How to lose your beloved pet

Note: I actually wrote this last year in the weeks after her death, in October 2024, but could not bring myself to post/send it until now. (Thank you to the "thinking of you" email from the hospice vet - that frankly gave me a heart attack - for getting me to post it.)

Back in mid-September, I noticed that my cat, Luna, wasn't really eating her wet food. She was just licking up the juices.

For a time, I thought this was a ruse on her part, a gambit. A way to get more of what she wanted – treats. For many years, these treats had been the only dry food she was given. She had had bladder stones twice and even the urinary dry food didn't do enough to keep them in check.

"If you don't start eating your food, " I chided her. "We will have to go to the vet."

Because of this wet food-only diet, her figure was much slimmed down from the Rubenesque proportions she had known in her middle age. When I picked her up one day, I was dismayed to see that her belly was getting big again. I had always worried, especially in her younger, more rotund days, that she might develop diabetes and need daily insulin shots, which I knew both she and I would hate and that would make leaving her for any period of time basically impossible. She would barely let any cat sitters see or pet her, much less give her injections.

The following weekend, I noticed her belly was not only big but firm. Distended, as I heard it described in the mid-90s on countless episodes of ER. I called the vet hospital in Scarborough. They suggested she should be seen soon – the next day if not that night.

I packed her up – she always cried when I put her in the carrier and it pained me. As we drove down, I jokingly asked her if she could keep this under $3K. She was quickly whisked inside, and it was not too long after that I was ushered back into an exam room. While overwhelmed, I knew it was not a good sign that they did not simply come to speak to me in the lobby.

The veterinarian was kind but direct: she had an enormous amount of fluid in her belly (over the course of her overnight stay, they removed 1.7 liters) and it was likely indicative of a serious underlying condition, probably cancer. I had a few choices: I could say goodbye tonight (out of the question – not here, not like this), we could assume it was cancer and send her home with steroids, or we could take some tests and see what we could find. Lymphoma, she said, had a very established course of treatment and cats responded well to it.

A tech came in with a estimate, and I started to cry as we went over the (as anyone who's ever been in a fancy animal hospital like this can attest) eye-popping yet unsurprising figures. I signed immediately – I didn't care and would figure it out later.

I won't bore or pain you with the continued particulars of Luna's final illness. The tests were inconclusive, the treatments ineffective. She would have more than a liter of fluid drained from her abdomen two more times as I waited for an appointment with the internal medicine department at the vet hospital, an appointment that told me nothing new but allowed me to feel I had done everything I could for her. A little over three weeks after I took her in that first time, I arranged for a hospice vet to come to my condo and end her increasing – and unresolvable – discomfort.

This has been incredibly painful. She was so important to me (truly, for a time during the pandemic, my whole world) and I would not have survived the last five years – which started with the traumatic break-up of an abusive relationship, followed shortly by a global pandemic, and finished with a couple of years of intense stress and overwhelm as well as growth and healing – without her. I am grateful that she stayed around long enough to see me through it, to get me to a place where I could better withstand the loss of her.

I want to talk instead about what made this easier – not easy, but easier – for me. Luna, in her final act, gave me the opportunity, however unwelcome and unwanted, to practice losing something I dearly loved. And in increasing my capacity for losing, I have also increased my capacity for loving, because I no longer have to fear that I will not survive the loss of that love.

Luna is gone but she is also everywhere. In the days after her death, I spent as much time as I could out in nature, and it revealed to me why she had to go when she did. She had to go be the full moon the next night and the first frost the following morning. She had to be the foam that spills onto the beach with the crash of every wave.

It's funny – not funny ha ha, but funny notable, funny strange – that I found myself drawing upon a lot of what I write about in this post. (Which...maybe only one or two people have seen, as I did not share it to social media.) Firstly, the idea of groundlessness. As I said, these past five years and especially the last two, have been a lot. It's only been the past few months, maybe just since last summer, that I've felt like I hit some kind of equilibrium – feeling more secure in my job, my apartment, the still quite-hostile Portland social scene. But life never lets you get too comfortable. (Post-November 5 update: Well, shit.)

And instead of fighting that, I just accepted it. As soon as I was ushered into that room at the vet hospital, I recognized that Luna and I were in a new phase – the final phase – of our relationship. The idyll we had enjoyed since January 2020 – during which we became closer than we had ever been, she had never even been a lap cat before that – was brought to a definitive end.

And, like, that sucked. But acknowledging it made it easier for me to focus on her and what she needed. Death is a rite of passage but we don't treat it like one. We avoid it, too overwhelmed by our own fears and sense of loss, and leave the dying creature to figure it out. I didn't want to do that to her. I also didn't want to squeeze as much life out of her as possible just for my own comfort. I wanted to help her through it.

A book I mention in that previous post, Mark Epstein's The Trauma of Everyday Life, has been really helpful to me. I picked up a copy in May 2023 at this very cute used bookstore in the Hudson Valley when I was visiting my uncles. I've read it three or four times since then. The book uses the lens of the Buddha's loss of his mother at one week old to talk about trauma and dissociation. Before and even since Luna died, I've taken to throwing it into my bag as I head out the door, like some kind of talisman.

