Our baby cat

Amber is quiet and out of sight a long ten minutes, when she had made clear that she needed to finish a paper for class and I was to leave her to it. I look down the stairs and there she is, three steps up, studying the kitten a step above her. Jareth is not breathing well. Neither is Amber, though because she is trying to hold in her sobs.

I descend the rest of the steps, but I don't say anything to her. I watch until she is ready to say what she is thinking.

"He isn't doing well." She hesitates in calling her job, as it is late, and they are likely, but not definitely, closed. Instead, she asks if we should take him to the emergency vet.

"I worry," she says, "if I take him there, he isn't coming home with us." She does not mean that they will keep him for observation.

Still, she won't let Jareth remain this way overnight, and I won't let her deal with this alone, nor would she want this.

I was showered, with my teeth brushed, ten minutes from going to bed. I throw on clothes. Amber packs up the kitten. She comes to the main floor, licks her fingertips, and extinguishes the candle she had embedded in salt as part of her spell for Jareth.

I drive in silence, aside from telling her once that I love her and her taking my cell phone, so it can guide me to the vet.

My head is both racing and empty. I want the details spelled out for me. If he is euthanized away from Amber's hospital, do we have to bring the body back with us? And what will we do until they open? I don't ask. Her marginal peace of mind is worth more than my sated curiosity.

The woman at the front desk, an older woman in a tie-dye shirt, hands Amber and form and tells us at length how she wants to go home. She already worked one job, and now she is working the night here. I do not think we are the people to whom she should be complaining.

Amber sets to filling out the form. I sit in one of the chairs and try to pour myself a water from the dispenser, which is empty. A cat hobbles over to me, three-legged and pretty. I scratch the top of its head, absently and affectionately. Jareth would ordinarily have thrilled to meet this cat. The cat hops up to sit beside me.

We sit only a few minutes before being called into the office.

The vet is businesslike, running through the introductory remarks: "Hi, how are you? How old is the patient? What is wrong with him tonight?"

I am waiting. Amber will stop having questions to answer and the vet will want to see Jareth. Then there won't need to be other rote questions. I know this.

Amber lifts the cage lid open. The vet looks in at Jareth, her expression blankly interested. Then the moment. She sees Jareth's face. Her own twists as she recoils.

To her possible credit, she doesn't long dissemble before telling us that she hates to say it, but she recommends "letting him go."

Amber argues. He is getting chemotherapy. He goes to the vet all the time. Here are the medications he is taking. Here is how often.

Amber explains Jareth's conditions -- leukemia, lymphoma -- and then adds rectal prolapse. This was new to me. The vet lifts Jareth's tail and, yes, this is so.

The vet weighs Jareth. The last I knew, he was six and a half pounds. Now he is 5.8. His healthy weight, two weeks ago, was eight and a half. Amber cannot force-feed him enough to return that weight to him.

The vet tries to explain that our cat is suffering and that she can't tell us the right thing to do, but she recommends euthanasia. She leaves us then to discuss.

Amber weeps. I try to hold her, but she isn't ready for that. I don't know my part in this. A week ago, I would have. A week ago, I would have fought anyone who dared to suggest Jareth should be put down. Now, I knew my cat was dying and that nothing was going to bring him back, so that is what I end up saying, even as each word stabs me.

Amber wants to state her case to me, but I am not prosecuting the cat or her. I tell her that we did everything we could, and Jareth knows that.

Amber whispers through possibilities and things she wishes were true.

Images come in bright flashes, but they do not follow fluidly. I see Amber's face in stark relief, high contrast of her wet cheeks and pink eyes. I see the glassy bulb of the vet's stethoscope, its arms sugar skull skeleton kitties. I see my baby cat's prolapsed rectum.

"What is it you want from this tonight?" I ask.

"I don't want to have him put down. Not here."

"But tomorrow at work," I say.

"I don't know."

I hug her. "I support you in what you have to do."

"Maybe we can get painkillers for him tonight, so he isn't suffering."

Another pill. He has taken so many and hated them all. I don't know that any has had much of an effect.

The vet returns, again wondering what Amber wants to do, again saying that it is time to let him go. "If you really want, we can try to do surgery on his rump. We'd have to knock him out, and I don't like to do that. If you don't, that part is going to dry out and die. We could do a purse-string, but that means the only way he is ever going to poop again is by giving him diarrhea."

