Custard finally conked out. I was hoping she'd sleep herself into oblivion, and for a while it certainly looked that way. She stopped eating and slipped into a coma; it was surely only a matter of time. Then she roused and started to make incoherent noises, so we took her off to the vet. He confirmed that she was dying, but said that if we left her to it she'd do so in distress and of course we weren't having that. So out came the big needle and for the first time in our lives we had to watch an animal being put down.
We said our goodbyes, told her how we'd loved her, like she'd understand (we're entitled to our little fantasies, aren't we?) Anyway, you have to say these things "for the record", so that you can remember yourself as having said them. She's been a member of the family for 11 years and you honour that, you pay some kind of tribute, without forgetting that she was after all a cat. Not "only" or "just" a cat, that demeans her; but not an honorary human being either. In thinking about animal ethics you have to steer between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of heartless pragmatism, seeing other creatures as nothing more than means to our ends.
Custard wailed as the steel pierced her skinny old body and within a minute or less had stopped breathing. I have to say that the vet's basket-side manner was brilliant, he could teach some consultants of my acquaintance a things or two. Later that evening I buried her close to the spot in the garden where latterly she had taken to sunbathing and watching a very blurred and confusing version of the world go by in between periods of sleep too heavy to qualify as cat-naps.
Any decent cat owner would have done the same, which is of little comfort; the house is now pervaded by huge absence where Custard used to eat and groom herself and snuggle into her basket, a cold chill on our laps. But all life comes up against its necessary end, I don't think she'll be coming back to haunt us. It feels like an obvious remark that we don't know how to deal humanely with human beings at the end of their days for whom all quality of life has gone, but I resist owning it because I know it's more complicated than that.
I am now at the point where, with my Dad some way from his necessary end, I am watching his experience of life become more impoverished by the week, as if he's being dragged up a mountainside to where the air is thin and the only view is of clouds. Sooner perhaps rather than later he will be aware of little but effort and bewilderment. Maybe, as now, he won't be in pain, but there will be no content to his days. But you can't just reach for the hypodermic, even if every compassionate fibre of your being is tingling with the conviction that all he now wants is to be with his beloved Margie. He's not a cat. And you never know whether your own frustration at having to care for someone who is past being able to respond colours your judgement as to what is and what is not a "best interest" decision.
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