Goodbye, old friend

Della Marie Carter Dow-Schmidt

November, 1994- May 15, 2015

Della came into my life as I was writing my dissertation, on the cusp of a long and difficult journey to finding out exactly what I was supposed to be doing with a Ph.D. Twenty years later, almost to the day, she left my life as I am just getting serious about planning my retirement.

When Jane and I picked Della out at the animal shelter in May, 1995, she was seven months old. It’s a good age to get a cat. “They are still playful,” Jane said, “but they don’t climb up the curtains.”

We named her Della after Della Street, Perry Mason’s secretary. Our Della was not so refined and lady-like, however. When we got to know her better, I thought we should have named her Entropy, because she tended toward disorder. Science humor. She liked to carry things off and drop them at random places throughout the house. She stole pencils off my desk. She left teeth marks in one of them. I kept it with me as I moved around the country as a reminder of the cat I left behind. I still have it. She stole Little Teddy (a small stuffed Teddy bear) off Jane’s headboard and left him In the middle of the stairs, looking stunned at his abrupt change in location.

Della was Max’s replacement. He had died that spring. We still had my cat, Fruitcake (a.k.a., Bubby), and Jane’s cat, Meggie, whom we had each acquired independently before we shared a house.

Time passed. I moved to North Dakota, then Utah, then Buffalo, where Terry and I were married. I was never able to find a decent apartment that allowed pets, so Bubby stayed with Aunt Jane. He was diabetic and required two insulin shots a day. I sent cat support payments every month for his medicine, and Jane gets to be a saint for giving him the injections.

Bubby got cancer and died during our first summer in Buffalo. Jane had to take him to be put down without me. I was in the middle of a party when she called. I had to excuse myself to cry, but had to pull myself together as soon as possible, what with all those guests in the house.

Jane had taken in a stray cat, Logan, who had gotten to be quite a large boy. Once Bubby was gone the cat dynamic changed. Logan wanted to play with Della. Della found Logan quite intimidating and hid beneath the China cabinet.

“Della wants to be an only cat,” Jane said. “She wants to live with you and Terry.”

When we bought our house in Buffalo, she came to live with us for the next 16 years. This is when we found out she was a howler. She never said a word when she lived with Jane and the other cats. Terry had been more of a dog person, but he adapted. He found Della to be rather dog-like. She followed us around and sat on our laps. She was good company.

We moved to the Mary Ann Beebe Center. During the first years, Della earned her keep as a mouser. She got older, of course. She started peeing on the rugs by the doorway. “She doesn’t like going downstairs to the litter box,” Terry said.

I took her to the vet anyway. Hundreds of dollars later, when she was shown to be free of infection and bladder stones, I had to admit that Terry was right, and we moved the litter box upstairs, putting an end to the problem, although I was not thrilled about having the litter box so close to the kitchen.

And we moved to where we live now. In December, 2013, she was diagnosed with kidney failure. We could make her comfortable with daily subcutaneous injections of 100 ml Ringer’s solution.

The vet tech who instructed me on the injections said that Della could last “quite a little while.” I thought 6 weeks, tops.

“It will give you time to get used to the idea,” Jane said.

I asked Terry to dig a grave so we would be ready if Della died before the ground thawed. Ellie, one of our chickens, got that grave when she died in January. The following year, Terry dug a second grave as winter came on. That one was usurped by Julia, another chicken the following June.

Two and a half years and $1825 later (just for the fluid therapy—this doesn’t include the prescription food), it was the arthritis that got to be too much. Della and I had an agreement: as long as she used her litter box, she could stay. In March, she peed on the entry rug. We removed it. She’d been territorial like that before. In April, she peed on the rug between our recliners and the TV. We pulled up all of the rugs everywhere, and I emailed the vet who makes house calls. I’d use up the Ringer’s that I had on hand and that would be that. I wanted to get through finals. We set the appointment for 10:00 on Friday, May 15. This was about two and a half weeks ago. In retrospect, it was far too long to wait.

I felt terrible, of course. But when I compared what Della used to be able to do with what she was capable of doing now, it was clear. She hasn’t played with any of her toys for a long time. She used to prefer water from a freshly-flushed toilet, but hasn’t been able to hop up and/or balance on the seat for years. She was very, very old. Her hips hurt. Even when she got in the litter box, which was most of the time, she didn’t bend well enough to keep the waste inside.

I think that any time one has a long association with another living thing, one develops routines. Della was a princess. She knew how she liked things. If feeding her was not my first priority when I got up in the morning, she let me know that was not acceptable. She liked her dry food fresh and trained me to keep it tightly sealed and in the freezer.

She claimed the futon as her own years ago. She often stood on the edge, rubbing her cheeks against the arm and crying, “Pet me! Now! Now! Now!” Terry called it, “the head petting station.” Typically, she insisted on pets whenever our hands were wet or freshly embrocated.

Our evening routine with Della began with her hopping up on the couch to pick her favorite lap of the day. She went in streaks, sometimes preferring Terry and sometimes sitting on me. We’ve always been recliner people. As she got older, we would lower the foot rest to make a ramp for her, pat our lap, and say, “C’mon, Della. C’mon up here.” And she would hop up.

She got to where she hesitated. She would test the surface with her front paws, right, left, right, left, and, with encouragement, finally make the leap. Not too long ago, she tested with her front paws, and went back to the floor. “C’mon, Della,” I said, “you can do it.”

