his cat basket, which has a heating pad under the blanket on which he lay.

Around three I heard him cry out. He had crawled out of the basket and was stretched out on the cold slate floor of the bedroom. I put him on an absorbent pad -- think a big Depends sheet -- and then placed my sweatshirt over him.

I got back in bed. I lay there for a minute or two. I got out of bed and put two of the absorbent sheets across the sheet next to me and picked Oliver up and laid him there and lay down next to him and began to cuddle him.

He was making soft cries of protest, against pain I suppose, though perhaps only against the touch of death, the tightening of its grip. He was limp as a rag doll. When I had gone to bed around midnight, I had imagined that sometime during the night he would come struggling up his ramp, having improved enough from the treatment he had just undergone at the vet to manage that modest incline.

That he was worse rather than better suggested failed treatment, a hopeful diagnosis gone wrong. I can squeeze his bladder, I thought, and squeeze baby food and chicken broth into him, but for how long? At what point does one accept the inevitable? It was a hard question. I saw no easy answer.

About five, I got out of bed and put him next to his water bowl, but he would not drink. I took him to the bathroom and used a clean syringe -- we have a dozen or so; we stocked up; we encouraged ourselves by behaving as it we were in for the long haul -- and fed him water, which he seemed to relish.

Then, I took him back to bed. I couldn't sleep and thought I might get up in the dark and have coffee and wait for the first of the four newspapers we get every morning. But then I did sleep, and I dreamed. There were several different dreams, and at the periphery of each was Oliver, not well again but improved, limping about, interested in food, trying to jump up with that awkward gallant determination he showed as he slowly lost control of his back legs.

I awoke around seven and looked at him, still pressed against my side, and saw almost at once that he was dead. Which I did not expect.

I took him upstairs and sat on the sofa where he loved to sit and cradled him in my arms for a good long time. Then I called my wife in Florida. She was picking up barbecue for her mother's lunch. I asked her how long before she would be home and would have waited telling her the news until then, but then she asked how Oliver had passed the night. And I told her he was dead and how and when.

And then we wept -- wept as I told the tale, filling it with gasps and gaps -- and I felt all the better for it. In the barbecue restaurant in Florida, several people asked my wife why she was crying, and every time I heard her reply, "My cat died."
Posted by ....J.Michael Robertson at 9:36 AM 3 comments Links to this post
Labels: cats, death, Oliver
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Saving Tinkerbelle

I mean please on my behalf believe or feign belief that little Oliver can get his fuzzy butt in gear again. For today he simply quit moving.

He crawls a little, the best he can, not good enough. It's been coming these six months. In June we pulled him back from the vet's last needle when no one thought we could, but he's an old cat, 16 years, eight months, 19 days we figure.

I am not sure that the strength is there in his little body. I don't know if it's there for him to find. He cries out, and the vet said it may not be pain -- the vet does not think he is in pain -- he cries out in frustration because his nerve-damaged rear legs cannot push him, though he tries, and his front legs at last lack the strength to pull him forward.

The vet is "shot-gunning" his condition -- $409 worth of shotgunning. A vitamin B Complex shot. A powerful steroid. An enema for god's sake because his little bowel is packed and potentially toxic.

I feed him chicken soup and baby food by syringe. And another syringe with a softener for his feces and another syringe with the paste they call CalLax and another syringe with half a teaspoon of potassium.

And a steroid pill and one-quarter of a blood pressure pill. Oh, I have to squeeze his bladder empty twice a day, laying him on his side, pressing him down with my left hand, squeezing with my right as if he were a baby's toy, handling him rough, too rough, because gentle will not work because I'm on my own, and I've never done this on my own before.

He's not strong enough to struggle. And I think: Give him the strength to make me stop, at least to exact a price. Then he will be well again.

If only.

Actually, I don't want much, no miracle, no drastic recalibration of the laws of causation. I just want to keep him going for a month until E. comes home from her mother's. She left him in my care. It matters because it matters because it matters. Take my word.
Posted by ....J.Michael Robertson at 10:55 PM 1 comments Links to this post
Labels: cat, E., Oliver

Kitten Countdown is Underway

Less than a year after we were married, E. brought home our first cat conveniently packaged in kitten form . I had told her I wanted a cat, and one of her junior high students was redistributing the family wealth, their cat having gone all supply side: Birth 'em and hope someone will come.

And for 40 years after we had cats or you could say cats had us because we are fiercely loyal cat owners, willing to spend money to keep them alive. But after Oliver died almost a year ago -- died in bed with me, pressed agains my side -- we have been catless.

We concluded E.'s mom might not be with us much longer, and her final illness would mean weeks in Florida and 60-hour weeks at work to enable E. to go to Florida as needed. That wouldn't leave much time for kitten nuturing and kitten bonding, and I wanted E. to be at the center of what will probably be our last great Gathering of the Cats.

