Hanging Out with a Cat at the End of His Life
Hanging Out with a Cat at the End of His Life
On the in between.
By the time we arrived, just before Christmas, Moose’s interest in food had already waned. As my mother-in-law explained, and Moose later demonstrated, he would take a few bites from a freshly opened can of Fancy Feast and ignore the rest.
But he doesn’t seem that sick, she said, though having just seen Moose at the end of the summer, C. and I noted he was noticeably, worryingly thin.
It was true—at least a little, though. Moose was not fully himself—an eager hunter of hair ties, a determined licker of feet—but he was still sociable, affectionate, yelling for some attention when he saw you on the stairs. One night, I woke up to him purring loudly, sleeping on top of my chest.
He doesn’t know he’s old, we used to say, looking at our then-cat Harpo, nearly eighteen, out on a cushion in the sun. All the anxiety we held over his life ending—well, he had none of it. It seemed like a kind of a gift. He simply had no idea.
After his vet appointment, Moose was sent home with an appetite stimulant and instructions to wait and see, maybe another day or two. He was upset from the whole ordeal, curled up on the back of the downstairs couch. We were leaving, so I thought I should say goodbye—both in the immediate sense and, like, forever.
While I sat there, petting him for a bit, Moose suddenly perked up at the sight of a squirrel out the window. I thought, looking at him—we put so much weight on beginnings and endings, but there is so much in between. Things outside to be watched, little ears scanning all around and whiskers twitching.
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