“That’s about it,” the vet agreed. “The thing is, even the really mean cats, when they have numbers like these, are usually so sick and weak that we can do whatever we need to with them. I don’t know how much longer Homer’s strength can last—it’s a miracle that it’s lasted this long—but as long as it does, there’s really nothing to be gained by you bringing him back here.”
She was, as I would later recount at innumerable shelter readings whenever I told this story, saying to me in the nicest possible way, Please don’t ever bring your demon cat back to our animal hospital again. I couldn’t argue. I was no more anxious to bring Homer back than they were to have him.
“Is there anything I can do for him by myself?”
“I’m going to write you a couple of prescriptions,” she said. “Some medication to support his liver and other functions. There’s a pharmacy uptown that can compound it with something yummy-tasting like chicken or tuna. That way you can just squirt it into his mouth or mix it with his food, instead of trying to pill him. It’s a two-week course of treatment.”
My voice cracked when I spoke again, dreading the answer even before I asked the question. “What do we do for him when the two weeks are up?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and the sorrow in her voice was genuine. “But Homer’s numbers are incompatible with life.”
It was an awful phrase, incompatible with life—at once so brutal yet efficiently descriptive that it told the whole story. So it seemed almost superfluous when she went on to add:
“I don’t think he has more than two weeks left.”
AS A KINDNESS to my fellow sensitive readers (and I’m assuming that applies to most of you reading this), I’ll risk ruining the suspense and tell you up front that we did not lose Homer within the next two weeks. Nor did we lose him within four weeks, or even four months. Homer, as it turned out, had more fight left in him than even those of us who knew him best (and had seen him at his worst) thought he was capable of. In the end, he would stay with us for the better part of the next year.
But, at the time, we still had to go through it all and make our decisions without knowing outcomes. Looking back now, I realize that I didn’t really have any decisions to make. Homer had made them already. All I could do was let things take whatever course they were going to take. But I didn’t know this then—or perhaps it’s more honest to say that it was a knowledge I resisted.
It was hard to believe that Homer’s condition could really be as dire as the vet had said. I scanned his ears anxiously when Laurence and I got home from the restaurant, and indeed, when I looked at them closely, the insides had a definite yellow cast beneath the black of his fur. But Homer quickly grew impatient with his ear exam. He was far more interested in the bag I’d brought home containing my uneaten sandwich. After downing a generous helping of sliced turkey—which pretty much depleted my sandwich entirely, and it was astonishing to watch Homer put away a quantity of food that would have more than filled me up—Homer trotted over to his bed on the desk beside my computer, waiting patiently for me to sit down after lunch as I usually did, and spend the afternoon typing away with him by my side. It was as if yesterday hadn’t happened.
I spent the next two weeks on a sort of doomsday watch. Every time Homer ate a meal with gusto (which was pretty much every meal), I counted it as a triumph. Every time I watched him chase a crinkle ball around, every time he cuddled up to have me spoon him on the couch, I thought, Is this it? Is this the last time? Every time he was slower to awaken from a nap than I thought he should be, I wondered if he was going to wake up at all.
I watched and I wondered—and I agonized. What was I to do for him? When Vashti had been diagnosed with chronic renal failure (and hyperthyroidism, and high blood pressure, and anemia), I’d forced pills down her throat once a day, and given her shots twice a day, and administered subcutaneous fluid injections every other day. I’d taken her to the vet for monthly check-ups and twice she’d had to stay there overnight. Scarlett had had surgery for her cancer, and I’d had to give her insulin shots twice a day for her diabetes. Certainly none of it could be described as fun—and the two of them had struggled and fled and clawed and even hissed on occasion enough for me to know how much they disliked all the poking and prodding and pilling—but all that had been a few unpleasant minutes out of our days, which the two of them seemed to forget completely as soon as it was over. And the reward for those unpleasant few minutes was the additional time we had together that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
But Homer wasn’t like Vashti and Scarlett. For the past few years, he wouldn’t even let me trim his claws anymore. I had known even before Homer got sick—back when I was going through everything I went through with my two girls—that I wouldn’t be able to do the same for him. Regular vet visits would be difficult enough, probably even impossible. As much as Homer loved and trusted me, I knew he’d never let me pill him regularly, or stick needles in him. The best-case scenario was that I’d win those battles (maybe!) but end up injured and bloodied for my efforts, and Homer would come to fear my scent and the sound of my voice as much as he’d ever feared the vet’s office. Homer would never understand why I was doing all these terrible things to him. What would be the point of extending his life only to rob him of all the security and love and trust he’d built that life on?
There would be no point, I had assured myself, back when Homer was healthy and these were only abstract thoughts.
But now the abstract had become concrete, and the sand beneath my feet had shifted. I couldn’t just do nothing, could I? I mean, maybe I couldn’t do anything—but I certainly couldn’t do nothing. The collective wisdom of Homer’s Facebook community recommended milk thistle, which I began liberally sprinkling into his drinking water. Perhaps it helped. But it certainly didn’t seem like the kind of heroic measures I should be taking on his behalf. How could a few drops of milk thistle be sufficient when I was willing to do anything—literally, anything—that could be done for Homer, if only he would let me help him?
I remember one day when it was especially bad with me, when the certainty that I was losing Homer and could do nothing to stop it was the only certainty I had in the world, and it sat in my chest so heavily I could hardly breathe. I was at my computer, and Homer was sitting on his haunches on the desk next to me, leaning the entire weight of his body heavily against my left shoulder, as he did when he sensed that I needed comfort. I went to his Facebook page and, unlike my usual habit of posting funny pictures and amusing little stories, typed a single sentence. How will I live without this cat? I quickly deleted it, embarrassed at having posted such a stark (and melodramatic) cry of pain on a Facebook page for anybody to see. But it had been seen already, and my phone rang a few minutes later.
Some months earlier, out on the “cat circuit,” I’d struck up a friendship with Jackson Galaxy—Animal Planet’s famous and infamous “Cat Daddy”—and, as it turned out, he was every bit as compassionate in real life as one would expect from his show. He’d called now to see how Homer and I were doing, and I laid out my dilemma for him, sparing no details in describing Homer’s recent visit to the animal hospital. I concluded by asking him the same question I’d been asking myself non-stop for days: Didn’t I have to do something more for Homer—try some new doctor, some kind of medical treatment, something more than what I was doing?