Well, actually, I've been here before
I looked around, and I'm surprised they are still posted, but some years back (about 3 years) I made some entries here under my real name (Tom Horn) about a male Rex rabbit named Louie whom I found after he had been abandoned in July 1999. I had wondered whether Ingrid would tolerate his presence, because by then she was almost 12.
They got along just fine.
I think Louie was born sometime early in 1999, then abandoned by some ignorant person who thought he could survive on his own. I nearly ran over him the night I found him; he'd gone looking for water and food, then wandered into the street. Poor guy was thirsty and hungry! Very near-sighted, too, I think.
Louie lived with us from July of 1999 until November 3, 2003. That Sunday night in November, I got out of the shower, and his body language was something no one else could have read, but it was very much as if he had taken a shower himself and shaved and put on a tie, and he was waiting for me. Of that I am absolutely sure. He wanted to say goodbye.
I knew the second I picked him up that he was dying. He had just been hanging on to see me again. I had been working on my car that day, not paying much attention to him, and I'm sure it was an effort. It was like he thought it would be too impolite to leave without saying so long.
I picked him up and cradled him, and within ten minutes he was gone.
Funny thing--Ingrid mourned Louie. A few days later, she was sitting in the hallway and I was on the couch, and I said "Come here, Sweetie." She took two steps toward me, then turned right and went over and sat down by Louie's cage, and she looked in there for a solid 20 seconds or so. That's a long time for a cat to peer at something that isn't there. She remembered him. She missed him.
Then she came over to me and hopped up by me. She was sad.
I could tell, also, that in her last few days Ingrid was afraid of letting me down. Can you imagine that? She didn't want to leave me alone. She didn't want to cause me any pain. I'm certain of it. I've heard some people say that cats have no sense of their own mortality, that everything for them is here and now, but if you'll pardon the expression (and if it's not out of bounds here--I apologize if it is, because I don't want to offend anyone and if it's forbidden I will never do it again), I believe that that assumption is bullshit. None of them will do calculus or learn to speak Russian, but the range of intelligence and prescience is every bit as wide in cats as it is in human beings.
It was hard enough when Louie died. It's much worse now.
Thanks again for your help, everyone
I'm very grateful for any good thoughts you might send Ingrid's way. Or mine.
And so the time passes. . . .
I'd like to thank everybody again for their kindness.
I've been making an effort to try & let myself off the hook on this; nothing that I could have done (yet failed to do) let carcinomas develop in Ingrid's pancreatic and biliary tracts. It wasn't a matter of not changing the litter box often enough--and I'll admit that in my primitive hard-core bachelor housekeeping, I let it go too far sometimes (*most* of the time, my friends would probably interject), but Ingrid never commented on that (as I have heard about other cats doing) by making a deposit elsewhere--or a matter of my not loving her enough, or even of having taken her for granted sometimes over 18 years. It wasn't anything that I did, or anything that I failed to do, that let the cancer get a foothold in Ingrid's tummy. It just happened. There was nothing I could do about it. It just happened. I couldn't have foreseen it, and I couldn't have stopped it. It just happened.
Our cats may think that we have magical, godlike powers, but the truth is that we are just members of a species with hands and access to technology.
It has been a great help to reflect on all the good times we had together. For instance, regarding the litter box: Ingrid never failed to hit it, regardless of how messy it was. But she watched me intently (as if she were trying her best to memorize the procedure, so she could maybe do it herself) when I emptied it and changed the filler, and you know what? She'd nearly always mark it, as soon as it was set. Like: "Ooh, my nice clean litter box! Now it's good to go!"
Another time, we had gone out of town, and after having already started to return, I realized I had an engine problem that I needed to fix. So I doubled back to where we had stayed, took Ingrid inside, and called my boss long-distance to tell them why I wouldn't make it to work that day. While I was on the phone, Ingrid stretched up to tap me on the elbow, and she had this pleading look on her face. It said "I can't find my litter box." So I got off the phone, went out to my car to get her box & bring it inside, and she jumped in there immediately.
