I killed the cat.
At least I think I did.
Technically, it was “congenitive heart failure.” Or was it “congenital?” Who can recall? After a routine neutering, when you bring your year-old kitty in because of a little bleeding from the wound site, you don’t expect him to become weak and lethargic and then hear from the doctor that he’s never going to recover. Sure, you could keep him alive a little longer and pay thousands of dollars to the veterinary cardiologist, but it wouldn’t be long before…
They’d given him a pain pill. I hate medication, for myself or anyone in my family. I didn’t want to give the cat anything, but the nurse said “Oh, this stuff is great!”
You’d have thought she was on it herself.
During the months since the cat died, I have convinced myself that cause was depression. Sure, the vet acted like he was born with a weak heart, but vets don’t know. Besides, it is always easier for vets to transfer blame from the owners to the animals themselves. Dead cats tell no tales.
But I know. I can tell by the way that crazy cat looked at me beseechingly whenever I didn’t pay him enough attention. And the way he tried to escape all the time. He wanted more out of life than he could have in our paranoid domestic situation, where we kept him in for fear of him getting killed.
So it is ironic that he died in the safety of our home.
I kept telling myself that he couldn’t possibly have understood that things were going to get better, that the terrible cone he had to wear was only temporary. The lethargy caused by the pain pill was completely anathema to his spirited personality. Of course his heart broke. I’d be broken-hearted too if the person I trusted most let me down.
So, I am angry at myself not just for how he died, but for not doing more for him in his life.
He wanted to roam free, and I didn’t let him.
“You killed the cat,” I say, and not just in the sense that I approved the order to put him down. I mean I take full responsibility for what happened, for waiting too long to neuter him, for not putting a cone on him right away, for giving him those stupid pain pills. In sum, I blame myself for not handling my dear little crazy kitty better so that he might not be gone now, his ashes finally brought out from the box I’d driven around with in the car for months and scattered ham-fistedly by that waterfall in Prospect Park.
The responsibility for other beings is an onerous one.
Some days I am in such a dither trying to remember everyone’s schedules and who needs me for what that I can’t even recall what I have going on. When school lets out, it is even worse. There are no schedules some days and I have no time to myself to think.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out for taking care of other beings. I think that a lot.
But it’s too late. I cannot turn back, nor do I think at this late juncture I will find the rule book that will explain to me how to do it perfectly, so that nothing goes wrong. As my husband said to me once during a fight, in self-defense, “I’m only human.”
Someone said something about humans, about how imperfect we are.
“To err is human, to forgive divine.” It was Alexander Pope, some 18th-century English poet. He figured it out, that whole forgiveness thing, and how necessary it is when dealing with fallible humans.
But can we forgive ourselves? The cat debacle weighs on me like all the other failings that put my kids in physical or mental jeopardy. Why didn’t I notice that they were falling behind? That they didn’t turn in homework? How could I have forgotten to sign that one up for football? Why didn’t I do something more, something better?
I could beat myself up, and often do, which is why I meditate. I try to push out those thoughts of what I’ve done wrong, what I could have done differently by my beloved kitty or with my kids. There is no going back, there can be no looking forward really. There is just now.
“It is what it is…” a friend used to say to me when I’d fret and worry. I’d get annoyed, like that was stupid, like of course I could learn from my mistakes and next time… But then, I realized: Next time I’d probably do something else wrong or stupid.
“To err is human…” Thank you, Mr. Pope, for your infinite wisdom. Forgiveness is, I guess, the best medicine, the divine kind. It will, ideally, bring us and others to a better place.
