Farewell to a Cat: The First & Last of Sidney

I inherited Sidney the Cat (whom I nicknamed Sidney, Mighty Huntress of the Night for her beautiful black coat and her stealth ways) when she was already middle-aged.  Our time together went something like this . . .

Ben calls, in tears, begging me to take on this cat with the words, “Ma, I know you’re not a cat person, but please take her.  We don’t have anyone else.  If you don’t take her, we’ll have to put her to sleep.”

Who can ignore the tearful pleas of one’s own child calling one to be a rescuing hero in the life of another creature?  Certainly not I.

We meet at one of our many half-way points and Ben hands me over this cat in her cage, along with litter box, food, and many, many, instructions, my favorite still being:

“You must let the water run all the time.  She only drinks running water.”  After a bit of a verbal tussle on this one, I (wisely) simply opted for silence.  About a week in to our new life together, Ben calls to check in on Sid.  He asks how I am doing (notice the emphasis) with the running water thing.  “Not a problem,” I cheerfully reply.  A wise and naturally suspicious child (at least when it comes to his mother), Ben digs deeper: “are you running the water?”  “Of course not.”  “Is she drinking?”  “She is now.”  “What does that mean?”  “It means that I am not leaving the water run 24 hours a day for the cat and that she’s figured that out.  It took her a few days, but she’s drinking from the bowl.”  Suspicious he: “how many days?”  “Oh, about 3.”  “You let my cat go without water for 3 days?!?”  “No, Ben.  I never let your cat go without water.  What I did was put it in a bowl.  She found it.  It took her awhile, but she found it.”  I’m not sure if he’s yet forgiven me for that one, but Sid and I had made our arrangement and Ben was largely beside the point.

Ben instructs me at that fateful exchange meeting that at first, I must restrict Sidney to one room in the house so that she can get accustomed to her new space.  I decide it will be my office.  I get her situated and then I go do some other things.  When I come back, I cannot find Sidney. . . anywhere.  I thoroughly scout the office – no Sid.  I then search the entirety of the house – no small feat – and still, no Sidney.  I call for her.  I listen for any meows.  I hear nothing.  I see nothing.  

I sit down at my office chair, in admitted defeat, pick up the phone to return Ben’s call.  He has left a message that beat us home to see how Sidney is doing.  I am going to have to tell him that I have lost his cat within minutes of our arrival at her new home.  It won’t be pretty.  As the phone is ringing, I sit and ponder, retracing all my own steps since bringing Sidney inside.  A thought enters my mind.  I dismiss it.  And then I act on it, opening the lower drawer where I had thrown my purse.  And there she was.  Apparently the gal had snuck in to the drawer just ahead of my tossing my purse in and there she crouched, silent, like the night.

Ben answers the phone, I tell him everything is fine and then confess the last hour’s horror of lostness.  All is forgiven for all is well.  I am so bucked up in my new confidence that I tease him about never having called to check to make sure that I made it home all right.  We laugh together.

***

I’ve written before about my tendency to Pollyanna things, to be the incurable optimist.  It has a price.

For some time, I had been thinking that Sidney was failing and that it might be time.  You know:  time to put her to sleep.* Yet I resisted, thinking that ‘nature’ should simply take its course.  It did not seem that she suffered, or if so, not much.  She wasn’t complaining.

But I had been thinking on it.

And then came yesterday morning.  When I got up, Sidney was already up, unusual these days.  She was walking in this odd sort of circle, when I realized that one of her back legs wasn’t working.  That leg served as a sort of anchor against which she tried in vain to navigate.  She finally broke the circling and managed to walk down the hall by leaning against the wall on the side of her problem leg.

Her prospects were becoming more clear, yet still I hesitated.  And called and talked to folk.  And read on the internet about geriatric cats.  And made the call – or more accurately had a friend who is a relative of the vet make the call.

Another friend had shared how she received confirmation in a comforting way during the dying process.

I too received confirmation.  But it wasn’t much comfort.  I’ve been there when another pet – a beloved dog, was put down, so I was familiar with the process, a bit different for cats, but not much.

This time, Sidney had lost so much weight that it took several attempts to find a vein for the injection.  There just wasn’t any there there anymore, for she was truly skin and bones.

