An Experiment in Scotch

Warn­ing: Don’t read this post if you aren’t into not-happy, dying things. Seri­ously. just. don’t. You’ve been warned.

Bill Sim­mons, aka the Sports Guy on ESPN.com, is a writer I read pretty reg­u­larly, nay every week because he’s damn funny, lives and breathes sports and writes bet­ter than I do. I love all his columns, even the ones that are about things I couldn’t care less about, even the Boston Red Sox. Good writ­ers are like that. Funny thing is, I never really saw him as a reg­u­lar guy, even though his writ­ing is very much like that. I saw him as a sports guy, stuck in a lit­tle niche that was all I under­stood of him. Like most peo­ple that you find out are actu­ally human, I found out because of sad­ness in his life.

His dog died. Unlike most of the writ­ers on ESPN, Bill has a lit­tle more free­dom in his columns because he’s not really cov­er­ing sports as much as he is explain­ing sports from a reg­u­lar guy view. So ESPN seems to have allowed him to write about los­ing his dog. It had to have been extra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fi­cult because The Dooze (Bill is crazy and I have no idea why his dog was named The Dooze) was only 6. She got lym­phoma. It must be ter­ri­bly hard to lose any pet or any human before their time. We mourn the old. We grieve for the young. His story of his dog makes my heart heavy.

If you aren’t an ani­mal per­son or if you’re a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment or if you just do crazy things like read about other peo­ple telling the entire life story of their dog end­ing in euthana­sia, I rec­om­mend you read it. It’s touch­ing and poignant like all the sto­ries that end the exact same way that peo­ple write about all the time. And that made me real­ize, peo­ple don’t write these sto­ries for their read­ers, even if it’s big-time famous peo­ple like Bill Sim­mons. They write the sto­ries for them­selves. To remem­ber. To grieve. To honor the lives of the past, whether they are ani­mals or peo­ple. And that made me real­ize (yup, this is a real­iza­tion post and I’m doing some seri­ous real­iz­ing) that I never did that last year for Pan­dora. I don’t know why really…well, I do, it’s because it’s dif­fi­cult to tell and I don’t write well bawl­ing and snif­fling like a lit­tle girl. Obvi­ously, the story didn’t have a par­tic­u­lar happy end­ing and at the time, I was busy try­ing to find my life again and well, it just didn’t happen.

But then some­thing seemed to click inside and told me it was a story I needed to tell, to have it out there and open and unbot­tled up. So this is that story. If you didn’t pay atten­tion to the warn­ing at the out­set, here’s the syn­op­sis and you can move on: Pan­dora came to live with me because I was sad, she made me happy, she was a good cat, she really only liked me and no one else, she got sick and went to the moon (read the Sim­mons story for the expla­na­tion about the moon).

I got Pan­dora when I was 20, a junior in col­lege and liv­ing on my own for the first time. I was rea­son­ably unhappy in the win­ter of that year (story for another time) and my girl­friend thought that a cat would cheer me up. She knew I missed my cat who still lived at home because my apart­ment didn’t allow pets so she fig­ured a cat would be just the thing, fail­ing to com­pletely under­stand why I didn’t have my cat with me, god bless her. So Pan­dora came to live with me in my no-pets hav­ing apartment.

Pan­dora had a lot in com­mon with the girl­friend because she didn’t under­stand the no-pets hav­ing apart­ment rules and would sit in the west win­dow all day in the sun which hap­pened to open onto the court­yard where the office man­ager walked all the time. Need­less to say, we didn’t last long in that apart­ment but we lasted quite awhile together.

Pan­dora was always shy around guests but loved noth­ing more than to curl up on my lap at any oppor­tu­nity. She was a mostly happy cat. She had the most amaz­ing coat though, one that was made up of a thick, soft under-fur that always mat­ted up in the spring. So she got shaved occa­sion­ally and there’s noth­ing fun­nier than a shaved cat. She always acted like she hated me for a week after that but secretly, I think she felt so much bet­ter that she could hardly stand it.

