Thankfully, Dr. V. was able to come over at noon. It's a good thing, too, because we would not have been able to move Penny without her getting violently sick. At one point, we thought she might enjoy the sunbeams, so we tried to pick her up and move her a few feet away from where she was into one of the beams. We arranged the magic blanket that she liked so much into a comfy bed on the floor, but when I picked her up, she yowled, freaked out, and tried to walk back to where she had been before...but she could barely walk, she was so weak and in pain. Then she vomited this horrible, dark green bile while lying on her side, her tongue lolling out of her mouth. I thought she was going to die right then, but after three heaves, she stopped and tried to regain her breath. When Dr. V. came in, she asked how Penny was doing, saw her, and said "I think it's time." Penny was lying on her right side on the comforter that Neil spent the night on, just in front of my desk, panting and struggling, staring into space -- not really there, only semi-aware. Her breathing was more calm, but shallow, and her heartbeat was very quiet. She did not even respond to her own name.
She jumped and hissed at the first injection (the anesthetic, like the one they use in surgery) because it probably stung, but then it slowly took effect. I hated that she even had to endure that pinch/sting. We all sat on the floor and quietly talked with the vet about their names: why we decided to call them Penny and Arthur. She knew the Beatles references and joked that at least we didn't name her Eleanor Rigby. Eventually, after about eight minutes or so, Penny gradually relaxed and soon she had no reflex reaction. I had been holding her head in my left hand and paws in my right, so I told Neil to take her head while I kept her front paws. They were cold and tense. Dr. V. located Penny's heart with her fingers and stethoscope, and the needle went in with a sickening pop. Or maybe I just imagined that. She slowly delivered the turquoise blue liquid, and just as slowly, Penny's front paws gradually unclenched, almost rolled open, relaxing completely. Her breathing slowed...and then stopped imperceptibly. Dr. V. listened for her heart and quietly said, with a gentle catch in her voice, "She's gone."
I felt a mixture of intense sadness and also extreme relief. I gave Penny five fast little kisses on her head like I always did to make her purr. We removed the safety pins and elastic from her suit -- I sort of wish we had taken the whole suit off, but there was no point, really, it would have just been unpleasant to do. Neil carefully picked up her body and placed it on a purple towel Dr. V. had brought -- she chose it on purpose because she knew it would match the little purple ribbon we had put on P's suit to keep it from slipping down too far. I knelt on the floor behind her and gave P a big long hug, putting my cheek on her side and feeling her impossibly soft, beautiful fur on my face for the last time. It was odd how I could imagine a heartbeat. I suppose it was my own pulse in my ears. I gave her another bout of five kisses before Dr. V. positioned her into a curled-up, sleeping kitty position on the towel. It really did look like she was just sleeping, except that her eyes were still open. Dr. V. slowly folded the towel up over her, one side at a time, covering her head last. The movement of the towel shifted her head slightly and it moved far too easily, as if it weren't really attached to her body, which wrenched my heart.
Dr. V. tenderly carried her down the hall, through the living room, down the stairs and out to her little red car. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. She placed the purple bundle in a white postal service bin on the passenger side of her messy car -- a bin which I am certain Penny would have adored. Then she gave us both hugs, got in her car, and drove away with our beautiful, sweet, amazing kitty.
Neil and I stalked back up the stairs, empty and drained. We clung to each other and sobbed, still half expecting to see Penny waddling out into the living room in order to make sure we were ok. Out the living room window, we could see Dr. V's car turning into the veterinary hospital's parking lot, since it's literally right across the street. It was very odd knowing that Penny was really neither here nor there, but I wanted to run across the street and touch that precious little body again.
Instead, we picked up the comforter from the office floor because shortly after Penny staggered back from the sunbeam fiasco, her bladder released and soaked the comforter and the floor. We threw the comforter and blankets she was using into the washer. The rest of the day was just plain hard. We took a walk under the gorgeous, blue, cloudless sky and talked about her. We went to Bruster's and had ice cream (coffee fudge something) in a waffle cone and couldn't believe that there were children playing and people laughing around us. We walked home hand in hand. Coming home was particularly difficult because she wasn't there to greet us. We decided to try and distract ourselves with an episode of MadMen, which helped...but we had to stop it frequently because thoughts of Penny kept intruding.
We couldn't function well enough to make dinner, so we ordered a pizza (pesto mambo from Pizza-X!) and went to pick it up. Everything seemed surreal. Neither of us wanted to eat even though we were ravenous. Neil went to orchestra rehearsal...how he made it through that, I don't know. When he left, I lost it. My strength faltered completely and I just wanted to scream and wail and roll around on the floor senselessly. I decided to channel the sadness into making a memorial shrine for Penny, where we could light a candle and tell her how much we miss her. I gathered some favorite photos and her favorite toys (the crinkly mousie, the pink ribbon, her catnip sardine), extra squares from a quilt I made that she liked to "help" me with, her suit straps and safety pins, the amitriptyline pill I was supposed to have given her that morning. I lit a white candle and sat there, on the spot where she died, sobbing and trying to tell her how much I loved her, how sorry I was that this happened the way it did, and how amazing she was.
Neil came home after rehearsal and eventually we went to bed. It was difficult, but a bit of a relief, to realize that we didn't have to take care of Penny's tumor, or give her any medicine before bedtime. It was devastating, however, when we realized that we would be alone in bed, without her gentle, purring weight on our legs or feet. Neil remembered that he had seen one of her bright white whiskers on the floor and he got up, found it, and put it on Penny's shrine.
At about 3:30 in the morning, I was awakened by a heart-sick yowl from the living room. Arthur usually "sings" to his water bowl in the middle of the night, but it's normally a series of odd chirps and squawks. This was a mournful moan, and at first I thought he wasn't well, so I jumped out of bed to check on him. He was sitting by his water bowl (actually, I guess the right description is "loafing") and looking very serious. When I put my hand on him, he flopped listlessly onto his side. No purring. Barely acknowledging my presence. Earlier that morning, before the vet came, he had actually come into the office -- he had been avoiding it since the night before, choosing to spend the night in an odd place sort of between the living room and dining room where he could see all the way down the hall, keeping an eye on the room where Neil slept with Penny on the floor. So, it was a surprise when he came in to see Penny during a brief moment of lucidity that morning -- her head was up and she was alert. They came nose to nose for a good sniff, just like they did when they first met, then Arthur walked all the way into the room, checked everything out, and walked out almost joyfully. That was their goodbye, and I'm certain they knew it. So, when he found himself alone at 3:30am, a time when she was often up and active, I think the quietness and solitude hit him.
I am still trying to make sense of why losing this little cat hurts so much. It is partly because we were so invested in her -- all that time, energy, emotion -- and partly because it was so sudden. She is also the first cat that we/I have lost for whom we had full responsibility. But it's more than that. She was so strong. She had so many things wrong, but she always recovered. The tragedy in her last trial was that she couldn't recover. It's hard to get over for these and so many other reasons.
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