I killed the love of my life.
He was a nineteen year old cat and it was an accident, but I am still haunted seventeen years later.
Tiger was my first child, my first daughter’s first playmate and the best bed partner I have ever had. He was born to a stray who had nested and delivered on my aunt’s back porch. When I fell in love with him, I was living in a no pets apartment. (This was the 80’s and emotional support animal exceptions did not yet exist.) Aunt Jane was kind enough to agree to let him stay until I could move. I visited regularly and promised I was coming to take him home soon and hoped he wouldn’t wander off before I did.
I have always wondered if the reason he was the best cat who ever lived was that he got to stay with his mom for five months. Long before there were cages at our borders, I hated the way our culture separates mothers from their young — for pets, for milk, for remunerated work, for any excuse of human exceptionalism!
But I digress.
From the moment I took him home, Tiger was the best roommate ever. He groomed himself impeccably. He never made a mess. I honestly don’t even remember him shedding, although he must have. I find myself thinking about this whenever I visit others with cats!
Tiger always knew his place in my bed. When I was alone, he slept along my back, when the man who would become my daughters’ father was present, he slept at my feet. If it was cold, he cuddled closer. If it was warm, just close enough to comfort me with his presence without overheating. When that marriage had become untenable, Tiger returned to my back, claws in the direction of the no longer companionable human bedmate. When the dad moved out, it was a long time before dating was even a thought. My hands were full with three young daughters and my Tiger cuddlier than ever.
Pregnant with my eldest daughter a few of years after bringing Tiger home, I was told all the old wives’ tales about cats and babies. But I had already spent winters with my beloved and I intuited that this slander came from the desire for proximity to the warmth of an exhale when it was cold. I also had already spent a lot of time babysitting for my nephew and making sure Tiger got enough attention to never be jealous. I planned to pull him into my lap anytime others held the new baby. What I never anticipated was what an amazing and protective big brother he would immediately become.
My third day of motherhood was the very first day of Claire’s life that the three of us spent entirely alone together. I had been encouraging Tiger into my lap while she nursed so he would know there would still always be room for him. He took to watching her sphinx-like anytime I put her down. And then, he really blew my mind. I had placed her on her back in the center of my bed and walked around the corner to the bathroom. The entire time she was out of my line of vision, he paced between us. Back and forth. I felt a bit like he was judging that I had left her alone while maintaining contact between us. When she became a crawler, I moved Tiger’s food and water to a counter she couldn’t reach and he adjusted without hesitation. It’s been nearly 30 years since they were my only children, so I don’t remember if it happened more than once, but I have a vivid memory of the very first time Claire pulled Tiger’s tale. He crossed the room to bite me!
The night I killed him, Claire climbed up on the cold metal examining table and sat with him in her lap until the vet told me that I should convince her to let him go before he started to stiffen.
I had driven to the emergency vet with his limp body in my lap knowing he was already dead, but unable to be the one who told his three sisters. We had already been grieving for several months. My father had been diagnosed with lung cancer the month after I ended my marriage and a week after 9/11. For two and a half years, I had been living a full time experiment in balancing depletion and self-care, my emotions and theirs, despair and relief. But this, this was the thing I had been actively trying to prevent for three months.
The same week I had arranged for my father’s hospice care and the delivery of a hospital bed to my parent’s master bedroom, I had taken nineteen year old Tiger to the vet and been told that he was dehydrated and his kidneys were slowly failing, the most common cause of death in geriatric cats. I did my best imitation of a person whose world wasn’t coming apart and explained that I knew Tiger had already surpassed his life expectancy and that when it was time, of course we would euthanize him before he had to suffer. (Because we are kinder to our animals than other humans.) “But, if I don’t think we are there yet, what can we do?” I asked, trying not to sound desperate or irrational. The vet then hydrated Tiger with an IV bag and a tiny needle. “So you don’t have to find a vein?” I observed stupidly.
Once hydrated, Tiger’s lethargy disappeared and the vet said I could bring him back for fluids every time he slowed down. At this point I explained that I was a single mom juggling two part time jobs, three kids in three different schools and a dying father. “Couldn’t I do that at home as needed?”
When I domesticated Tiger, it never occurred to me not to let him continue to have access to the outdoors where he had been born to a cat who never lived indoors. We had lived in six states and Canada together. When necessary he had had a litter box and been confined to pining at the windows, but mostly he was a free range feline. In his last home, I had installed a doggy door and he had total freedom and no litter box. My biggest fear had always been that when his time came, he would disappear and I would never know what happened to him. The doggy door was in the back of the house and I hoped he would stay away from the street side.
We had just been to the first Passover seder of our lives without my father. I was sad and tired. It had taken an hour to drive home, the kids were sleepy. I stopped the car in the driveway and asked them to get out before I pulled into the tight garage. They said no. Cranky me hit the gas again to pull into the garage. I felt and heard Tiger under the wheel instantly. That squeal, the knowing what I had done. I am as haunted as ever.
My father’s death had taught me the need to balance both modeling healthy expressions of grief and protecting my girls from the depth of my own struggles. But this was different because my sorrow was tangled up in guilt and blame. Claire didn’t speak to me for weeks other than necessary for the logistics of our lives. Then one evening, she came into my bathroom when I was wearing the robe that was usually on the hook where the IV bag still hung. She turned white, “what’s that?” There was a moment of confusion while she feared for my life and I wondered if the truth would make her more or less angry with me. I explained and she asked clarifying questions. Then her anger melted and her grief poured out in a flood of sobs. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me be so mean to you? You didn’t kill him, you gave us more time.”
The next day, I took the IV set up back to the kind vet who did not yet know the end of Tiger’s story. When I said with anguished irony that I had killed him in the end, the lovely vet insisted that Tiger had taken matters in his own paws because I couldn’t choose to let him go. “It was his time,” he assured me.
I swore I would never have another cat because Tiger was irreplaceable. My girls thought I would change my mind. I haven’t. Seventeen years later, my mom has never dated for the same reason I don’t want another cat. We’ve been so lucky, we still hold our memories very close and it wouldn’t even be fair to try to love another.
On my youngest daughter Natalie’s 13th birthday, she was gifted a kitten she named Momo. Claire adopted a stray who came to live on her stoop in her first apartment after college. Last year when Momo turned thirteen, Natalie adopted a kitten. A google search says, “indoor cats live on average 10–15 years, while outdoor cats live on average 2–5 years.” These numbers bring me a little comfort about Tiger. They also remind me that the hardest part of mothering is anticipating and witnessing the suffering of one’s children no matter how old and independent they have become. I know what’s coming and there is nothing I can do to mitigate it. Love hurts.