She put her paws back up, right, left, right, left. She stopped, both paws on the foot rest, and gave me a long look right in the eye. I can’t. She dropped to the floor, cried a few times, climbed the ramp to the futon, crawled under her blanket, and went to sleep.

Last night, she was feeling spritely enough to hop up on my lap. She stumbled as she did the requisite circles before lying down. She settled between my legs and flopped her head over my knee, a posture that I have always thought very endearing and as cute as can be. My heart ached with the thought that it was the last time. I focused on how it felt, trying to fix it in my memory. The warm weight on my thighs; the softness of her fur. I questioned my decision. Is it really time?

Then I took a good look at her. Her front half seemed relaxed. The back half of her spine, however, was curled unnaturally. Her back foot stuck out from under her body at an odd angle. Her breathing was frequent and shallow. It was time.

When she stood up, I hugged her as tightly as she would tolerate. She was never a pick-up, huggy kind of cat, and her sore hips just made it worse. I gave myself up to sobbing, telling her I was sorry, but it was time for her to go. She was a good cat. Through it all, she purred patiently.

This morning in the shower, I had a new thought. This decision to put her down was the first selfless one I had made. I’ve kept her alive all this time for me. In theory, I am opposed to extraordinary measures to extend the life of the very old. If I’d been asked to spend $1825 for a surgery that would have been invasive, painful, and traumatic for Della with no possibility of a cure, I certainly wouldn’t have done it. But it seemed like not much expense or effort to spend $2 a day to give her an injection. When I started the fluids, I didn’t know I was going to stick her a thousand times. Poor thing—her back must have looked like a pincushion.

I got up this morning and gave Della fresh water and food from the freezer. She ate and drank. I cleaned up the last three pukes from sometime in the night. Della always puked three times. I tried to keep myself busy and not cry too often. Jane arrived at 9:30. Della was sleeping under her blanket on the futon, as usual. I lifted the edge so Aunt Jane could say goodbye. Della looked up, but didn’t move.

The vet (who turned out to be a vet tech), Nancy, came right at 10:00. She was very nice and said how sorry she was about Della. I signed a piece of paper. She explained the procedure. First, she would give a sedative. Sometimes with a very old cat, that was enough. If Della was still alive after 6 minutes, she would give an intravenous injection. She might vomit. Nancy wanted me to hold her or pet her and talk to her while she went outside so the cat would not be stressed by the presence of a stranger. Knowing that Della would not want to be picked up, I sat next to her and held her head while Nancy gave her a shot in the abdomen.

Della licked her nose a few times and put her head down. Her breathing slowed, then paused. She breathed a few more times at long intervals, and then she was gone. The IV injection was not necessary. She must have been close to death anyway. I felt better.

Nancy reassured me that I’d done very well taking care of Della and made the decision at the right time. “I see cats all the time who are like skeletons. They haven’t eaten for a week. It’s bad. You kept Della comfortable right up to the end.”

The other day Jane told me that grieving for our pets helps us practice grieving for our human loved ones. I think she read it somewhere, and it may be true. It has certainly taught me the difference between death and the end of life. Death is a one-time deal. The end of life can be quite prolonged. I am coming to understand how people can not only tolerate seemingly loathsome care-giving chores, but come to cherish them. It is all you have left during the end of life. Della slept most of the time in her last months. We had a few minutes together every morning when I would insert the needle and hold it in place with my thumb while stroking the underside of her chin with my fingers. And she would purr. I will miss that time with her.

Also as I have gotten older, I have come to understand the many different ways in which a heart can break. Death is the ultimate. When someone ends a relationship, you can always hope that he will come to his senses and realize that you are The One after all. You can write a letter that you will regret sending the minute it lands at the bottom of the mailbox. Eventually, you realize that he was just a big jerk anyway and are relieved to have escaped when you did. Years afterwards, you might bump into him in a grocery store and laugh about old times.

Death is not like that. It’s so very final. Jane often reminds me to “say what you need to say,” but I don’t have anything more to say right now. Yet, I know that as soon as my parents are gone, things will happen that I will want to tell them about, and they won’t be around. The words will pile up and have nowhere to go. As much as I have tried to do everything that I want to do with them so I won’t have regrets, there is never enough time, and there are always new things that would be fun, or would have been fun.

On an episode of Lonely Planet, a Mexican was trying to explain why the Day of the Dead is such a big deal in his culture. “As soon as you are born, the death is already in you,” he said. A few days ago, it occurred to me that this means that life is not a gift, but a loan. You have to give it back.

Cats don’t live forever, and they don’t live as long as we do. Della had a good long run. She was buried in the third grave in a shoebox with her favorite toy, Mr. Fishy. It was peaceful in the woods by the creek this morning. I planted a forget-me-not on her grave. Terry arranged some stones to both mark the site and keep her from getting dug up. As it goes, it’s good to die in spring. Mother Earth is warm and welcoming. She will take Della to Her and quickly begin putting the worn-out, arthritic body that caused Della so much pain into new life. What happens to your immortal soul is a matter of spiritual belief; eternal life through nutrient cycling is biological fact. I try to be comfortable with this larger view of the cyclic nature of life and death that is so foreign to the culture of modern medicine. Mostly we try to cheat death whenever we can, as I did by keeping Della alive for an extra two and a half years, and we believe that, deep down, death pretty much sucks.

We will remember her, and we will carry on. She will always be our little princess.