I was in the Newark airport getting ready to come home when I called the girlfriend. I asked her about how Guliko was doing. She told me that the vet had called her on Friday and then called her back on Saturday. The diagnosis was the worst possible: an aggressive, invasive cancer that had probably spread to her lymph node from somewhere else. A tumor with no clear margins. A death sentence.
When I left for New Jersey, the cat was still able to walk around and occasionally jump up on things. She could eat some food, though not very much. The day after I left, the cat even got up and jumped over the baby gate we have in the doorway to the girlfriend's room to keep her roommate's dog out. She went to hang out in the spare bedroom. She wanted to be petted for hours and she just purred and purred and purred. I think that might have been her last hurrah.
On Saturday, Guliko was much different. She was wobbly and could barely lick the gravy off her food. She clearly couldn't see out of her right eye, so it took her much longer to walk to the litterbox because she had to walk along the edges of the room to navigate. But she still purred and purred when you rubbed her tummy or petted her. She was spending a lot of time hiding in the closet. But she seemed to be having a harder and harder time. The girlfriend and I went to a wedding on Sunday. We gave Guliko a painkiller before we left so she wouldn't have to be alone and in pain. We got home late at night. Guliko didn't really want to come out, but she did lick some food.
The next day she licked more food. We gave her the painkiller in the morning and again at night. She was having more trouble keeping her balance and getting into the litter box. And just...tired. She didn't want to get up from the box she was sitting on in the closet.
And so the next morning as we watched her walk across the room to the litter box--a ten-minute process--we knew it was time. I called the vet and told her we needed to bring Guliko in. We made an appointment to go in at 3 pm.
I think that day was the longest of my life. We started getting ready, but not talking about it. We cleared a spot in the front yard where Guliko first came to the girlfriend. I dug a hole to put the kitty in when it was all over. Then we brought Guliko out and let her sit outside. She sat under a bush and then on top of the dirt pile from her freshly dug grave. It seemed strange, but she seemed so peaceful. For most of the time, she just sat and smelled and listened. The sun was shining, though this spot was in the shade, and insects buzzed around us in the humid air.
After an hour or so, we brought her back inside. She sat with the girlfriend for a few moments on the bed, but then she was ready to leave. We had to stop her from jumping off the bed and hiding under it! So back she went to the closet.
Then it was time to leave for the vet's. The girlfriend held the kitty on her lap. We both cried. Then we put her in her carrier and went out to the car. We cried all the way there. I held the cat on my lap and petted her.
The receptionist showed us into a room, a somber look on her face. We waited, petting her in her kitty carrier, until the vet came in. She asked us how Guliko was. I'm not sure whether she wanted to make sure we were making the right decision or if she just didn't know what to say. She told us that if we were going to bury the cat in the yard, we should bury her very, very deep. Then she explained the sequence of events and asked us if we wanted to stay. The girlfriend wanted to, so we did.
We put the cat out on the exam table. The vet felt the tumor in the side of her head and closed her eyes. "I can't believe how much that has grown." We put the cat down on her side and they went to put the line in her inner thigh. The procedure is that they put the line in and push propofol (an anesthetic) and, when that took effect, push the euthanasia medicine. This all requires getting that line in. It took a while. They poked her and poked her and the vein rolled and popped the needle out. And the cat just...looked at us. Just looked at us and waited for it to be over.
The vet finally got the anesthesia in and then started putting in the euthanasia stuff and the line blew out and sprayed the medicine all over the towel on the exam table. The vet had to run and get a syringe to finish the injection. It was kind of terrible. But on June 1, 2010 at about 3:30 PM, Guliko died.
They wrapped her up in a big green plastic bag, folded over and taped with medical tape. We put her back in the kitty carrier and carried her back out to the car. There was no charge. We cried all the way home. I dug the hole a little deeper. Then we put her in the hole, still in the bag, and the girlfriend went to get her roommate from inside the house. The girlfriend put a few shovels of dirt in the grave, then I finished filling it in. We put some rocks on top of the grave. And then it was done.
We gathered up all the kitty things in the house and put them together to put them away in a closet at my house. And we drank to Guliko's memory.
I am trying not to remember those last moments. I am trying to wipe away the needle poking the cat over and over and the way her body looked when they were done. I am trying to remember the cat that followed me to the bathroom in the middle of the night so I would scratch her butt and her ears or the one that would sit on my chest or bat at my ear in the morning so I would get up and give her the milk from my cereal in the morning. I am trying.
The girlfriend went off to her 5th college reunion yesterday. Ordinarily, Guliko would come stay with me when the girlfriend was out of town. So I keep thinking I see Guliko out of the corner of my eye. I miss her. She is the cat by which all others will be judged.
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