Still After 30 Years

Even after 30 years, each year when the relentless August sun softens to mellow September light angling in to illuminate the shadows, the cooler nights while the days grow shorter, as did yours, I remember those last weeks with you, who rescued me, who taught me so much, even in your death.

Above is the tribute I wrote to include in the Pet Memorial Sunday ceremony in 2021, describing the same experience I’ve had since the very first anniversary with only the number of years changing with each passing anniversary. It’s true, every year since September 19, 1996, as September light and days and quiet cool slowly change from summer to autumn, I also begin to think about him and our last weeks. He communicated so clearly, and he and I both knew he was going to die, but as long as the wordless communication continued, worked in expressions and thoughts, I was disbelieving, and apparently so was he.

Early on, an animal communicator had told me that he felt he could beat this, and she thought so too, and gave me lots of information about treatments for him to use along with the allopathic medicine. I believed that and following her suggestions got myself a crash course in homeopathic remedies, flower essences and some herbal treatment. I had faith in all the alternatives but I felt for many years as if I failed him, this most consequential being in my whole life.

I recognize now that I’ve used these alternative methods for decades I was looking at each of them as an individual treatment instead of as one part of a whole system that could and should be adjusted each day. If I could have gotten enough fluids in him, that would have made a huge difference, but I was inexperienced and he moved so much, and I could have warmed them more. If I had recognized symptoms more easily and changes due to the alternative therapies, if I had been able to get the ingredients for the raw and cooked diets, all of those things, worked together, could have made a very real difference, but I was floundering in doing and not yet in knowing, feeling as if I was guessing. In part it was my own self-doubt that made me feel that way and only see the failure but not the successes.

Looking back over 30 years of rescue and care I don’t feel I failed him. I used what was available to me from the sources that were available to me, and I did my best to learn and use my intuition. I’ve built my knowledge of cat care on what I learned taking care of him.

And I also realize that we humans and the animals we love often feel “we can beat this” because we want it so deeply. But “beating this” can be seen as a longer good quality life than expected, simply feeling better for all the time left, being able to enjoy the things we love and making memories right up to the last minutes of life, and beyond, not necessarily vanquishing an illness and returning to wellness. If we overlook the good that we’ve done and only focus on the loss, we have failed, failed ourselves and failed our beloved animal companion. Even in that, he taught me a lesson, and I have used it to the betterment of all the cats who come into my life since then. Each September, I remember that too.

Looking at the photo above, note the columbine leaves and the bit of pale yellow behind Kublai, the grassy things off to the right. Look in the photo below—he was getting a drink in the birdbath. When I first saw Mimi get a drink from one of the birdbaths I remembered Kublai, another one of those rhymes through the history of our feline family (Sometimes Memories Rhyme and Vintage Photos: Generations Looking Out the Basement Door).

I love the way he’s looking at me in the photo below, despite all the evidence of his illness. I knew that expression. We were in this together until the end, whenever and however that happened.

He weighed about six pounds in these photos. He had weighed 12 at his mature weight. Obviously with two shaved front legs he’d recently had some tests, IV fluids, I remember there was antibiotic therapy, prednisolone, other medications administered in hospital. He wasn’t staying hydrated, he wasn’t getting nourishment from his food, even his fur was fading from the rich black it had always been to a dull mahogany. He wasn’t visibly suffering and was still pretty active, had in fact been able to cut his way through the basement screen door with one of his claws, the Houdini cat he always was, and I was shocked when I returned from an errand to see him in the driveway. My veterinarian would soften things but never minced words. I knew it was “just a matter of time”.

This photo may look familiar, but maybe not as a photo.

My profile image on Facebook, LinkedIn and a few other places, is a charcoal a sketch on a blue background of me holding Kublai, called, not surprisingly, “Self-portrait with Kublai”. I sketched it when I participated in an art exhibit with the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators in 2004 and needed an image of myself to include in the catalog; most of us either had or decided to do self-portraits. I remembered these photos and had always wanted to create some image of the two of us from them.

I was 35 years old and it seems like ages ago, so many cats ago, so many illnesses and lessons ago.

My veterinarian was pretty sure it was toxoplasmosis, partly because so much else had been ruled out, though it didn’t respond to clindamycin; that’s one of the reasons toxoplasmosis has been on my radar again since Basil was diagnosed in 2020 and Mimi in 2021. I don’t want any other cat to go through what Kublai did. Through the years I’ve also learned more about toxoplasmosis and also autoimmune conditions, which were nowhere on the radar for cats in the 90s, and only recently understood and recognized. He had a raging allergy to fleas and the house we’d moved from had been polluted with them with no topical treatments, only chemicals. Moving here had cleared them up but the damage to his immune system and GI tract would have already happened. But really, I’ll never know.

Kublai prepared me for what was to come, and especially now looking back, I am grateful for that.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave e’re long.

~from Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet

Read the whole sonnet, and more about Kublai in To Love That Well Which Thou Must Leave ‘Ere Long.

You would also recognize this illustration, though far smaller than this. He appears in many posts dividing one year from the next or one section from the next, I just love to include him. It’s a silhouette of Kublai I created from a photo of him on the floor in a sun puddle.

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Pet Loss in the First Person

From the time I began writing about my experiences in pet loss, relating what I was feeling and thinking about it as I moved through grief, readers have thanked me, often in private, for my honesty, grateful to know another shared their feelings as they moved through grief, or helped them make a decision. 

Thank you for following our grief journey after losing seven members of our feline family.

I hope sharing our experiences have helped you in some way, as sharing my experiences with you helps me.