my cat boojie

I had a cat. Her name was Boojie. She was an orange tabby. She lived to be very old, too old for her own good. This was my aunt’s assessment. I was content to place a chair between her and the sink, so that she could continue to drink from the tap. She was a creature of habit. So was I. And so I kept her alive much longer than her body could permit to maintain that lie that we both perpetrated as creatures of habit. Death is a fairy tail. Let us believe that we go about our routine, continue in our habits, but one day silently we fade into the slumber of death. Not so.

The day my aunt and uncle came to pick me and Boojie up, it was time to send my cat, unwillingly into her long night. I fed her a can of wet food. I fancied her feast a last meal. While she had not chosen it herself, she obligingly gorged it down. It would be the first to come up when the veterinarian gave her a fatal dose of anesthetic.

My aunt accompanied me as we entered the room. My cat, being the grouchy feline she was, hissed and growled. Her hair was matted from her own inability to groom. She was 19 at the time. I was 20. We were two companions, one old, one still young, who shared a lifeline for a long time. I was unwilling to leave her at the fork in the road. My aunt helped me to realize that I had to make that turn and leave Boojie behind. Her rationale was brutally pragmatic. If the cat cannot take care of itself, then it's time; that’s the rationale of automatons. When the clock no longer tells time it must be disposed. There is no chance of making it a relic, a collector’s item, a souvenir—something with historicity. Bodies are best left to rot, to give their elements back to the soil and the air. Decay is the youngest form of life; it is the context for birth. Cat’s aren’t clocks, but I could fit my own mysticism within my aunt’s pragmatic cosmology.

The veterinarian did a simple check and determined that Boojie’s kidneys were small and atrophied. Likely my cat’s inability to filter her blood would lead to a slower and perhaps more macabre demise. The anesthetic would be a swift and humane departure. The veterinarian injected Boojie. Immediately she fought back. Since I was holding her, she did what any vicious feline does when disturbed. With all her might she dug into my arm with her front paws and used her back paws to kick and dig into my arm. Growling, scratching, and biting she registered her discontent in the flesh of my arm. Then the anesthetic took effect.

She growled slowly and began to violently empty the contents of her stomach. The reverse peristaltic reaction rendered her lithe cat frame a visible example of digestion. Over and over, her body undulated to the wave of peristaltic spasm and her last meal came forth. Then she began to quiver and shake violently with vomit smeared across her face. At that point Boojie was no longer my cat.

To see a cat in its final throws of life is shocking and violent. My once graceful companion teetered on oblivion and acted as if she were a mannequin with a few of its strings tangled up. Its movements were base, less orchestrated. In this state I knew that life wasn’t fragile. No, life is a monstrosity. Its desire to live extends so far as to kill in order to survive. My cat, after all, was a predator. I probably had eaten some meat, the product of an industry of genocide that slaughters and processes millions of living organisms hourly. My cat’s body at that point was an obscenity; it rendered that poetic vision of life a farce. It revealed the moody and rank interior of life’s violent force. The graceful ballet of a cat in play was stripped away, first slowly by infirmity, and stripped altogether more violently by the vet’s needle. I realize that dying is hard for all of us. What’s even harder is to see the body of a loved one become an inarticulate mass of decay, a writhing spasm of muscle twitching and nervous activity. The final sparks of life are much like a clock that is losing time. What once made the living organism sensible was its carefully choreographed routine, a life in the dance of survival. Removing its ability to perform that dance renders the body a less sensible and perverse version of its former self. Our minds must adjust, but the initial encounter is shocking, utterly shocking. I killed my cat.

Boojie held on after her strings were cut. She lay there, almost as if asleep. The veterinarian probed her body with her stethoscope. “Her little heart won’t give up.” The monster still pulsed. Life sparked on indifferent to the blow the organism had received. With gross motor activity ended and a brain perhaps slowly being starved of oxygen, her weak pulse, a creature of its own habit, continued on. The vet injected more anesthetic into her, and brought all life to an end.