Bittersweet Goodbye.
She's gone. Really gone. So I'm going to say this all at once, so I don't have to do it again, and maybe then I can start letting go.
Monday night, Sargon and I found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, panting, and thought she'd had another seizure. I moved her someplace more comfortable, and we waited to see if she'd come out of it on her own, like she had last time. It rapidly became apparent that something was wrong on a deeper level. She wasn't coming around or responding to anything. She moved occasionally, but it was uncoordinated, involuntary contractions of her legs, and then just occasional random movements. Her breathing grew faster and shallower. She cried twice, and hissed a couple of times, but didn't seem really aware of anything going on around her.
I called my dad and he drove us to the emergency vet's, where we only waited a few minutes before being told that she had thrown a massive blood clot and had a stroke and was essentially comatose. There was nothing they could do for her. We didn't even have to talk about it. I just told them to go get her so we could say goodbye and send her off. I didn't want her suffering another second if I could prevent it.
It wasn't hard to do it. She may have been suffering, we thought not but didn't know for sure, and there was no pulling through it, so there was no choice to make. I'm sure if there had been a choice, any degree of uncertainty, it would have been horribly hard, but there wasn't.
She went easy. It was fast. I was glad I was there, and I want to say to anyone who thinks they couldn't do it, thinks they couldn't stand to be there, that it makes it easier for you and for them to stay. They need you there, and it's not as bad as it seems like it must be. This is twice now I've had to be present. It's better to see it with your own eyes, to know that it's just that fast and just that painless, and just that much of a release. She sighed once, and she was gone.
I held her for a long, long time, and I cried a lot, and sang her her favorite song, the one she'd always come running to, that she thought was written just for her. And I let her go.
Then I came home, developed possibly the worst non-head-injury related headache I have ever had, threw up, and slept for ten hours.
So that was the part that sucked.
Let me tell you what didn't suck.
The last 15 years and nine months.
She was given to me in a Denny's parking lot by a friend who had come up from Georgia and brought two tiny kittens with her. I held her, and she was tiny, so tiny! Way too tiny to be away from mom! And I could tell she wasn't feeling all that well, and was tired and hungry and missing her mother, and she was scared, and my maternal instinct kicked in and I licked her on the head and . . . yeah, that was pretty much it. She was my cat after that. Her tabby-and-white brother, larger and healthier, went to the receptionist at our apartment complex. I hope he had a good life with her.
A few days later I took her outside our apartment to the great big tree that grew in the middle of the greensway, and I put her down next to it. She looked at it and looked at me in confusion, so I stepped up and raked my nails across it and popped them in the bark like cats do. The little light bulb went off in her head and she immediately turned and dug her claws into it with total concentration, sharpening them for the first time. Then some big guy walked past, about fifteen feet off, and she saw his VERY white socks going back and forth, and ran over and attacked his ankle. He said "Aaah! Hey!" and plucked her gently off and we laughed about it and I carried her back inside in my breast pocket. That was how little she was.
She loved her food so much she would run from one side of the apartment to the other and fling herself on the drawer that held the cans of food. She would grab the drawer-pull and somehow use her momentum to pull the drawer out. This is from a kitten that weighed about as much as one of those cans.
She developed a nasty uterine infection before we could have her spayed, and we almost lost her then. I came to see her while she was recovering at the vet's for two days, and when I came in she was doped to the gills with an IV, but she still staggered to the front of her cage and wailed until they opened it. I went to her and she clung to me desperately and cried and cried, like a human baby, until they had to pull us apart so she could rest. Man, that sucked. Not losing her then didn't suck, though.
Once, we tried to teach her to go outside on a lead, but all she wanted to do was eat grass, like a tiny, creeping, furry black lawnmower. We got her as far as the driveway eventually, where she sat down in the sun, blinking happily, then started pathetically bleating and crying because she'd sat her ass down on an anthill. Sargon had to pick all the ants out of her butt-fur, which took a while, what with the laughing helplessly.
A veteran trash-digger, she once got a red and gold cardboard ring meant to go around a fast food chicken sandwich wrapped around her middle. A perfect fit. We couldn't find her when we got home, and discovered her in the darkest part of the hall, hiding under a chair in utter shame. She looked like an organ-grinder's monkey or something. We couldn't stop laughing long enough to coax her out for at least ten minutes, and for years afterward, if you called her "Circus Ape! Circus Ape!" she would glare venomously.
She wasn't very playful, but when she did play it was fucking hilarious. She would roll on her back and flail her limbs around like a mad thing, claws splayed, her ass wagging in the air. Looked like jumping spider mating behavior. Crazy. Then she'd spit, like her brain had just popped, and go running off. Just a few days ago, she went bugshit playing with a feather, crazy as a kitten. I tried to get it on camera. Of course, the instant the camera came on, she stopped playing and just looked at the feather like ". . . What the fuck is this?"
She wasn't playful, but she was loving. She cared for me. She would sometimes steal food from the trash or the cutting board and bring it to me to eat, trilling in her throat and proud of her kill. She once broke into my own lunch container and brought me a whole chicken breast.
When I was miserable and unmedicated and in deep emotional shit, she was there to make me go to bed, to lay on me until I fell asleep, and she still made sure I got some sleep every night. She'd pick-pick-pick at me to come to bed. If I went to bed without her, she would come in within twenty seconds of me turning out the light. Can't miss it! Important! And there was the time recently, when I was really sick, that she slept next to me nonstop while I recovered, and I caught her growling nastily in her sleep for the first time ever. I like to think she was defending me from the Bad Thing that was making me feel so shitty. When I woke her up, she purred so happily.
She was my cat. Mine, the way very few animals belong to people. She hated other human beings, and I do not say that lightly. And I was hers, too.