And so it was, and so E.'s mom died in September. And now E. is about to retire. It's kitten time, two of them, I think, and their momcat, too, because I have a sentimental bourgeois aversion to kittens saved while mom is euthanized.

January, probably, after the holidays. We preview the moment.

Black Cat Month is Coming

Image via Wikipedia

Or so they say over at About Cats, my website of choice for unlimited (and perhaps even untethered) cat love. I believe we must have us a black cat soon. I'm told that they are harder to adopt out and more likely to be abused because of their association with witches, evil and bad luck. We've had two, and they were the sweetest boys.

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• Friday Cat Blogging (americablog.com)

I Wonder if Max Payne is the Worst Movie Ever Made? (As in: It Inflicts 'Max Pain' on the Audience)

When my wife is out of town, my sleep is fitful, and even the worst cable movie postpones the sheet wrestle. Mark Wahlberg has this little Munchkin face in this little Munchkin body. And he's the 'killer ap' cop?

Good news is I can give it one star at Netflix, which will make future choices there more like to satisfy.

No wife, no kitty. My sleep satisfaction is at least tolerable when there's a warm cat body nearby, preferably two or three. Last kitty I slept with died, and at the moment we are Catless in Gaza (a Biblical reference and also Huxley reference, I think, and thus as inviting to most readers as a slap in the face).

But back to cats. Come January we'll get a basketful.

Stumbled Across 'Fade to Cat' - and Now Oliver's Gone

Escaping the Ambush

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today at the neighborhood farmers' market we stumbled upon a couple cages set up by Oakland Animal Shelter volunteers -- two cages, four kittens, a handsome Bengal pair and a less handsome grey kitten lumped over an even less handsome black kitten.

It was the latter pair I warmed toward, of course, always on the side of the undercat and remembering our two black cats: Lawrence, who died young of feline leukemia; Oliver, who died in bed next to me last December, almost 17.

They were loving kitties, quite insistent on worming in and huddling up. Also, I've read many places that black cats have a harder time getting adopted and are often cruelly tormented, such cruel fools so many people are. So I think I now must always have a black cat, just to put a grain of kindness on the scale.

But no kitties today, not until E. retires, which I am beginning to think she never will do. I want her to be home with kittens, enjoying them and bonding. This next batch could be our last batch, actuarially speaking. Even if we survive this next lot, I'd not get kittens again but some fine old homeboy or homegirl, ten minutes from execution.

That will be then. This is now. So: kittens! But not today. We mutually tore one another away from those beautiful kittens in the cage, all fuzz and fun and big neonatal mugs.

Tonight I find in Daily Kos a bit of a tearjerker about euthanizing a beloved cat. Mine were certainly jerked. I don't understand people who don't like cats. I prefer cats, but I like dogs. Maybe these people saw their parents having sex ... with dogs?? Bowwow Oedipus, I guess. Got to be some explanation other than a withering of the soul.

More Oliver Memories. He's the One Cracking on McCain.

Oliver in December, Two Weeks Before He Died (Just Found the Video)

He did enjoy a good scratch, up until the last day. Good on you, little friend.



Expressing Oliver's bladder back in the day.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown

A friend who lurks, dropping in occasionally to see what the Cat is up to, emails privately to say she is a little worried about me, as I sit here in my own filth -- gin bottles, Twinkies wrappers, Hustler's Guide to the Hadron Particle Collider -- swooning away till my sweet E. comes home.

There are many things a blog can be, and perhaps too often I let this one descend into Dear Diary mode, where one bathes in one's own tears. But dammit all those years as a journalist have spoiled private writing for me. If no one might possibly read it, why write it? And then you must recall I was a feature writer, the essence of which is -- shall we say about half the time? -- writing about something concerning which no one gives a sh-t but in such a droll and stylish way the form excuses the slightness of the content.

Voila! Let's blog. So I complain and prostrate myself across my bed -- for show; for fun? even the experts disagree.

And I do miss my wife, and I have yet really to internalize how much I miss the damn cat. I am saving that till E. comes home. She was cheated of a last goodbye, and life is as much symbol as thing.

Yet I am happier than I seem. One immediately thinks -- you do; you know you do -- of the exchange in Twelfth Night:

Sir Toby: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
Clown: Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too.
Sir Toby: Thou ’rt i’ the right. Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs. A stoup of wine, Maria! Well, there you go. I'm a little sad (he revises the text for his purpose), but outside the walls of this blog the cakes, the ale and the bite of ginger remain, and I enjoy them. And, of course, one can always rub one's chain with crumbs.

Brother, Can You Spare 75 Cents If You Won't Go for a Sunday Subscription?