And jeez. . .that was actually about 15 or 16 years ago. That's a long time, huh?
Ingrid lived 6520 days: 17 years, 9 months & 6 days. She came to live with me when she was about 5 weeks old.
I have to keep this in mind. That's a jolly long life for a cat. I've read about folks in here who have had cats pass away when they were much, much younger than Ingrid. We had ourselves a good long ride. I could hardly ask for more. I need to remember that.
Of course, the flip side is that after being together for so long, it's hard to get used to being the one left to carry on. There's this void now.
I've got Ingrid's grave fixed up pretty nice. The spot she chose out there in the back yard, and some timbers I used to elevate the soil level about 9 inches, and the ornamental grasses and ferns I planted there. . . . As graves go, it's really okay. I cannot foretell how long I might live in this house--I'm just very, very glad that Ingrid had the chance to enjoy it, too: she adapted immediately, sprawled out on the carpet and asked "So why didn't we do this a long time ago?"--but I think I've got her resting place established so that nobody will ever bother her. Anyway, I hope so. In addition to the soil & the plants, at two different depths there are cast-iron things like parts of a trellis that I laid in there (one at the bottom of the planter, another a few inches below the surface of the surrounding yard), plus a long plank of wood covering her pet carrier.
In the pet carrier, except for her head, I covered her with a shirt of mine. I put her toys--including the one that she used to carry around talking with her mama-call, the one she often brought to me and the one I was afraid to wash even though it had gotten so ratty, because I thought she might not like it any more if I did--and a couple of those cloth things with catnip in them that she used to hook her claws into and wash down and rub on her head like crazy--and some others she used as pillows, and one of those little plastic rings that you take off the milk jug when you open it, because she was nuts about batting those around and she loved to bring them to me to flick them around for her when I was sitting in the bathroom (if you get the picture).
I put a scoop of coffee in the corner of the pet carrier, too, because I had found out long ago--a good 16, 17 years ago, when she was still sufficiently agile to jump up on the counter and stick her nose in the coffee filter before I poured the water through there--that something in the aroma of fresh-ground coffee was attractive to Ingrid. She loved it. "Gonna check the coffee?" I'd ask. And she did. Got about three hits to make sure it was okay for me before brewing. It was funny.
In her latter years, I'd hold the cone down by the floor and let Ingrid check the coffee. She took that job seriously.
From all I have read, the form of cancer Ingrid had was really bad: aggressive, almost impossible to resect completely, only very rarely benign, with an extremely poor prognosis. Pancreatic & biliary carcinomas are almost universally fatal in all mammals--including humans. The diagnosis is a death sentence.
So I can be glad that Ingrid was still mentally sharp, that her personality was intact, that she was not in excruciating pain, and that she was still mobile and responsive. Still basically herself. She lay down with me & snuggled up and purred our last night together. She met me coming out of the shower and even asked me to feed her (which I couldn't do--not that she likely would have touched it, anyway--because she was going in for surgery) on our last morning. We didn't wait until things were just absolutely pathetic, or until she couldn't hold her head upright or anything demeaning like that, or until searing hurt was all she knew. Except for having to take Ingrid back to a place that she hated as much as the vet's--and not being able to hold her as her little life slipped away--I did my best. There was no way I could explain to her that that scary place might have been where they could save her. We had to try.
Ingrid still had her dignity. So I think maybe I did well by her. I tried.
Even so, I tend to second-guess myself. It's hard to let go. For every "What if I had only," I keep coming up with "No, that would not have helped." It was far beyond my power to make Ingrid young and healthy again. I need to accept that. I have to do it. Ingrid never liked it when I was sad; she could tell, and it bummed her out, too. So bit by bit, I have to let her go, and I have to forgive myself for not being able to make her all better.