She wanted to be on me or near me all the time. Constantly. I figured out that if I put a chair next to my own with one of her favorite blankets in it, she would sit quietly and just purr. I didn't even have to touch her. She was happy just to be near me. That's all she wanted. She would lay there and purr and occasionally look over at me dreamily, as happy as she ever managed to look without food being involved. If I regret anything, I regret that I was too stupid to figure this out years ago, and only started deliberately doing it a couple months ago (as opposed to how often it happened just because there happened to be a chair next to me, which was a lot).
If I sang to myself, or sang along to music, she would come running, wanting to be held, right in my arms. Nothing else would do. She had favorite songs. Daughter of the Glade, Hallelujah, Familiar Taste of Poison, Song to the Siren, and, appropriately, Kylie's Bittersweet Goodbye, which I sung to her often and often, and one last time during that last hour I held her, when she was no longer there. It was always our song of never having long enough. It was always going to be true.
She ran to greet me at the door whenever I came home, always, with her fluffy tail held high and her eyes so bright, and I always scooped her up and hugged her and told her I loved her first thing. Ask Sargon. I'd often say hello to her before I said hello to him. Not because I love him less, but because she was my baby, and that's just . . . that's what you do when your kids are happy to see you, dammit.
She would frequently put herself within arm's reach just in case I wanted her. I would sit, reading, surfing, writing, making art, with one hand in her fur. She was that near to me nearly all the time, and that much a part of everything I did. If you own something I made, I was holding her in my lap at some point while I made it. If you have read anything that I have written, I ran my fingers through her fur while writing it.
In the past year, we had acutally come to understand each other even more than in all the years before. I had learned so many things about her, I had learned how much she actually understood, which was a lot.
I didn't have to raise my voice, could just say to her "Let's go into the studio," or "I'm getting up, I'm leaving, come on," or "You can't be in here right now. Not now. Out." I could tell her to go into the carrier and come out of the carrier. I could ask if she wanted water or food or a treat, and she would answer "yeah" or "meh."
After the first seizure, as she was wandering around the exam room, seemingly fully recovered, she was complaining under her breath in little grunts and bleats. "I know, I know. This stinks. We'll go home soon," I told her. "Then you can have food." She gave an enthusiastic happy bleat and looked me in the eye, because she understood what I'd said, and when I got home, she was expecting her food, by golly. She was almost sixteen. Stupid to think that an animal that old wouldn't pick up a lot of language. I only really started trying to teach her to listen and communicate, as opposed to just obeying me, when she was around thirteen. She was getting better at it all the time. I wish I had started sooner.
When she was pestering me, and she often did, I would look at her silly face and think "I won't have her around much longer." And then I would put aside what I was doing and make room for her because I knew there would come a time when I would give worlds to be bothered by her again. I did it even when I didn't want to. Not always, but almost. Enough that I don't feel bad about the times I didn't, even now that she is gone.
I had my warning a year and a half ago when she had the seizure. I knew then that I would lose her soon, and I hoped for just another couple of years of good health and good times. I got more than I thought I might. I made the most of it.
She didn't have a long decline. She was happy and playful and energetic and healthy and not in any pain at all right up until it hit her and she went down. I am so grateful for that, that she never knew struggle or debility or constant pain. That her life was absolutely without a doubt a good one, even if it hadn't always been (the years that were hardest on me were hard on her, too, very hard).
The night before she died, I had a horrible nightmare. I woke up, really disturbed, went to get a hug from Sargon, and when I came back, she put me back to bed with this vaguely disgusted air of "You are making me do this AGAIN? *sigh* I love you, stupid human, but you really need to get this sleeping thing figured out, 'cause this? This is just sad."
I remember thinking, as she was snuggling up to me for the second time that night, that someday she would tuck me into bed for the last time, that I only had a limited number of these moments left, and that I should appreciate each one as though I wouldn't get another. I snuggled her extra hard that last night, for no real reason I can articulate, and that was the night it turned out to be true.
On Monday, she came up to me during gaming night and mugged me for attention, and rather than doing her usual thing of climbing onto my shoulder and then looking disgusted at the company and jumping back down, she actually settled on my shoulder and lay there a while, purring happily. She got down when she was done and wandered off with her tail up and her britches wiggling, and that was the last I really saw of her before we found her on the floor. She was happy.
And now I am without her, like losing something as close to me as my own shadow. I will move on, in time, someday the grief will not be so keen, but it's something I will never get back. And, too, it's something I can never lose: that I had her. Or she had me.
Cats are often depicted as dense, uncaring, mercenary beasts that can't be trained and are inherently selfish, malevolent, and manipulative. To her everlasting credit, Tazendra managed to be absolutely the best companion any human could have asked for without defying any of those traditions. That is a rare thing in the extreme. The world knew her as a highly-evolved slime mold colony with a bad roast beef addiction and a seething hatred for all forms of life. She was a totally different cat with me.
And that perhaps is the worst thing. That no matter how eloquently I describe it, nobody else saw those sides of her, nobody else really knows what an amazing friend she was. Her in particular. I could try to explain it until my eyeballs bled and still nobody would understand how lucky I was to have her.
I was so lucky. So incredibly lucky.
Here we are in the dead of night
Will you keep me warm and hold me tight
All we have is until the dawn
Let the night be long and ease the dawn
I love you more than you'll ever know
It hurts to see you go
So darling sing me a lullaby
Oh, oh, oh
Bittersweet goodbye
Don't think about the future now
These few hours
Let the nighttime envelop us
Take us under
Bewitching spell, bewitching spell
Here we are in the dead of night
Won't see you past the morning light
So darling sing me a lullaby
Bittersweet goodbye
Remember me when you're away
Goodbye.