Shortly after their deaths, I cradled the limp dead bodies of our brother cats Boris and Oliver, and I grieved.

In the case of Boris, that grief was almost 15 years ago when he was run over crossing the street in front of our house, and a neighbor came to tell. That was painful. I won't go into particulars of my regret because I'm afraid all this recent pet-loving is all so bourgeois -- you may be interested to know, by the way, that if you prick a bourgeoisie, do we not bleed? -- but suffice it to say that it's hard to lose a young pet with so much fun still to come for us and for the cat.

You can fill in the blanks, I think. If you've read this far, we are probably in sync.

Did the same thing with little Oliver after he died in our sleep Friday morning, holding him for a while, before he started to get stiff. That death was less painful because he had lived long and well, and we had fought so hard the last six months to keep him alive. Seeing him dead, my mind reset to images of his relative health as short a time as only a year ago, and I saw that his death was a proper end, acceptable to us and a relief to him.

All this I have said is by way of introducing a few thoughts about the delicate state of newspapers today.

(So much introduction and so few thoughts. This is the kind of thing for which I'd grade my reporting students down. Lack of proper proportion between intro and body, I cry!)

Anyway, this morning I flop-stepped outside in my sandals and my pink bathrobe. (Send me a quarter, and I'll explain that bathrobe; I've got to monetize my fan dance.)

So out I flop out to pick up our four morning papers. And I look at them there in driveway and front yard. And I think of Kitty Oliver, as I see them lying there, so thin and limp, pitiful really if you remember their muscular days.

And I think this is just like being in bed Friday morning with Oliver. I'm watching newspapers die. I look. I turn away (metaphorically).

I will turn back and they will be gone.


Addendum: And, yes, this little conceit quickly breaks down, given the fact we'll go to the pound and get a box of kittens, and happiness will reign, and my ruling analogy will curl up in a ball and go to sleep.

Though, actually, when it comes to gathering information both useful and accurate, the internet is a little bit like a box of kittens. For once I don't mean that in a nice way.

Some Friends Came Over to Play Games and Take My Mind Off Oliver's Death, But I Forgot to Video Them. *Or Maybe I Made Them All Up.*

In which case grief has deranged my mind, right?

Among the guests were Paris Hilton, J.D. Salinger, Anita Bryant, Howard Hughes body double (not the last one, the next to last), Nate Silver, Dick Cheney's secret Santa and the Lichen brothers, Algae and Fungus.

You decide.

I Need to Bury the Cat

I'm not going to put it off any longer. The earth is soft, and the sky is blue.

I read this poem a long time ago. I looked and I found it. Dickey does not write of domestic animals, but I am still glad I found it, not believing in heaven for anyone but glad to play at believing.

The Heaven of Animals

Here they are.  The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains it is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these, it could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward:  to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle's center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

  -- James Dickey

Sometime Between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. This Morning

Our cat Oliver died in bed with me, pressed against my side as I slept fitfully. After all the syringes full of food, medicine, laxative, minerals that I gave him late last night -- after the successful squeezing of his bladder -- I put him in his cat basket, which has a heating pad under the blanket on which he lay.

Around three I heard him cry out. He had crawled out of the basket and was stretched out on the cold slate floor of the bedroom. I put him on an absorbent pad -- think a big Depends sheet -- and then placed my sweatshirt over him.

I got back in bed. I lay there for a minute or two. I got out of bed and put two of the absorbent sheets across the sheet next to me and picked Oliver up and laid him there and lay down next to him and began to cuddle him.

He was making soft cries of protest, against pain I suppose, though perhaps only against the touch of death, the tightening of its grip. He was limp as a rag doll. When I had gone to bed around midnight, I had imagined that sometime during the night he would come struggling up his ramp, having improved enough from the treatment he had just undergone at the vet to manage that modest incline.

That he was worse rather than better suggested failed treatment, a hopeful diagnosis gone wrong. I can squeeze his bladder, I thought, and squeeze baby food and chicken broth into him, but for how long? At what point does one accept the inevitable? It was a hard question. I saw no easy answer.

About five, I got out of bed and put him next to his water bowl, but he would not drink. I took him to the bathroom and used a clean syringe -- we have a dozen or so; we stocked up; we encouraged ourselves by behaving as it we were in for the long haul -- and fed him water, which he seemed to relish.

Then, I took him back to bed. I couldn't sleep and thought I might get up in the dark and have coffee and wait for the first of the four newspapers we get every morning. But then I did sleep, and I dreamed. There were several different dreams, and at the periphery of each was Oliver, not well again but improved, limping about, interested in food, trying to jump up with that awkward gallant determination he showed as he slowly lost control of his back legs.

I awoke around seven and looked at him, still pressed against my side, and saw almost at once that he was dead. Which I did not expect.

