Goodbye to dear, sweet Emily

Dear Readers:

I’ve come to believe that some cats show how much they care by how much they act like they just don’t care much at all. But my dear sweet late Emily did, for 22 years.

This past Friday at suppertime, I noticed she was lying down on the hardwood floor in my kitchen. I could tell something was wrong.

You see, for close to 22 years, Emily has been a cat on a very predictable schedule.  While her situations have changed over the years, she has maintained predictable and uncanny preferences with her daily goings on.  My client, Sandra Frazier, who gave the cat to me 14 years ago when Emily had just turned eight, explained her temperament.  “Dr. Forsythe, Emily is a special cat, she is a Gemini, and she was my mother’s favorite of all 15 of her cats”.  Sandra went on to let me know that because her mother had died rather suddenly from bone cancer, all 15 of her mother’s cats needed to be placed in homes, and Sandra had reserved the very best cat for me.

Thus began the Forsythe’s love affair with Emily, the newly minted Altimira Veterinary Hospital “clinic cat” who liked everything to be “just so” like any good Gemini baby does.

When I noticed her on the floor I was alarmed enough to pick her up and place her back on her spot on the couch and offer her some of her stinky, smelly K/D food — the canned food she had been living on for the past two years, ever since her kidneys started failing.  Emily wanted nothing to do with her dinner, and seemed to be getting weaker by the minute. It seemed like her life was flashing before my very eyes, but she never uttered a peep, just kept looking at me as if she just didn’t really care.

I brought her into the clinic to do an exam and give her some hydrating fluids, thinking this would help her “bounce back”.  As a kidney patient, she was used to getting fluids injected under her skin on a weekly basis to help combat the advancement of her chronic kidney disease.  But tonight, she wasn’t even able to sit up for treatment. Within five minutes, my friend and coworker Kelly had come down to the hospital and was helping me warm the fading cat up to a normal temperature, and watching tears flow down my cheeks.

I knew it was time to say goodbye, and I’d known this day was approaching for the last few months, but I had no idea when the actual time came it would feel so piercing, so wicked, and so raw inside me.

Predictably, Miss Emily acted like she didn’t much care.  She meowed, and blinked her eyes a few times, but she did not convey any sense of fear or worry. Much as she had conducted herself over 22 years, she spent her last moments being comfortable in her soft, sweet grey tabby fur, letting the cycle of life pedal forward, completely at peace.

My son Magnus came downstairs and had a moment to love Emily and tell her goodbye.  Then, with Kelly by my side, I gently administered the pink sodium pentathol into her IV port while whispering, “Thank you, I love you, be safe, and goodbye.”

In the few days since Emily passed on, I have had many overwhelming moments of humility and gratitude for all that she gave us.  She helped us at the Altimira Veterinary Hospital location for several years as a tolerant and sweet clinic cat before her age dictated that she would be better of in our home.  As life unfolded, our family endured a divorce and subsequent creation of two separate households, Emily was a constant in my son and daughter’s lives — never acting like she was interested or particularly engaged, but always offering a soothing purr or a nudge with her head against a pre-teen’s leg while they brushed their teeth; always providing an unspoken comfort and warmth that needed no words or description.  Emily had a purpose and a point of view, one that usually went unnoticed but was powerful and meaningful.

As the kids grew older, Emily was always there when Sigrid got home from ballet practice, tired and hungry and worried about the things all teenage girls worry about.  And when Magnus came home from a little league game, win or lose, that tabby cat was always lying  there on the couch willing to cuddle and comfort.

In the last few years, Emily seemed to feign apathy about the recession, elections, and Obamacare.  She showed little interest in my personal challenges and struggles of being a single gay father in a small town, and most recently, of my fears of the loneliness I anticipate when my two beautiful kids go off to college simultaneously in the next month.  Emily superbly maintained the faux appearance of indifference all these years.

But the truth was, she really did care, in her own cat way.  She raised these two kids, every day, and every night, and never even took a day off.  Through colds and field trips and holidays and dioramas, she was a loving family pet who really completed our lives.  And she helped me through my early years as a new vet in Sonoma, through a divorce, coming out, and stumbling through the raising of my wonderful kids.  For a cat who really didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about much, I don’t think our family could have been more blessed than to have had Emily with us.  And now, with our luck and prayers, I hope she’s watching over us from a very comfy couch.