microcosmic

oct. 2022 —

Here’s the thesis, the long and short of it: My three-year-old cat recently died of acute renal failure. Cause: lily toxicity. So the vets think; they aren’t sure, but I am. I’m going to talk about what happened, both for catharsis and awareness purposes.

In early October, a date gave me flowers, a bundle of pink blooms in a pot that I didn’t bother to look too closely at. I’ve always avoided bringing plants into the apartment, conscious of how my cats liked to meddle with them, but I found the gesture sweet and I figured if I put them on the highest shelf of my bookcase where the cats couldn’t tread, it wouldn’t be an issue. I slid them up there, promptly got swept up in the busyness of my life, and forgot about them.

A week later, I got a call on a Friday night that my Golden retriever of 12 and a half years was almost certainly dying of cancer. They’d found a large splenic mass and couldn’t operate or biopsy because of her anemia. She likely had a couple of months left, if the tumor didn’t rupture first. The same night, I also found that my wallet had been missing for a week. All of that served to distract me quite a bit. Still, I was concerned when I came home that following Monday, after visiting my sick pup, and found a few spots of vomit on the floor of my apartment. My two cats didn’t throw up that often, but occasionally did if food disagreed with them.

“Alright, which one of you was it?” I asked them both teasingly. It feels ghoulish now, to have been so unconcerned. To Rowan, bright-eyed and alert on the cat tree: “Was it you?” My attention shifted. “It was you, wasn’t it?” That, I said to Basil, huddled at the end of the couch with a sallow air. I cooed over him a bit, saying this and that about an upset stomach, although I wasn’t really sure which one of them had been sick. Basil threw up again about a half hour later, confirming my suspicion, but there was nothing in his vomit. A little concerned, I texted a vet tech friend: Is this worth taking him in for tonight? They responded the way any vet would have: Maybe, but probably not? Cats vomit a lot for a lot of reasons, and they’ll likely treat symptomatically with anti-nausea. Keep an eye on him; he could just have eaten too fast.

The next day, Basil was acting fine. (24 hours.) Then, Wednesday morning, I woke up and he wasn’t at my bedroom door to greet me. He wasn’t anywhere to be found. A cold dread filled me as I spun through the apartment looking for him, calling for him with increasing panic. It was unusual enough that Basil didn’t come greet me in the morning; it was absolutely unprecedented that he didn’t come when he was called, especially with food out. I was so distressed that I immediately called my mom, certain something was wrong even when I found him hiding in a couch crevice. He ate a little, but I wasn’t appeased. I took him into the vet that afternoon. They ran all of their usual tests — temperature check, a physical, an X-ray — and I was told everything looked fine. The X-ray found nothing in his stomach or intestines, only a bit of gas and irritation. Basil, who had been lethargic earlier, was bopping around the vet’s office now, jumping up on tables and rubbing his face against machinery.

“If you hadn’t told me in advance, I never would have assumed this cat was feeling sick,” the vet told me.

We chatted a bit through our options; I asked every question I could think of. The vet mentioned bloodwork as a potential next step, if called for. He warned me it would be even more expensive than the appointment cost and the X-ray.

I was uncertain. “Do you think he’s showing any symptoms that would warrant it?”

“Honestly? No,” the vet replied. “He’s presenting as very bright and active, and I’m not seeing any obstructions or internal issues on the X-ray.”

I was a little unsettled; made some joke about Basil having Munchausen, for how perky he was. The vet gave him an anti-nausea shot and some medication and told me to keep an eye on his food intake.

Vets would tell me later how unusual it was — how, really, unprecedented it was — for any cat 48 hours into lily toxicity to be as energetic and asymptomatic as he was. I didn’t know then, but when we left the first vet’s office, his fate was sealed. By forgoing bloodwork, I’d thrown away his only shot of detection and recovery. Studies will tell you that the chance of a cat’s survival after 48 hours of lily consumption is next to none. The severity of lily toxicity really should be a PSA for cat owners anywhere: It doesn’t just go for consumption. If a cat even touches a lily petal or its pollen, it can kill them.

The next morning, I knew something was very wrong. Basil was still hiding. He wouldn’t eat and was having trouble drinking; he had a small twitch in his face and his fur was ungroomed. At this point, I was convinced it was something beyond a gastrointestinal issue. I took off more work to take him to the emergency vet, even though I knew it would cost a fortune. Again, he seemed fine — lethargic, but well enough that the receptionists let other emergency patients go before us. Once in the room, I explained all of his symptoms to the vet and the tech, who both seemed rather unconcerned given how he was presenting and his former results. The emergency vet, after a quick physical examination, confessed that Basil seemed “annoyingly” fine on exam, using those terms bright and active like I’d heard before. Still, he said he’d run bloodwork just to be safe.

