In those last few moments all I could do was call his name; all he could do was purr, a ritual we’d engaged in since his birth in early 1999, a call and response that had tied our lives together in a way only undying love could, and here he was dying, and I had to let him go.
No human or animal had ever attached itself to me the way this cat had, he needing me so utterly, I could do nothing but reciprocate – love for love, need for need, call and response.
Even as I stood with him in the vet’s office, I knew this was the final act in a year full of such pain, of doubt about what has been and what was bound to come, full of life’s deceptions to which I contributed my share, an appropriate conclusion to a conflict I had tried to keep remote, separate from those things I cared deeply about, trying not to be cynical about everything – the office and the strange people who struggled there meaningless at moments like these.
My fingers stroked his fur even as the vet eased the needle of death into the cat’s leg, searching for a vein that could endure this one last insult life issued before expiring.
I still call him Tiny Tug, even though I knew his father, Big Tug, has expired years earlier, laying down his life in the tumble of trees behind our house, pausing on his way to death to bid us farewell, he like Jelly (Little Tug’s mother) knowing how we kept sacred of earlier kittens they had produced no one thought would ever survive the wilds, Jelly nudging this one tiny accident-prone and pathetically-breathing kitten through our back door for safe keeping, and he (Little Tug) latching onto me as mother, father and best friend, sleeping with me at night, clinging to me day by day as if he expected me to expire before he did, or leave him the way his real parents did, comforted by my voice or touch now as the tender mercy of the vet’s needle too him out of this troubled world and into that other place beyond pain or sorrow.
No real safe place in this world of ours, no comfort zone, no words of wisdom that I might impair, he relying on me to know what is best, when we as humans often don’t know what is best for ourselves, all life a struggle, to be free of pain and fear, to find our way through the stormy night to some better dawn.
I cried over him the way I did my mother, and before her, my grandmother, knowing that someone special was leaving, someone I would not encounter again on this side of the great divide, and his absence would leave a space in me, a hole in my heart I would carry with me until the last beat and I rejoined him in the world beyond.
A whole day later, I still have the cat carrier rattling around in the back seat of my car, still struck by its emptiness after taking it away with me but leaving Tiny Tug behind, perhaps still carrying its spirit if not its body, now even more firmly gripping my heart with all its claws.
There are some things in this life you don’t know you have until you don’t have them anymore, and yet, maybe still have, buried deep in a place nobody can get at, a treasure so previous no gilt frame could contain it.
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