I took him upstairs and sat on the sofa where he loved to sit and cradled him in my arms for a good long time. Then I called my wife in Florida. She was picking up barbecue for her mother's lunch. I asked her how long before she would be home and would have waited telling her the news until then, but then she asked how Oliver had passed the night. And I told her he was dead and how and when.

And then we wept -- wept as I told the tale, filling it with gasps and gaps -- and I felt all the better for it. In the barbecue restaurant in Florida, several people asked my wife why she was crying, and every time I heard her reply, "My cat died."

Saving Tinkerbelle

I mean please on my behalf believe or feign belief that little Oliver can get his fuzzy butt in gear again. For today he simply quit moving.

He crawls a little, the best he can, not good enough. It's been coming these six months. In June we pulled him back from the vet's last needle when no one thought we could, but he's an old cat, 16 years, eight months, 19 days we figure.

I am not sure that the strength is there in his little body. I don't know if it's there for him to find. He cries out, and the vet said it may not be pain -- the vet does not think he is in pain -- he cries out in frustration because his nerve-damaged rear legs cannot push him, though he tries, and his front legs at last lack the strength to pull him forward.

The vet is "shot-gunning" his condition -- $409 worth of shotgunning. A vitamin B Complex shot. A powerful steroid. An enema for god's sake because his little bowel is packed and potentially toxic.

I feed him chicken soup and baby food by syringe. And another syringe with a softener for his feces and another syringe with the paste they call CalLax and another syringe with half a teaspoon of potassium.

And a steroid pill and one-quarter of a blood pressure pill. Oh, I have to squeeze his bladder empty twice a day, laying him on his side, pressing him down with my left hand, squeezing with my right as if he were a baby's toy, handling him rough, too rough, because gentle will not work because I'm on my own, and I've never done this on my own before.

He's not strong enough to struggle. And I think: Give him the strength to make me stop, at least to exact a price. Then he will be well again.

If only.

Actually, I don't want much, no miracle, no drastic recalibration of the laws of causation. I just want to keep him going for a month until E. comes home from her mother's. She left him in my care. It matters because it matters because it matters. Take my word.

'Expressing' Oliver's Bladder. A *Vet* Showed Me How to Do This. Seek Professional Instruction Once You Have Been Inspired by Our Demonstration.

Corrections:

Actually Oliver is not a young cat. He is 16. Was I concerned about his feelings by declining to state his age when the cameras were running?

Also, his problem is not just piddling in the wrong place. For ten days, he did not void; he leaked. That was when we were inspired by Sue Russell's treatment of her cat Spenser, who was paralyzed in the back parts from kittenhood, to squeeze Oliver's bladder.

Oliver is not quite paralyzed, but the video makes clear how limited is his control over his rear legs. And that poor little tail! Think of a furry overcooked noodle.

Kitty Update

Not so good. Won't eat. Use the big syringe, mix a little baby food and chicken broth and:

Voila. We hope.

An Oliver Update

The steroids seem to be helping. He is walking a little bit -- to walk at all, some limp and some drag, is better than he was doing Saturday and Sunday -- and he seems to have much better control of his bladder. Of course, Eydie and I are "expressing" -- weird nomenclature; whose sensibilities needed salving? -- his bladder morning and night *and I am getting pretty good.*

This means in a day or two: a video!

We are the Sultan

Like Scheherazade, Oliver must tell us a tale each night so that he be allowed to live another day. His tales are a bit of a dumb show, of course, for a meow can be many things but never an argument.

Tonight he dragged himself into his litter box and urinated and then -- to the wonder of all -- bumped his way up the stairs.

And then he lay down. He had done enough. For today.

Cat Bulletin

Not good. When we got home from the A's game Saturday night, Oliver could walk only with great difficulty. He'd move a few feet -- shuffle really, like an old man -- and then sit for a while. Sunday morning we called our vet hospital, which was short staffed and told us no appointments were available, but Eydie said it IS an emergency and you WILL see the kitty and they did.

So the last round begins: a steroids shot and pills twice a day. We see no particular benefit 24 hours later. The little guy struggles to move, though he is using his litter -- some of the time. I do not think life is very pleasant for him, even by cat standards, which I have never thought of as particularly exacting.

What are the parameters of cat contentment? Were those all-night snuggles essential or incidental, one of many sources of warmth in the night? It is sentimental to put off killing him, I conclude, but I think that supposing we can be rational about all things is itself profoundly irrational and more distorted and misdirected than our wild spasms of intution. (Reverse is true, too.)

So: a few more days and then the hole in the garden, the tears at the vet (where sometimes they are unsettled when a man cries) and then the good memories take hold, and we accept things as they are and let those things resonate.



Here. Look at this. These are things I've said before.