I knew the day would come, when I would have to face the fact that my cat is walking his last steps. He's had a good run. We think he is eighteen years old, although we can't be sure. That first day he showed up at the surf shop, I tried my best to give him away.
Our black cat, Hobo, had just died. It was something I wanted to forget, but never will. To find your beloved pet in the woods, nearly dead after spending the last three days and nights of his life suffering alone... well, I never wanted another pet after him. We had looked for him, called his name, searching all around the house and woods, for three days and nights.
We had missed a spot.
The neighborhood kids found him after they had taken a shortcut home through the woods. When they raced to my door, I was hopeful, for one sweet second, when they said they had found him. But, somehow you know. You just know. With nearly every bone in his body broken, and internal injuries so pervasive that it was beyond belief that he was still breathing, he held on. As maggots made a home in the open wounds on his back, he had held on. That image is burned into my brain, of his clear green eyes looking up at me, as if absolutely nothing was wrong. I read them as pleading for help, mingled with the joy that I had finally arrived.
The vet had looked at me with disgust, as if it was all my doing. I was too upset to explain the details, I was focused on saving him. An x-ray revealed there was nothing they could do. Everything inside him was broken.
He was put to sleep.
After that, I vowed never, ever, to have a pet again. It wasn't worth the despair of losing something you loved so much.
About two weeks later, Chan walked into the surf shop. "There's a kitten sitting on the top tire of your car," he said. Oh, no, was all I could think. When I walked out to check, my heart dropped. There was a black kitten, and with those big green eyes. It looked too much like Hobo. No, no, I thought. This is not going to happen. I got a box, quickly put the kitten into it, and put it by the front door. I wrote "Free kitten to good home" on the outside, and tried to give it away all day long.
At the end of the day, I sighed. There he was, looking up at me with those eyes. I had to take him home, I supposed, until tomorrow when I would take him to the pound. But, as I drove home in the dark, he somehow crawled out of that box. He somehow crawled up the seat, and wrapped himself around my neck for the ride home. No, no, I said. Don't do this.
When I got home, David and Colby saw him and smiled. "Can we keep him, mom?" little Colby asked, in that eight year old voice that could make me do just about anything. And, that, as they say, was that. Colby named him "Stimpy," after the cartoon, "Ren and Stimpy," that he loved so much. We later thought maybe Stimpy had escaped from the junkyard next door to the shop. He was probably born in one of those old wrecked cars that were piled up everywhere beyond the rusty fence. The way he would always run and hide whenever a big truck rumbled down the street told us something. We imagined a big truck rumbling in to drop off another wrecked car. As Stimpy was nestled into the back seat of one of the abandoned wrecks, nursing with his siblings, the truck dropped the car with a crash, scaring them, and they had scattered. Stimpy had ended up crawling up on my tire - looking for his family, forever lost. That's the story we came up with, anyway. It seems impossible that this was nearly eighteen years ago. Colby is now approaching age twenty-six, and Stimpy is an old, old man.
I took Stimpy to the vet today. He's on those last steps, like I said. He is howling at night, a sad and hollow cry. It's probably dementia, the vet says. He's not cleaning himself, his fur is matting up, and he's not eating much. He never wants to go outside, anymore. His kidneys are shrinking. He is losing weight. I don't want to wait too long. I don't want him to suffer. But the weight of deciding if it is time to go is weighing heavy on me. The kindest thing to do is often the hardest.
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