A brief hiatus

I'll be back soon.

I know that madness is engulfing my native country. But I need a few more days to decide what, if anything, I have to say about it. There are plenty of hot takes out there. None of them will be read a hundred years from now. So I don’t think it will do me (or you) any harm if I refrain from joining the chorus of hot takes.

I need another day or two to sort out my thoughts and my emotions about the past week’s news, and maybe to separate them, because my infinitely sweet little three-legged cat—the last member of my cat family—is dying. She did so well after losing her leg, and she’d been in remission so long, that I thought she was cured. But she wasn’t. Last week, I noticed that I could feel her ribs. She was eating well, and she didn’t seem sick. I told myself I must be imagining it. But I wasn’t. And I knew what it meant. Yesterday, the vet confirmed what I already knew. The fibrosarcoma that claimed her leg has metastasized.

I asked her how long we had left. She couldn’t say. Sometimes, she said, it progresses slowly. I brought my cat home hoping this might mean, “months.” But looking at her today, I don’t think so. I think it will be more like “days.” Just two days ago, I could honestly say that she wasn’t behaving like a sick animal. But today, she is. The speed with which she’s losing weight is astonishing: I didn’t know it was biologically possible for a mammal to lose that much weight, that fast. Where is it going?

And now, she’s weak. She’s not hopping up and running toward me when I call. She still eats, when I bring her food, but with much less gusto than she did yesterday. She’s clearly exhausted.

I don’t think the stress of the trip to the vet yesterday helped.

She’s not showing signs of pain. My vet said there was no need for analgesics yet, because the tumors don’t seem to be pressing against anything with nerves. But I wonder if they’re beginning to do that.

I’ve been waiting all day for my vet to call me back. She’s a wonderful veterinarian, but an infuriatingly bad manager of her schedule. She’s always late. Always. Her assistant said she would call me this morning, but seven hours later, she hasn’t called. I understand that there are emergencies in veterinary care, but she has never once been on time for an appointment. I have had many appointments, given I had seven cats. She never returns calls when she says she will. But she’s a good veterinarian, and she’s been wonderful with my cats, so I haven’t looked for another one.

I’m furious with her. I suppose that’s because it doesn’t make sense to be furious at a soft-tissue sarcoma. It doesn’t make sense to be furious at her, either, but I am.

I hope that when she finally calls me back, she’ll agree with me that it’s time to give her a fentanyl patch. She doesn’t seem to be in pain, no, but why take the chance? She has terminal cancer. That’s not a condition I associate with the words, “surprisingly painless.”

I hope there’s not some idiotic law that says I have to bring her back to the clinic so the vet can witness me sticking it on my cat and not myself. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. I hope I don’t have to argue with her about this. I hope I don’t wind up losing my mind and screaming at everyone there that if I wanted to get high, I could find an easier way to do that than faking my cat’s death.

No living creature has spent more time with me than she has. I realized this over the weekend. Not my parents, not my friends, nor any other animal. I’d more or less left my parents’ house by the time I was fifteen. But I found her twenty years ago, when she was a tiny kitten. Since then, except when I’ve gone out of town (which I rarely do, anymore), she’s been near me almost every minute of almost every day.

David Gross and I once began writing a graphic novel about the cats we adopted when we lived in Istanbul. We called it Catstantinople.

We thought for sure it would be a bestseller—hardcover, paperback, translations, film rights, serials, merchandise, we’d never have to work again. But publishers passed. One said she didn’t know which section of the book store it would go in. Another said the characters weren’t relatable. (The characters are cats. We spent a lot of time wondering what she could have possibly meant.) Then David and I split up, so the story lost its natural arc, and we never finished the book. But here’s how it began:

When she was a kitten, she followed me everywhere. She paddled after me when I went to the kitchen to make coffee, then joined me in the garden where I drank it. When she grew older, she lost the habit, as most kittens do. But after her brothers died, she began following me again. Until last week, no matter what I did, she hop-hop-hoppity-hopped right behind me.

It’s been just the two of us since Zeki and Suley died. We know each other so well. Several times a night, I feel softness, warm breath, and hear a tiny meow. It’s like feathers falling from the beating wings of an angel, she’s so small, so silky, so feminine, so delicate. I stroke her little head, very gently, without really waking up. She purrs, and we both drift back to sleep. She fits into my dreamworld as if she emerged from it.

She knows my routine by heart. When I wake up, so does she. She hop-hop-hops behind me to the bathroom to watch me brush my teeth, then to the kitchen to help me make coffee. Even when I do housework, she feels compelled to hop from room to room with me as I sweep. It makes her cross. “Claire,” she looks at me as if say, “The apartment’s clean enough. Sit down again. I’m tired.”

“You don’t have to follow me, you know. You can actually lie down anytime you want.”

“No I can’t, Claire. You know the rules.”

But now, she’s too tired to follow me. Hopping, I think, takes much more energy than walking on four legs. This is happening so fast.

We’re going to start her today on the prednisone. Perhaps that will give her a few more days of energy and appetite. I have it right here. I’m just waiting for the vet to call me to tell me how much to give her. It would take her 30 seconds to do that. All I need to know is the dose.

Why won’t she just call me back?

Féline has been part of my life for so long. I’m not the same person that I was when she entered it. She’s been with me through two cities, a fiancé, two boyfriends, three breakups.

When I found her, Leo wasn’t yet born; now he’s old enough to think about where he’ll go to college. She outlived my stepsister Laura, then she outlived my mother.

She’s helped me write two books, countless articles, and start the Cosmopolitan Globalist. She’s seen it grow into a real journal. She’s been with me through the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. She’s been there to comfort me after the deaths, one by one, of the other cats. I loved each one of them infinitely much. She’s always been there: soft, tiny, infinitely sweet, and so beautiful. 

and we go, 
And we drop like the fruits of the tree, 
Even we, 
Even so.