Sqweaky is fading away before my eyes. My beloved cat – she has always been very much my cat; Michele is tolerated – is ill with kidney disease and there is nothing we can do.
No money, no medicine and no miracles can save her. For cats, kidney disease is a death sentence.
We’ve known for a few months now that our time with her is rapidly shortening. So we have kept her bright and happy with the food she favours and the occasional raw prawn, which she loves.
But it was clear over the past few weeks that she was suddenly losing weight quite quickly, something confirmed when we took her to the vet for another blood test.
In fact, she’d lost a frightening 400g in just a month, and she had, in the couple of days before the latest test, become noticeably less bright.
The afternoon after the blood test, which happened to be the day before Waitangi Day, the vet rang with the results. Her kidney disease hadn’t noticeably advanced, which was good news, but she might now have a bladder infection as well. It would be best that we brought her in and left her with them overnight so they could get a urine sample and figure out what to do next.
So we rushed her into town in the late afternoon, in the shimmering, almost blinding heat that has finally arrived in Wairarapa to cheer up our late summer. Sqweaky looked as depressed to be there as I felt as we left her. But then, she’s always hated going to the vet.
When we collected her on Waitangi Day, she seemed brighter, and, along with antibiotics, we were given the hope that she would get better.
But the following day, she hardly moved from her not-so-secret nest in the garden and seemed to eat hardly a thing. A day after that, it was back to the vet for more drugs and more under-skin hydration, then home again.
As I write this, she is lying on her blanket by the open French doors in the living room, enjoying a little sun, the breeze and the sound of cicadas on an already hot morning. She’s eaten most of a raw prawn and had a bit of water.
She seems a little better, but she also seems restless and not herself, even if she is still talking to me when I talk to her.
Soon, possibly very soon, we will have to decide whether to ring the vet once again to have them come to Lush Places so we can let Sqweaky go.
Intellectually, I know this is an act of kindness, the last best thing we can do for her. But as I type it, the thought of it makes my chest tighten and my eyes well.
Why do we do it? Why do we bring them into our lives, knowing as we do that our beloved pets will die long before us and that their departure, whatever the circumstances, will be a hard, miserable thing?
The end and the sadness of a pet’s death is so predictable and inevitable, and there is enough sadness in the world without chasing more of it.
But who thinks about endings at the beginning? With the most fulfilling things in our emotional lives – friendships, romances, marriages, having children, a cat adopting us – we are consumed only by the pleasures and companionship we know are to come, I suppose.
If, as seems very likely, our 14 years with Sqweaky are soon to end, I will have to try to remember the pleasure we enjoyed in each other’s company, the purring and the prawns, and try to forget that one of us knew from the beginning that, sooner or later, we’d have to say goodbye. l
Sqweaky was finally euthanised on Tuesday, February 11.
