Before

My cat, lying on the bed across the room from me, has 21 hours and 32 minutes of life left to him. It is my intention tomorrow to hold him as he dies, because he has been my best, and at times my only, friend for the past decade.

There would be no honour in handing him over for disposal without letting him be comforted by my presence one last time as he slips away. I owe him much, much more but the pleasure and assurance of my touch (itself, of course, a lie of monstrous proportion this time) this one final time is the most I can provide, and it will have to be enough.

My cat, Spot, age 10, weight 25 pounds, colour white, with gray spot, used to sit on my mother’s lap and sleep while she watched All My Children and Oprah and Supermarket Sweep and her personality slowly, almost imperceptibly dissolved. If you’d told me a decade ago that Spot, who my mother called “the Mugger,” because of his habit of grabbing at her as she walked by, would outlive my mother, I would not have believed it. If you would have mentioned that they would die in the same year, I would not have believed that either.

My daughter Kira, age 11 and a half months, weight 22 and a half pounds, colour white with blond hair, will never remember Spot, although he has amused and entertained her for a large percentage of her life to date. There are pictures of the two of them together, as well as the three of us laying on my bed. He’ll never climb up and fall asleep in the crook of her arm has he has in mine, like a comfortable old friend or lover.

He has loved and trusted me all his life, from the day he was born in my brother’s closet on a hot summer day in 1984, and tomorrow I will fulfill and betray that trust at once as I give a total stranger 30 dollars to kill my oldest friend.

I will hold him in my arms as he dies, something I did not do for my mother. I will not read of his passing in the newspaper, and the last face he sees will be mine and he will look at me and as he fades away another part of me will be gone, like my first car, my first love, my mother, my unknown father, my virginity, my childhood.

And I will still be here, and my wife, and my child, although the clock ticks on and this event is a reminder of that inescapable, mostly ignored fact.

At least with pets we can sometimes know the end is coming (mark it on your calendar, Saturday at one o’clock) and we can say goodbye.

It is more, I suppose, than we have the right to ask for. And more than most of us will ever get.

After

The deed, it is done. As it says in the Bible, “It is accomplished.” I think it says that in the Bible. Maybe it was a Peter Gabriel song.

I arrived, wife and child in tow and cat in carrier, at 12:45 in the afternoon. I wanted to be early for the occasion, I guess. The smell of animals was overwhelming as we entered the empty office. The cat whined a lot while he was in the carrier, as he always did. This despite the fact that, in real life, he never meowed much at all.

It was over much quicker, and much less poetically, than I had imagined. But then, you knew it would be, didn’t you? I was so caught up in the emotion and misery of the event that it never occurred to me how rapidly my cat would die.

I set the carrier up on a polished aluminum table, and a very pretty dark-haired, small-breasted girl helped get Spot out onto the table. He didn’t like it too much at first, but he settled down and the doctor came in a gave him a sedative to keep him still. The sedative alone was really the end of Spot as I knew him. His eyes went blank and his tongue hung out and he just kept breathing and after a minute he didn’t move at all. Then the doctor came in and started feeling his chest looking for his heart. It was at that moment that it occurred to me that I had only a second or two to prevent this from happening. I suppose I imagined whisking him off the table and racing out the door and talking him home and watching him take days to recover from the heavy sedative but of course none of that happened and the doctor plunged the needle directly into his heart and left the room.

I stroked his fur and the girl came back and stood there a minute and I couldn’t help but feel that both the girl and the doctor were angry at me for allowing this to happen. The more I think about this the surer I am that this is the case. After what I’d guess was about three minutes the doctor came back in and checked to see if Spot was still breathing, which of course to his surprise and my horror he was. At 25 pounds the shot simply hadn’t been enough to do the job quickly so the doctor felt his chest and found his heart and again injected more of the blue fluid into my friend Spot.

The rising and falling of his chest continued for another minute or so, and the doctor left and I kissed Spot on the forehead and the doctor came back in just as the Mugger breathed his last breath.

As we arrived back home, I looked around wondering where he was, as I always had looked for the better part of the past decade, one- third of my life. Much like I sometimes catch myself subconsciously thinking my mother is still living with my sister in Saratoga, I kind of assumed he was asleep on my bed as he always was when I came home. Of course consciously I knew he wasn’t, and in time it will sink in that we are a household of three now with no pets and I don’t have to buy cat food or con Lora into changing the cat’s litter anymore.