Been Here Before

    I have been here before.
    The sudden click and hum of the electric razor. The thin bone and pink skin exposed as the hair falls away. I stroke her fur. She hasn’t even flinched. I know that it’s bad.
     I stroke her fur.
   “Will it be like a dog? When their body releases the breath in their lungs?” That scared me the first time. I’m mentally bracing myself.
     The vet pauses. “No. It won’t.”
   I have been here before. Putting down four big dogs in my adult lifetime has prepared me for this, and yet every time, I am unprepared. She is my first cat. It is the same, but it is different.

   I stroke her fur.

   She continues.
   “I’ll administer it now. If you are ready.”
   I nod. Whisper. “Yes.”
   The sedation is clear. The solution is white. I’d never noticed that.
   I have been here before. Holding paws. Telling them how much they are loved. Why is it always so hard?
   Because they were loved. Because they are family.
   I know she is gone. The vet listens for a heartbeat. Touches her little eye. I know she is gone.
   I stroke her fur.
 
   When the vet was delayed, I had extra time. Time to hold her. Time to let the tears flow. Time to savor those last bits of time. I wasn’t sure she was even breathing at points. There were a few guttural purrs as I clutched her to my chest, but slow and labored, like the strings on a guitar that had been loosened too much. Of them all, she was always the cuddler. The rest were always on alert, like outdoor cats tend to be for their survival. Skittish. Squirmy.
     But not Peanut.
   It’s so hard to know when it’s time. There are lots of signs and signals, and at seventeen years old, the decline was progressive but slow. Last Wednesday night when I got home from work, I knew it.

   If you’ve heard any of my animal stories, we always seem to have weird pets. Peanut was no exception. She was the very first cat we ever got, from a student who was a neighbor at the time. He told us she was a male cat. I don’t know why, but we never questioned that. She was big. Lanky. Kind of lazy. Seemed like the tomcats I’d had on the farm growing up.
   Right up to the point when this tomcat got really fat and had babies.

   We got her fixed right after that and all the cats that we got afterward. We made sure to check! Quite a few of those cats never made it. Probably killed by coyotes. Picked off by owls. Peanut was the only cat to have such longevity, and in large part because she never strayed far from the house. She wasn’t a mouser. She didn’t chase birds. She was content just to live a sheltered cat life on the front deck. My husband said she was useless as a cat, but I kind of always admired that. Plus, like I said, she was my only cuddler. That made her my favorite.

    That night, I brought her inside the house for the first time ever. I have loved cats my whole life but am terribly allergic. Many times I was almost swayed to change my mind from the pleas of two small children, but I could never fully relent.
   I laid her on a towel and leaned her against the porch step. We facetimed there for two hours with my daughter in Calgary. Peanut was her cat. She hadn’t even started Kindergarten when we got her, so there was a shared lifetime of stories to tell. Then the time came to go.
   We stroked her fur. Told her how much she was loved.
   Because she was family.

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