Pan­dora made the move from Amar­illo to Fort Worth and then to Dal­las and finally to Wylie. She liked the big house a lot, so many places to lay in the sun and once she got used to K and her two fur­rballs, she was pretty happy. She wasn’t ever a cat to have an over­age of per­son­al­ity, she was more like a big, fat lazy Per­sian who loved being scratched and was com­pletely con­tent to just lounge around, like most cats. As a cat owner, you don’t really have crazy sto­ries about what your cat did or the balls she chased. You just have the sto­ries of them falling asleep with you or curl­ing up on your lap. It’s just what they do.

In June of 2007, she started los­ing weight which was a big deal for Pan­dora. She was always fat. I’d had her on a high fiber diet for sev­eral years to no avail. She was just one of those cats who got fat, even when she didn’t eat much. So when she started to lose weight, I knew some­thing was up but didn’t think too much of it because she was still eat­ing and drink­ing and being Pan­dora. In August though, things got much worse for her. She stopped eat­ing and drink­ing and was clearly quite sick. One night, she wanted to go out­side really badly. We let her out and I fol­lowed her around and it was clear to me that she was try­ing to go off to be alone some­where. I stayed out­side with her a long time, let­ting her at least par­tially enjoy the out­doors but it was difficult.

I was sick at the thought of tak­ing her to the vet, think­ing we wouldn’t be bring­ing her back but I knew we had to. The vet ran a bunch of tests and found a tumor in her stom­ach. They put her on an IV and she spent a cou­ple of days in the vet hos­pi­tal. They were basi­cally sug­gest­ing that it was time to let her go then but when we went up there the third day, she seemed like the old Pan­dora. She was full of energy and seemed gen­uinely happy to see us. Nei­ther K or I could bring our­selves to put her down then and the vet said we could take her home for a day or two and see how she did. The vet warned us that she’d be fine for a lit­tle while but even­tu­ally her kid­neys would prob­a­bly fail and that was extremely painful. I think they thought we were mak­ing the wrong deci­sion but at least they talked to us about what would happen.

We took her home and she seemed like the same old Pan­dora. She was eat­ing and drink­ing, loung­ing around. She was still skinny but didn’t seem to be in pain and liked the fact that I felt guilty about her appetite and fed her tuna all the time.

She stayed that way for about 3 months and it was a bit­ter­sweet time. I knew she was dying but I also knew that I loved hav­ing her around.

In Octo­ber, it was clear, espe­cially to me, that she was at the end. I told K on Sun­day, Octo­ber 28th that I thought we’d have to take Pan­dora in to the vet for a final visit that week. I had quit my job the pre­vi­ous week and that Mon­day, I took the dog into day­care so that Pan­dora could be out­side a lit­tle. She used to love just hang­ing out in the grass, watch­ing things go by. She would chase but­ter­flies and what­not, so I wanted her to have a full day out­side if it was going to be her last one.

In the end, she knew bet­ter than I did. She went out­side but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it. She finally told me that she was in pain, some­thing she hadn’t done before. It wasn’t medium pain, it was “the end” pain. I willed her to just let go but some­thing inside her wouldn’t let it hap­pen. I couldn’t bear the thought of stuff­ing her in a car­rier and mak­ing the trip to the vet to sit in a room that smells of stale pee and sick ani­mals just to have them stick a nee­dle in her arm and put her down. She always hated the vet, like any cat, and I refused to do that to her. So I put her down myself at home in the back­yard that she loved so much. It was both the eas­i­est and the hard­est thing I’ve ever done. I know it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets but it’s not some­thing I would wish on any­one. I hope all our other pets have the good decency to die in their damn sleep. I’ve read Old Yeller once and lived it once and if the rest of them know what’s good for them, they’ll lis­ten to me.

I called K and she came home to be with me which was sweet and much appre­ci­ated. We buried her in the gar­den area and planted a Car­olina Jes­samine vine on her grave that I hope turns out to be very pretty.

I still miss her every so often. She used to sit in the bath­room while I was show­er­ing and then go inside when I stepped out to drink the water off the floor for some bizarre rea­son. I still expect her to be there some days when I get out. She was a good cat and I’m hon­ored to have been her owner.