Ozark

May 1995 - January 23, 2008

The Expected Guest

How does one go about watching another being die? Are we supposed to wear a certain face? A speakingly sad posture? Is there an acceptable voice modulation specific to using around those who are not long for the world? How do you talk to them? What do you say? Do we walk through rooms in whispers? Do we allow any light to crack through the grim shadows growing long?

I knew my cat was dying before we did these last tests, just to be sure. So when I found out today that my cat is definitely dying, I wasn’t surprised, but I was surprisingly sad. I say surprisingly because I’ve been preparing myself for this news for two weeks now. Honestly? Longer than that. I don’t know if it was obvious from Ozark’s growing body hollows or from his face, but I saw it coming. It’s not really a mystery I think. He’s been changing pretty seriously over the course of the last six months.

Is death any different for animals than it is for humans? I don’t really think it is. I think that when it comes to death we’re all pretty much on the same plane. Or, we would be, if humans didn’t constantly muck every simple process up and make it into something we can’t talk about, can’t face, can’t approach, or even admit to.

I will admit, without qualms, that if my child’s kidney was failing I would absolutely put him on an organ donor list whereas I will not do that for my cat. However, it is more natural to just let go when the body shuts down than to desperately stay the moment of truth indefinitely. Even for humans. I understand why we do it. I do. But I will tell you that if I get cancer I will try to treat it within reason, but I don’t intend to live the rest of my life doing chemo and just hanging on to hang on.

There are so many different ways to approach death. I know that for most people it’s important to fight for your life no matter what that really means. And if anyone suggests they don’t want to fight any more? Others jump into action full of fear, indignation, desperation, as though death was something unnatural. Often it is avoided temporarily at immense cost to everyone involved, and most of all to the being who is closest to the “other side”.

If I say I know for sure that I wouldn’t want a transplant for my heart if it was failing I’m willing to bet that anyone within earshot would vehemently deny that I could know what I would do once in that situation or that I would definitely decide to try for a transplant. Maybe, but I looked death in the eye when I was fifteen and it wasn’t a fear of death that kept me from killing myself. Fear had nothing to do with it at all. I wasn’t afraid to kill myself. I first didn’t do it for the sake of a friend. And later I didn’t do it because I realized that I was only seventeen and I might be able to build a good life on the one flicker of hope I had left. But if my heart was dying? My loved ones might want me to do anything to save myself, but I think I’d like to recognize when my natural time has come, and face it with grace.

I haven’t been so good with the grace lately, but hopefully my own time is far enough away that I will have time to develop more elegance of the heart.

You can’t ask a cat what he wants in his last bit of time on earth. He can’t tell you how he’s feeling, if he’s in pain, if he would like you to stop injecting him with huge quantities of water that pool around his legs before being absorbed into his body. You can’t ask if he’s too warm or too cold or just wants you to sit with him all day. You can’t ask if he would like you to just let go or try giving him the rest of the antibiotic even though the answer is still death, and soon.

People don’t like talking about death.

At the vet’s office I was handing Ozark over to get his blood taken and I started to say “Don’t worry, you’ll be alright” but stopped myself and said to the vet and his assistant “I can’t actually tell him that, can I? Because he’s not OK.” And turning to my sick cat, said instead “Well, Ozark, we’re just trying to find out how we can make you feel better.” It doesn’t seem right to lie to an animal. Even though they can’t know our language well. I don’t think animals would lie to us.

What I’m hoping is that he’ll die quietly on his own, and soon. I don’t really want to have to choose to put him to sleep. Although I kind of think that I might like someone to do that for me when life has definitely already closed it’s doors on me and I’m just waiting for my body to let go.

He hasn’t eaten since yesterday. He didn’t want food this morning and didn’t want any this afternoon. I think he’s letting go.

I think people need to talk about death more. People need to accept the inevitability of it. No one has a right to something that is a gift. All this talk of “Right To Life” bothers me sometimes just for the inherent arrogance that that implies. Life is a gift with a use-by date. We get life on condition that we will at some point die and make room for others to have their turn. Some of us have shorter turns than others.