"Do you think we could give him Telazol?" Amber asks.

The vet explains that she doesn't like Telazol, and that she didn't think he would survive being put under, not in his state. "Asking for that, you seem to know too much for your own good."

"She's a vet tech," I say, because I don't know that Amber is going to.

The vet's demeanor changes in a second, melting. "Oh, honey, you know what is going on with him, then. You know that he's suffering. Why are you putting him through this?"

Because she isn't ready to let go of the hope that he is going to get better, somehow. I held it so tightly against me. Hours before this, I held Jareth as I picked up the apartment, then put him in his window so he could look out at the yard. He was thinner still. Every day, he is thinner, weaker, sicker. Jareth had diarrhea over the bathroom floor, having missed the litter box. He had put himself in the bathtub, where I provided him his food and water, along with a towel for comfort. He wanted none of this. As I cleaned up his effluence, I told him how much I loved him and how sorry I was that this was happening to him. I tenderly tried to dry his face and paws, which meant nothing to him except that he liked the contact. I cradled him like a starved baby in my arms, his litter and assorted fluids staining my shirt to my complete disinterest. He had tried to meow, but nothing would come.

"I know everyone says they have the best cat, but Jareth really is. He loves being held in your arms, putting his paw to either side--" and then I can't say anymore. I walk to the other side of the room to recover.

The vet won't prescribe painkillers. She doesn't see the point in it. At Amber's insistence, she administers subcutaneous fluids, sticking a needle in Jareth's back. This is all to keep him at least hydrated until tomorrow, until he can go to Amber's hospital. I know what should happen then. I'm not positive Amber does.

In the car, I refrain from saying any of the thoughts rushing through my head, and so I do not make things worse.

When he returns home, Amber releases him from his carrier. He sits there. After some minutes, he migrates to the litter box, where he plops down. Amber tries to goad him to do more, but he just wants to sit.

She diligently administers the two salves the vet gave us, one for his crusting, red, almost blind eyes and one for his prolapsed rectum. She then set to work on her paper for class, due in the morning along with her having to take a test.

I call out of work for tomorrow, because it is after midnight and because I need to be home with Jareth and her. I tell Amber that I am here for her if she needs me, but she says she only needs to work tonight, after petting the cat on the floor a while. She says I can go to sleep. Instead, I write most of this in one sitting, because that feels more pressing. I can't make many more goodbyes to Jareth. He is slipping from being able to appreciate them, if he has not already.

I love Jareth. What he has become is not Jareth as he was intended. It is better to have loved something short-lived and amazing than having felt indifference over something that lasts. I will always love this cat. I know that. He has marked me. He did from the moment I met him. It was the first time I fell in love with an animal on first sight.

Amber says, "It's so frustrating, you know?"

I say I do, because so much of this is frustrating, but I don't know what in particular she means.

"The masses are getting softer," Amber explains, meaning that she is finding painful hope in these. Maybe the treatment is working on some level. "But he is doing so poorly."

He would likely be dead before Elspar and steroids could effect a change -- if they could. This will be the niggling detail Amber considers when deciding tomorrow if he should be put to sleep. This is the regret she has found for self-flagellation. Maybe things could have been different had we intuited a month before his first symptom that he has large cell lymphoma. In this world, when we had only his increased reluctance toward food and some wheezing, we did everything possible the moment we could. There was nothing else anyone could have done that we didn't. It wasn't enough, but we have to reconcile ourselves with that.

Jareth walks back to a chair cushion, which he has drooled on and accidentally befouled. I go to comfort him, but he doesn't want comfort. He wants to be left alone. I tell him I am going to bed soon. If he is still alive and here in the morning, I will say goodbye again, but I love him, and I am sorrowful that such a good cat was given such a bad fate. He wheezes and won't look at me.

Our baby cat

I get up a few minutes after Amber's alarm, because I assume I won't be getting much more sleep.

I had a dream that a friend was describing how they once had a pig that a vet said needed to be put down. She didn't listen and, a year later, she told the vet that the pig was on a hiking tour of South America. When she left the room and asked her mother if everything my friend told me was true. Her mother informed me that my friend never had a pig.

Amber has to get to a test, and I didn't want to lose an hour I could spend with the kitten. He is on his high perch, face to the wall, and wants nothing to do with me unless it is helping him get back to the perch after using the litter box or failing to.

