The Hardest Thing

Today was a shitty day, the end of the longest week and the hardest decision we’ve ever had to make. We had to say goodbye our kitty. I’m so emotionally exhausted, I don’t even know what to say about it. She was sick. She was 14 years old. She’s been a part of my life longer than any of my friends have. I’m so sad, and I feel so guilty for having had to make this decision.

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From Mark:

My wife and I said goodbye to our cat today. When a person dies, you usually do what you can to remember all the good things about that particular person, but that is not what I’m here to do right now. Because Piddies deserves better than that.

Frankly, Piddies was a dick. If the wrong person attempted to pet her—or even if the right person was petting her the wrong way—she would bite them. The mere sound of your jeans rustling would cause her to sink her teeth into your leg. Although she was de-clawed, she could still slap the shit out of you with her machine-gun paws. She was a hit-and-run artist, always able to dash away before you could grab her or hit back.

She was perilously skinny and fragile looking, but she fought off other cats that were twice her size. She fought off dogs that were four times her size. Did I mention that she didn’t have claws? She wasn’t afraid of anything, except (for some reason) Glad Tall Kitchen bags. Whenever we emptied the trash she would run for the hills like Iron Maiden was playing.

If she got into your lap, it was so she could hit you upside the head with her tail or smack the taste right out of your mouth. On numerous occasions I have seen her literally bite the hand that was feeding her. Her favorite food was whatever you were having. She would use you as a jungle gym to get at it, especially if it was Dairy Queen.

Of course, you could always banish her to another room and close the door while you were trying to eat. But you had to be prepared for the sandpaper rasp of her paws against the door, a sound that would continue until you couldn’t stand to hear it anymore. She wouldn’t quit until you let her out. She would bat at the door until her paws bled, but she would never give up.

One day, for no apparent reason, Piddies’s left eye turned bloody-red. She was always rubbing her face on the pointiest things she could find, so we assumed she had scratched her eye on something. We took her to the vet, and we found out that she was in full-blown renal failure.

The vet’s suggested course of therapy was to give her fluids subcutaneously. Basically it involves an IV bag full of solution and a pulp-fiction–sized needle like the kind you might use to inflate a basketball. We were supposed to stick it in behind her shoulders and let the fluids drain into her. So we did. We put her on the kitchen rug. My wife held the bag, and I shoved in the needle and held Piddies down while the life-giving fluids trickled into her body.

After about a minute, Piddies wormed out of my grasp. “Fuck this,” she said, and just walked away. The needle pulled out and spurted onto the rug, and the cat went and sat on the couch. We tried doing the fluids a few more times, with pretty much the same results. Eventually we had to stop, because the failure of her kidneys was causing her front legs and feet to swell up to ridiculous baby-elephant proportions.

With her paws too cartoonishly puffy to slap people properly, and her body too weak to suffer the exertion of biting, Piddies had to find new ways to express her dickitude. She started picking out nice, carpeted spots to pee instead of in her litter box. We would come home from work and find a tidy little pile of cat turds sitting at the top of the stairs. We switched cat litters. She continued to pee and crap wherever she felt like doing so, but she was polite enough to spread the new litter all over the house anyway, so our efforts weren’t entirely in vain.

We knew she was sick and that she would never get better, so we braced ourselves for something pathetic to happen. We studied her every meow for some sign of hidden suffering. If she wasn’t going to heroically summon her last ounce of strength and crawl up into our laps to lie down and die of natural causes, we hoped she would at least sink into a pitiable level of debilitation that would make putting her to sleep an act of mercy.

But Piddies wasn’t going out like some punk-ass bitch. She never made anything easy on anyone in her entire life, and her death was no different. On her last night with us, Piddies stood in the middle of our bedroom and coughed up two big gudgeons of chunky orange cat bile. My wife and I just looked at each other. Then we got out the Little Green Machine. Again.

I’m sure Piddies hated her last car ride just as much as she hated all the other ones she had ever taken. Not that she had any idea what was coming; riding in the car always pissed her off. It combined her two least favorite things: being confined and not being in charge of where she was going.

Let’s be clear about one thing. Piddies’s kidneys quit. She never did. I don’t know how or when I’m going to die, but I can only hope that when I go, I have that damn cat’s same unimpeachable sense of my own invincibility. And I hope that someone who cares about me is there, too—loving me right down to the last minute and forgiving my frailty, my stupidity, and all my selfish ways.

Mark’s first post about her is here.

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