He came back to the room a half hour later, visibly more ashen than before. He laid out the paperwork on the table and told me the news wasn’t good: Basil’s kidney values were so high that they were beyond what their machine could even capture. It took a good while of calm vet-speak until he got to the point: Basil’s kidneys were failing, likely due to some kind of toxin. He had spoken to me so reassuringly up until now that it wasn’t until this point that I realized there was a very real chance of losing him. He asked me if there was anything he could have gotten into. I wracked my brain, and could only think of the flowerpot, out of reach. The emergency vet gently asked if there was a chance there’d been lilies in the pot. If so, he could only offer about a 5% chance of survival.

“If he got to a lily,” he said, “I’m so sorry, but it’s a death sentence.”

The moment he said it, I knew. In my mind’s eye, I could see that distinct pink shape on my top shelf, which I hadn’t even stopped to think twice about this week. I said I wasn’t certain, but I knew in the way only that particular kind of dread knows. Things progressed quickly after that: Basil came back into the room, still a little tired but as active as ever, exploring the room and jumping off tables. My uncle, also a vet, viewed Basil’s lab results and said if presented with those numbers blindly, he would assume the animal was comatose. I rushed home and despaired when I found an empty lily stalk in the pot. All the petals had shed into the pot, but one must have fallen to the floor from the top shelf, and of course, what curious cat could resist?

That awful night of waiting, I held onto a sliver of hope for a miracle, though I knew how futile it was. It was dashed when the vet told me the next day that Basil wasn’t improving. After only four days, he was in the final stages of renal failure, and fluid treatment was hurting and not helping: His abdomen was taking on an unusual amount of fluid and he was no longer producing urine. Unless we could get him on some miraculous feline dialysis — the nearest of which was a seven-hour drive away in Indiana — there was nothing more to do for him. There was also no guarantee dialysis would work, nor that he would survive the trip, with how far along he was. Even with his kidneys fully shot, Basil remained resiliently active when we saw him, poking around the room and trying to leap off tables.

“I really can’t explain it,” the vet told us, perplexed as she watched him move around. It was an anomaly. No one could explain values that high, even if Basil had eaten an entire petal (though I never found anything in his vomit or litter). No one could explain how Basil was presenting so well even when he should have been, by every possible account, in a coma. The vet suggested maybe it hadn’t been lilies at all — which I found hard to believe, given his symptoms and the fact that they were the only novel thing in my apartment — but something more chronic. Something that he had quietly lived with that allowed him to shoulder the pain more invisibly. Whatever it was, it had the same inescapable conclusion, which was to let him go mercifully and not cling onto his decline for selfish purposes.

I won’t talk about the awful hour of saying goodbye, because I’ve relived it enough. I will talk about what followed, because I’ve come to discover through conversation and research that pet grief is simultaneously so universal and also so dismissed. Shock was primary — it had happened so quickly, and as of a few days prior, Basil was spry and healthy. He was only three; I had assumed I had most of my thirties with him and Rowan together. In the span of 48 hours, I’d gone from being told it was an upset stomach to saying goodbye. Each vet I spoke to emphatically insisted I couldn’t blame myself, but how could I not? It had been my responsibility to protect him. I had played a role in his suffering and his death, even if unwittingly. I had made the wrong choices, and my cat had paid the price with his life.

I’m not a very maternal person, so I don’t consider my cats to be like my children. Even so, Basil and I had a special relationship even by owner-pet standards. From when he was very little, he clung to my every move like a small striped burr. He talked to me constantly, showering me with affection and dictating my attention with licks and lap-sits. He liked it when I sang to him or played guitar near him. There were so many little things that made his personality: the way his tail vibrated with excitement when I fed him, the way our voices traded back and forth in full conversations, how much he adored his sister, how the simplest touch could make him start purring, how he loved twisting around on clean sheets and sleeping on my laundry. He treated me as though I was his actual mother, and so I felt like it. He would often stretch out on top of me with all his toes pointed out. When I adopted him, the shelter had called him Long John. Sometimes I called him that, Long John boy, because he had indeed grown up quite long despite the scrawny beginnings that had once made the name ironic. He and Rowan were so bonded that they often moved in sync with the same mannerisms and motions. From infancy onward, they slept, played, ate, fought and traveled together. I used to joke they were one cat soul in two cat bodies. In addition to my own loss, I could not begin to fathom a Rowan without Basil. I couldn’t fathom coming home in the evenings to one cat that was supposed to be a half of a whole, although anyone will tell you Rowan has enough personality for three cats. Beyond that, I couldn’t explain the situation to her as she searched for him around the apartment with increasing distress, then sank into a listless depression. I couldn’t take that sadness or loneliness from her, either.

As I worked through grief, I felt like I’d been cruelly set up like some figure in a mythic tragedy, fumbling through the narrow trappings of a maze created by fate. Like each blind, errant choice I made had brought me careening toward that inevitable end. In the same breath, I would scoff at my own melodramatics. To assume the workings of some mysterious large hand was to absolve my own agency, my own accountability; my own ignorance.