I wish I could know what Ozark would most like right now. I’m just uncomfortable with death waiting in the house. A thankfully rare guest at our table. I’m uncomfortable because no one’s ever told me how to approach it. No one’s ever told me how to care for the dying. How to behave or prepare for it. We don’t talk about these things in our culture so that all of us are caught unprepared.

So I will watch. I will tell Ozark the truth. And we will give him love. And hopefully we will know when the moment has arrived to make decisions and be able to make those decisions with courage.

The Story Of Our Dangerous Pet

One night in 1994 I had a dream in which I found a kitten and in the dream I knew his name was Ozark and in this dream I also knew that this was supposed to happen in real life. I woke up and told Philip that it was time for us to get a cat. The cat had to be orange and we had to name him Ozark. This is when Philip truly got that he had married a mad woman, but because he is always in need of more sleep he said "sure" and rolled over and drifted off into his own cat-less sleep.

Interestingly enough very shortly after this dream I had, a friend called up to invite Philip and I to come look at a large gathering of semi-wild kittens which were the shameful result of her boyfriend's mother's habit of feeding feral cats in her back yard but not getting them fixed. My friend tried to reason with her boyfriend's mother about how she either needed to stop feeding all the strays in town or she needed to take proper responsibility for them. She was feeding approximately 15 feral cats. Many of them were females having kittens.

I told her I would only come up if she could confirm whether there was an orange kitten in the lot of them because I was determined that the cat must be orange and we didn't want to drive two hours for anything less.

She got back to me to say that there was at least one orange kitten there. So we went. We met Ozark. Ozark was the member of a three kitty litter who we realized (over the course of several hours of observation) was abandoned by their mother. No mama cat nursed them or came to see how they were doing. This litter was distinguishable by the fact that they were the only three kittens with orange on them. There were thousands (OK, maybe twenty) frisky semi-healthy looking black kittens and it must be said that our good sense told us to pick a healthy kitten.

But we saw Ozark by himself trying to get at some water. We saw him not get a scrap of food when the gravy train arrived. He was the smallest and sickest kitty there. It's true that I'm a sucker. I couldn't leave him there. He was tiny and had no mama and didn't seem healthy.

So we took his mewling self home with us and we promptly fell in love. We immediately took him to the vet where they ripped us a new one for removing a 5 1/2 week old kitten from his mother. Which made us angry because we would never have taken such a tiny kitty from it's mother before it was ready but we were sure that this kitten would have died if we left him. The vet told us that Ozark was very sick and too young to be weaned and had a 50% chance of surviving the parasite in his stomach, the upper respiratory infection in his lungs, and the infestation of fleas. Which confirmed our gut feeling in the first place.

Ozark is the feistiest scrappenist kitty that ever lived. Although he loved us and would snuggle with us and fall asleep on us and all good kitteny things, he was not particularly affectionate with anyone else. In fact, he quickly got a reputation for being a cranky cantankerous and combative cat.

He is famous for inviting strangers to touch his unbelievably soft belly and then attacking them when they made contact with his fur. When introducing people to Ozark we would always provide ample warning, which many people immediately ignored. It goes something like this: "This is Ozark. He looks cute, he'll sidle up to you, he'll invite you to pet him, but don't fall for it because he will almost certainly scratch you." Or "This is Ozark and he wants to kill you because he finds all humans annoying." Or "Watch out, the orange guy is dangerous." And most importantly "Never ever pick this cat up."

For some reason people often interpreted our warnings to really mean "While Ozark will harm most people- you are clearly special and this warning is not meant for you." Or "Please, pet the cat!" And best of all "Pick the cat up because he only scratches the eyes of people who aren't YOU."

It's amazing we've never been sued. We have a special knack for having pets and kids who come with warnings. We don't care. We've always loved our special needs cat.

In spite of his vicious reputation (his vet files are stamped with the giant red letters: "W A R N I N G", he managed to deal with the "thing" pretty well. Once he finished having a midlife crisis over it.

Ozark with "the thing" that changed his life. This is back when I had a pretty tidy house and even had houseplants. Ozark let us know that "the thing" was barely tolerable to him. We expected Max to be mauled by the cat and were expecting neighbors to report us to social services for keeping a dangerous animal near our kid. Shockingly, Ozark has rarely scratched Max. He has endured a lot of indignity at Max's hands that he would never have taken from anyone else.

