This is Ocean one year ago on the front porch on the first day of a couple of feet of snow. I don't know if she knew it, but she is looking at at the asian pear where we buried Crescent B. DeNulle more than a decade ago.
We may be burying Ocean nearby around Christmas. She liked to scratch on a elm log under the lilac nearly the driveway. Maybe that's where we'll put her and remember each spring with the blossoms flavor the air. Her lungs are filling with fluid and she is wheezing on the floor at my feet as I type this. I'm having a hard time seeing and keeping quiet so Mrs. Faustroll can get some sleep.
Ocean was a sick kitty from the start. It had taken three years to get over Crescent who had been with us for 18 years. I found Crescent abandoned in a feral nest of dead kitties under a laurel hedge in the backyard of the rental we lived in when we first arrived in Portland and set up the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge, and Laundromat. Crescent was a feral tortoise shell and got her name from a perfect white C on her chest.
She gave birth to two litters before we had her spayed. The first litter all died. They were born with congenital defects. Somehow, out of the second litter we managed to save Peabody DeBones who lived with us for thirteen years before disappearing as cats often do.
I took to calling Ocean Booger because she developed an infection on her nose shortly after we brought her home from the shelter, microchipped. She got the infection when we took her in for spaying.
Among the other catastrophes she survived were breathing problems 5-6 years ago orginally attributed to asthma (probably early cancer that is eating at her now). She fell out of a large Douglas Fir from halfway up, bouncing down the limbs before hitting the carport. She got mugged by the Bomboni cats and developed a cyst that put her in a bonnet off and on for 8 months.
She's only eleven years old and dying slowly of lumps in her chest that press on her heart and make her struggle to breathe. We feed her by hand and know she is going to die, and the only question is whether to help her along. Are we being selfish keeping her home so we can pet her and hear that welcoming purr? Would she rather be dead? I don't know. I don't speak cat.
I do know that I struggled before taking Crescent to the vet for that final sleep. Her liver was failing and she was losing motor control. She would grow frantic as if she no longer recognized parts of her own body and she would hiss and scratch and bite at the air in her last days. When she went crazy like that it was horrible to see, but I would pick her up and hold her and she would calm down and start purring, and she never hurt me despite what she was going through.
Ocean doesn't seem to be in pain, but she is not the cat she was a month ago. She loved to play. She ate constantly. She liked stalking the moles and gophers in the yard. Now she wheezes and has no appetite. She sleeps almost constantly. Now, we've had her to the vet for hydration twice in month, and she wore a little bandage from the IV that pretty much was the equivalent of what I had when I came home from surgery. A pair of sickies.
But if I go over to whatever afghan or quilt or blanket that we've placed on the floor because she can't get up and down even from a chair anymore, all I have to do is reach toward her, and she starts purring.
It breaks my heart.