And I had not noticed.  I noticed her slowing down.  I noticed she was thinner and eating less.  But somehow I failed to even notice that she had no fat, no flesh to her at all.

Ah Sidney, I owed you better than that, sure I did.

Perhaps now you reside in the land of perpetual fresh running water.  I sure hope so.



_________________
*How I do hate that euphemism.  And it is not how I think of it.  But I will spare you the language of my own internal dialogue on the matter.

On Not Paying Attention

Paying attention – heeding the other – no small thing in our society, we demand it from ourselves and others from an early age and I am left to wonder why.  For paying attention is not really about actually noticing someone else or what they’re saying or doing.  When we in these United States speak of paying attention, what we really mean is that you must heed me in a way that lets me know you’re heeding me.  Otherwise, you are not “paying attention” to me.

Spouses demand it from each other.  Parents from children although children do not have the right to expect it from parents.  Teachers certainly expect it from students.  And here is the rub.

A little guy in my family is not one for paying attention.  Never has been.  To the chagrin of his parents and others, he probably never will be.  But I am not to sussed by his supposed lack of attention for one very simple reason: this beloved boy-child comes from a very long line of inattentive ancestors and I am chief among them.

Don’t get me wrong: social skills matter.  But I have to ask whether they matter as much as we think they should.  When it comes to school, the point (it seems to me) to paying attention is to learn.  Turns out this grand son actually does quite well in school with his subjects.  But he does not do well in communicating to the teacher that he is present.

Given that he’s doing well, he must actually be paying attention to the subject matters at hand (either that or he was simply born knowing his school subjects, which, while I’d like to think he’s that smart, seems highly unlikely).  So it seems to me that his problem is that somehow, either with eye contact or its lack most likely, or with moving about or talking with other students or drawing when he’s supposed to be ‘listening’, the teacher is interpreting his behavior as inattentiveness when really, he’s hearing everything she says, or enough at least to teach him what she wants him to know.

So what is the problem?  From my own extensive experience, I conclude that when it comes to attention, perception is everything.  So often am I perceived by others to not be paying attention to them.  You’d have to ask them why they think so.  Maybe it’s because I’ll often be looking somewhere else.  Maybe it’s because I seem to be doing something else.  Maybe it’s because I do not offer the expected response or when I’m listening especially attentively, I offer no response at all because I am still listening, waiting, for you.  That’s all speculation on my part.

But I can tell you that my hearing is just fine and I hear it all (sometimes I wish I didn’t, but that’s another story).

Maybe it is a character flaw not to give folks the response they seek when we’re communicating, whether it’s eye contact, head nods or other non-verbal prompts, or verbal engagement.  And if someone goes to the extreme on avoiding those things, I get that it’s a problem.

But the daily input of information can be overwhelming.  And our world leaves little room for quiet.  So me and my kind have a tendency, even amidst our own talking, to create our own quiet spaces inside our own minds simply because it’s restful there.

But don’t worry.  We hear you.  Really.  Just look at our test scores.

Seeing Slower

Slow down!

You’re going too fast!

The bywords of the old to the young resonate in my ears of late.

I am driving slower these days, not because I want to, but because I’ve got way too many speeding tickets for anyone who wants to keep driving these beautiful country roads.  You’d think I’d see more, notice more, but I don’t.

I tend to live way too much in my head to notice the beauty around me unless I first slow down my thoughts and force myself to pay attention.

It’s a gift of the really young and the really old, this paying attention to the world around us business.

Young friends run head long into life.  Yet even at their warp speed, they manage to see everything – really see it all.  So the running child comes to full stop in a nanosecond to investigate the worm or leaf or ant or clump of oddly shaped dirt that has captured their attention, before running off to the next moment.

And my really old friends simply stop and look, taking it all in, savoring each sight as if it might be their last – because it might really be.

The first look and the last – each the richer for their uniqueness.

Why does everything in the middle get so easily taken for granted?

Because I don’t know, I slow down a bit today and stand with my old friend and simply gaze at the rain laden fog hanging suspended in the crease of one mountain folding into another.  We marvel together, arm in arm, and then move on, richer for the moment.

I think I like this seeing slower.