After 13 years with me, my cat Clawdia died today. It was quick and rather shocking. A couple of weeks ago she began losing weight alarmingly, didn’t want to eat or drink, threw up, lost all her zest and playfulness… She even stopped grooming… I took her to the vet, and after quite a few tests they gave me the bad news: it was cancer.
Must have been developing for quite a while without external signs, because before this sudden and catastrophic deterioration she was a perfectly normal (if old) cat, playful, loving, always wanting a petting, and jumping on my bed to curl up next to me while I slept, so that I would find her next morning sleeping there.
The vet gave me a medicine to try for a week, as a last-ditch thing. If after one week she wasn’t getting better… That was it.
Today, in the morning, she came to me. I picked her up to give her her medicine. Then she sort of choked, convulsed a bit and died in my arms. Just like that.
Oh, how I remember when she was barely 5 months old and managed to hid herself behind a drawer in a table, and drove everybody at home crazy because they could hear her miaow and couldn’t find her anywhere.
How I remember the time when she had her kittens… and she tried to give birth to them curled up on my stomach as I slept. She woke me up when she broke her water all over me.
How I remember her playfulness, the way she would greet me when I was back, the way in which she would very clearly express her disdain when I tried some fancy new “senior” food as she grew old – she liked her cheap food, and all this “nutritionally balanced” and “especially formulated” stuff could go … well, it could go stuff itself.
How all these memories came back to me in a flood, mingled with a flood of tears, as her pathetic little body lay on the floor where I placed it after it became clear that she was dead. How hard it was to take her to the place where they deal with your dead pets, knowing that “that was it”. That I was not going to see her again, that she wouldn’t greet me at the door any more, that I was not going to again hear her imperious demands for attention.
How amazing it is that a cat, such a little thing, can occupy such a big place in your heart. How painful it is to feel that void there, how surprising it is to realize that that pain is so cruelly piercing.
How sad it is that they live such short lives, lives which are however long enough to place themselves so deeply in your heart.
How crazy it is that, right now, late at night, writing this I am crying again.
Farewell Clawdia. You were a great friend for 13 years, and also a champion mouser – title which no other friend of mine can claim.