Ozark was neutered when he was four months old. We hoped that this would help him to mellow out. Which, obviously it didn't. Ozark not only fought with people, he also fought all the time with cats twice his size. He's spent many an evening at the pet urgent care getting wrapped up or examined for puncture wounds. We really didn't think he'd live to be seven years old.

The scrapping is why he has FIV. Vaccinations for FIV are relatively new and he had already been a fighting trouble maker for many years. We didn't realize they were giving vaccines for FIV until we found out he already had it. It is lucky for him that he has not been fighting in the past two years or we would have had no choice but to euthanize him for the safety of the neighbor cats because it is impossible to keep him inside. He's mellowed quite a bit in the past two years. He still comes with warnings though. Because this is a cat who will take on raccoons.

We take him to the vet today. Maybe we'll come home with a miracle in our pocket. Maybe this decline he's in right now is something fixable. I'm not holding my breath. It's weird though that Max and Ozark have become so close in the past two years since we moved here. Ozark sleeps with Max every night. Max is very gentle with him and doesn't try to sit on him like he does with the dog. Max loves that Ozark doesn't eat his toys. Although Max is a pretty fastidious person in some ways and one way is that he really hates that Ozark frequently vomits in his room. Yet if Ozark wakes up and leaves Max's room (which means we have to let him out, he wakes us up by banging on the door) Max will wake up and not go back to sleep.

Even with a miracle in our pocket we know that Ozark's time here is limited. Such is the nature of FIV. So I thought I would say here, before he's gone, how much we love him. I've been sitting with him and petting his bony back and putting my ear to his side like I've done since he was five and a half weeks old to listen to his enormous purr. I've never met a cat with a louder purr than Ozark's.

Although Ozark has been quite a bastard and has made me want to strangle him, I can honestly say that I think he's one of the best cats ever. Whether we get to keep him for a few more moths or only for a few weeks, or mere days, we will forgive the peeing and the attacks on the dog and love him til it's time for him to go.

Update: Back from the vet now. He either has a kidney infection or kidney disease. If it's an infection there's a chance he can live quite a bit longer if he responds well to antibiotics (FIV can make it hard to treat infections) and if it's kidney disease then he will slowly die and we will give him fluid injections and potassium pills for however long he lives to help him feel his best. The vet says that kidney disease isn't painful (someone here was just telling me that.). We will find out on Monday or Tuesday when they get the lab results. Fingers crossed!

Overwhelmed

I am very overwhelmed by all that needs to get done today. So it's a huge blessing that Max is going to Rex's house to play. It's already almost eleven am and I am still in my pyjamas. Here's what I've got to do:

1. go to the gym

2. pay the bills. This takes at least an hour to sort out and is always nerve racking when there's
no steady work out there for us.

3. prepare fifty little favors to give out at our greeters meeting for the Chamber Of Commerce.

4. send out an order

5. start moving stuff into the studio

6. pick mom up from the hospital (they wouldn't let her come home yesterday)

7. find out from the vet if they got the cat's records and find out if he ever had the FIV vaccin-
ation, because if he didn't (which my records show he didn't) then he has it.

8. Make up a batch of pickles that are waiting in the fridge.

See what I mean? I didn't put all the other things on the list that need doing because I know there's no way in hell they're going to get done. I'd like to blow off the Greeter's thingie because I'm going to put effort into it and probably not nearly as many people as they tell me to expect will come and I probably won't get any extra business from it. I think the Chamber greatly over estimates the benefits they can provide for my company. But I can't blow it off because if there's any chance at all of benefiting Dustpan Alley, I am in no position to scoff.

You know what I'll do though? Take it all one step at a time. Right now I'm off to the shower to actually get dressed. Then I'll eat food. Then I'll tackle the bills. Doing that will make me feel loads better. Or worse, depending on the point of view, obviously. But I do have an order to get out today and that's something to be grateful for. (By the way, Pam, I am going to send out the one oilcloth bag that I have that you ordered because I'm not going to place another order for more of them until I've sold more of the other things of theirs I have. There's a hundred dollar minimum...drat. So I'll get that out today too. So that makes two orders.)

Alright. Here we go....