There are a few passages that I re-read after her diagnosis that helped me accept that she would not have much time left. The first is a very famous story about a woman named Patacara (there are accents I am missing on her name), who, in a brief span of time, no more than a few days, loses her entire family: her husband, her two young children, her elderly parents (from whom she has been long estranged), and her brother. Wild with grief, Patacara is inconsolable, almost inapproachable, and spurned by the townspeople for her bizarre behavior. The Buddha throws his cloak over her, offering her literal and psychological refuge.

She eventually joins the order of mendicants that surround him. One day, washing her feet, she notice little rivulets of water running down the slope of the hill. Some of them, she notes, sink into the soil very quickly. Others make it a little further down, and others make it all the way to the bottom. She sees in these rivulets a reflection of her lost family – her children, who made it only a little way; her husband, who made it to young adulthood; and her elderly parents, who reached the bottom of the slope. Seeing this reflected in nature allows her to accept the state of things, to not resist it. In effect: We get the years that we get, and no more.

Luna, at nearly 15 and a half, had, for a cat, made it very close to the bottom of the slope. She had had a good life, despite enduring the (attempted) torments inflicted on her by my other cat, Dmitri, for quite a few years. (If I have one regret, it is privileging my need for a "cuddly" cat – I adopted Dmitri in 2012 shortly after the death of my father – over her comfort.)

There's another anecdote (also very famous) from The Trauma of Everyday Life – this one about the suddenness, the sheer incomprehensibleness, of death. In this case, the Buddha encounters another woman devastated by loss – this time of her baby, whose body she refuses to put down and whose resuscitation she desperately seeks. Rather than speak harsh truths to her, the Buddha says that he can help her. But first she must gather mustard seed from a house where no one has died. She sets out on this quest and when she reports back to the Buddha that she could not find such a house, she is no longer carrying the body of her dead child. Encountering the loss of others – coming to see its pervasive nature — has made it possible for her to accept her own.

She, like Patacara, also joins the mendicants around the Buddha. But whereas Patacara was soothed by the rivulets of water, this woman, Kisagotami, is struck by the flickering of oil lamps across the river. In one moment, they are lighted. In the next, dark. Like it did for Patacara, this simple element of the natural world — fire instead of water – offers insight into the mysteries of death. One moment her child was there; the next moment they were gone. So it is for us all.

Unlike Patacara or Kisagotami, I had the privilege of knowing this day was coming, even if I did not know exactly when. In February of 2023, Luna stopped eating (everything except treats, her true love) and was hiding under the bed in the downstairs bedroom. I took her to urgent care. They drew blood, ran tests, but there was nothing conclusive. (The veterinarian had clearly been prepared to tell me that Luna had advanced kidney disease but her blood work was impeccable and remained so up until the end.) Over a couple of days, I plied her with Fancy Feast (the Taco Bell of cat food), she regained her appetite with gusto, and things resumed as they had been.

But not quite: I had a brief moment of terror – I think familiar to most people whose elderly pets suddenly take sick – that I had had my last morning with Luna, or the last morning before things changed irrevocably. For the past couple of years, every morning, I would make coffee, go lie on the couch, and Luna would crawl up onto my chest and we'd just hang out for 30 minutes or so. In fact, almost any time I found myself vaguely horizontal, Luna (formerly very aloof) would be like "Okay! Cuddling time" and hop up on the bed or couch or wherever I'd be. When she instead stayed firmly planted under the bed, I was suddenly struck by a sense of loss. Had I had that last morning and not even known it?

I think this is what many people feel when a pet is suddenly gone. I should have appreciated them more. I should have spent more time. How could I have known we were so close to the end? But the end is always hovering just out of the frame, though it may not descend for months, years, or decades.

People think they are sparing themselves pain by refusing to see reality. I see folks who post TikToks recounting grim diagnoses for beloved pets with desperate please for ideas of what they could do, evident desire for a magical solution to emerge out of the digital ether. This desire is incredibly understandable, but they are only guaranteeing themselves greater pain. They deny themselves those final moments in the hopes of an extended reprieve.

I was fortunate enough to receive such a reprieve. In one of her books, Sharon Salzberg recounts a trip she took to visit one of her teachers who was thought to be in his last days. She approached the visit with dread. "This is the last time I'm going to see him," she thought to herself. But then her taxi got stuck in traffic and she began to fear she would be unable to see him at all, that he would be gone by the time she arrived. When the traffic cleared and she was on her way, her outlook had changed. Instead of dread, there was joy and gratitude: "I get to see him one more time!" (The guru, in fact, lived for several more years.)

This same attitude was what I brought to my morning ritual with Luna, now resumed. Every morning, as she settled her still-considerable bulk onto my chest, I thought, "Another morning with Luna." And I got probably another 500 of those mornings, a truly amazing gift. I adopted Luna when she was 18 months old and I had her for just a couple of weeks shy of 14 years. Many people would be so lucky.

On the last day of Luna's life, we did many of the same things we had done on any other: I made coffee, she crawled up onto my chest, we sat staring out the window in the downstairs bedroom. She scarfed down a handful of treats – as this point, all she was really eating – in her toothless mouth. I was grateful to capture this delightful noise on video for posterity.

The end was not perfect, not the smooth, peaceful exit that I had wished for her. The volume of fluid in her belly meant that the first sedative was not enough and the vet had to give her another dose. When he inserted the needle the second time, she cried.

I held her to my chest as she fell asleep and then was gone.