Through most of my life experiences, joyous or tragic, I’ve had a metaphor at the ready. I usually have to throw words at something until it sticks or makes sense. It’s a writer’s wont to examine our own pain in media res, to mine it for material, and most of all for meaning. I quickly found there were no words suitable to describe this kind of grief. What could I compare it to? No image was sufficient. There was nothing tangible enough to convey grief, even to myself; only that senseless, twisting mass of feeling, that which existed beyond language. I told a therapist I found this interesting, that I couldn’t put grief to words; she asked why I found it so. I paused in thought, and replied that it was because it meant grief was older than language. Primal, predestined, seeded into the rudimentary fabric of our makeup.

At the same time, during the mourning process, I felt abashed, even ashamed, by the volume of my grief over a pet. I have lost family members; I lost three in the span of a month of a half at the beginning of the pandemic. We couldn’t even hold proper funerals for them, due to quarantine protocols. By then, all of the streets outside had fallen as silent as a post-apocalypse. Through that period, I only felt a peculiar numbness, as if feeling everything beneath ice. In the flash-bang trauma of a nascent pandemic, that furor of events slid off me until I was in a place, much later, where I could grapple with it all. This was something different — this demanded to be felt, immediately and at great volume. As a career compartmentalizer, I was surprised I couldn’t wriggle away from this kind of pain, avoid it or shove it down. It just kept welling up and welling up and welling up. In a consoling chat, my aunt told me something my grandfather said, years after he lost his son, my uncle: “One day, there will be a morning where you wake up and it doesn’t grab you by the throat.” But how could I compare the loss of a cat to a human person — a brother or a son? It felt cheap to assume commonality with those who had experienced Real Grief. It felt cheap to have lost human family members and friends as I have, those losses which have warranted Real Grief, and to have this loss level me as it did. Surrounded by close friends my age who have experienced unimaginable losses, I unwittingly scribbled out a quick phone note only a few weeks before Basil died: “I am a bobber in a sea of my friends’ grief, waiting for my own turn to sink.” I was bracing for something inevitable, but I didn’t know what.

Maybe it was worse because through the process, my own guilt shouted back at me in an endless echo chamber. I found myself tracing back the bread crumbs in my phone of that awful week, forming a timeline of my own ignorance. The befores and afters, photos and timestamps. Here is when I visited my dying dog; was he eating poison at this moment, or this? Here is when I put on makeup for a date; I didn’t even know he was already past saving. Here is when my friend and I were practicing Mandarin flashcards on the couch and fumbling through guitar chords with quiet laughter; he was already 24 hours sick, next to us on the couch, and I didn’t know. At what point had it been too late? How had I not heard the ticking down of the hours? I visited flashbacks over and over again, retrospective omens that seemed glaring in hindsight: My date beaming and handing me a pot of pink flowers in the front seat; my own voice laughing, saying, My cats are a nightmare, I’ll have to put them somewhere they can’t mess with them. Afterward, I heard my own voice saying that over and over again; delighted by the gesture, too flustered to even look at the individual flowers in the pot. Always so fond and plural, my cats, my cats, the cats, like the way moms talk about picking up their kids from soccer practice. The flowers’ potential danger noted like a neon warning sign, and then forgotten just as fleetingly.

I realize the impact of pet loss may seem trivial, even mystifying, to non-pet owners. Certainly, compared to that of a human loved one. The weekend I lost Basil, a tow truck driver I argued with sneeringly told me that I could have shot him in the head for five dollars and saved myself the vet bills. Perhaps it would be easier if I viewed our relationships with animals so callously. But I’ve found that grief follows its own logic, certainly one incomprehensible to me. Regardless, I couldn’t control how I felt, and I had to surrender myself to that riptide.

There’s a larger point to be made here about pet grief — certainly psychologically, but also culturally. If I had more energy, I could whip a full article out of this, all sources cited. There’s another point to be made about the expected hyper-speed of American grief compared to other cultures. Many countries offer at least a month of bereavement, if not more, for the loss of a loved one. Americans grow impatient, almost exasperated, if you’re visibly grieving after a week. In a highly individualistic culture driven by capitalist churn, we lose humanity. Empathy, too. We lose community. There is only the movement onto the next action; the next work day, the next grind. The pandemic taught us that more than anything else. The chewing maw of American capitalism has never stopped that grind for anyone, not millions sick and dying and dead — it certainly wasn’t going to stop for my cat. This loss had wrecked my mental health to the point of true detriment, but the alternative was that I couldn’t work, or function normally as society expected me to.

It seems derivative or corny to end all of this with a poem, but I will because it conveys how I feel in the simplest possible way: I loved Basil, every single day he was with me, so much that I know he knew it until his last breath. All I can do in the absence of him is keep loving him.

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.

— Langston Hughes