Amber tells me that Kit-Kat had his paws on Jareth, wanting to play, but he doesn't understand that Jareth can't. It further broke Amber's already fragile heart.

She wants to call the oncologist to double check before taking him in to her hospital. I don't know what the oncologist would say. I can't envision them telling her the side effects of one dose of Elspar and a few steroids is another pound lost and rectal prolapse. I know what her hospital is going to tell her: the same thing the emergency vet did.

I do go for a walk, because I am groggy, and I need to be physical for a while to get through this day. On my way home, I get a text from Amber, asking where I am. I text back, but she doesn't receive it. When I ascend our hill, I have a voicemail from her where she sounds like a haunted ghost, asking where I went and if I am coming home.

Assuming we put him down today, we have so much of him around us. Food dishes. Food itself, hundreds of dollars of it. Medicines. Yesterday, Amber had delivered a baby scale, so she could track Jareth's weight. That was Amber bargaining, as though we could find some way to unmake what happened to him.

I want to clean everything to have this done. I must leave it all, because it is condemning him before we have to. While he can still hear me, it is preparing for his departure. I want to gather up all his uneaten food dishes and clean them, but Amber isn't ready for this. She wants to be the one to do this.

I remove a couple pictures of Jareth from the rotation on our television. It will not be forever, but I will need some time before I can see him. I also put all the photos of him sick beyond beauty in a zip file so that they do not pop up when I am looking at my photos. I took them so that we had something to show doctors of his progress or lack of, but they serve no other purpose now than torture.

I don't know how Kit-Kat is going to react to this. I don't know when he will notice, or if he will. Amber asks if he is going to want to go outside again "to pick up more tramps."

It is a cruel mercy to have to consider euthanasia for a beloved friend, a member of one's family.

Amber asks if her mother can come to the appointment today, if that's okay.

I say, "The more, the merrier." Then I cry.

Amber says that she thinks his tumors are getting softer still, but it doesn't matter. He has a prolapsed rectum that cannot be repaired without killing him. He won't eat. He slams his head into walls and the exercise bike when trying to get back onto his cat tree. He spends most of his time facing the walls. He wouldn't survive long enough for the treatment to help him into remission. We won't be killing him. We will be making a prolonged and painful death shorter and more personal. We can do it with full knowledge, not pretending that this latest malady was surmountable.

I don't want this doubt in my head, that maybe we were too hasty. I want the confidence that this was the right and only option. It is the worst right thing I have personally done.

I look up at Jareth on his perch, his wheezing, the food stains against the wall, and think how I will not be able to watch Labyrinth for a long time. It will be too painful to hear his name.

"We should watch Labyrinth," Amber says.

"Of course, we should."

Bowie's Jareth is not our Jareth. We comment, laughing, through the movie. We cry a little. The movie ends, and we return to this time until we have to go to the animal hospital.

Amber thinks the fluid revived Jareth somewhat, but I don't see it, or subconsciously choose not to. He is not as dying as he was the night before, but how can that matter when we are taking him to the vet to be put to sleep?

We put him in his carrier and he begins loudly purring. He loves the animal hospital. There are so many people there who love him and give him Easy Cheese.

Amber says that, when she brings Jareth out of the house, he wants to play in the grass. I don't know why the hell we wouldn't let him, but we don't. We have to get to his appointment.

Amber says how she wants to feed him something, how she is sorry he won't eat. She jokes, or she doesn't, that we should stop on the way and buy him a rotisserie chicken.

I did not want not ask Amber what the process was for putting an animal to sleep. I was curious, but I did not want to know and I more didn't want to ask.

We enter the room. On the counter, I see a clear box of blue fluid. I know from Amber's stories that this is Blue Juice, the euthanization drug. This is the liquid that is going to stop my baby cat's life.

"Jareth gets two euthanasia blankets because he is special." I look at the dark blue fabric on the table. How strange that they have designated blankets for putting animals down. On death, the animals might release their bladders and bowels. It makes sense.

Amber tries to encourage Jareth into his beloved sweater. He cannot see well enough to understand what it is or his face hurts too much to put it on. I place it under his nose, as though he might recognize it by scent. He can no longer smell well, and I don't know that the sweater has a distinct smell to him other than his own.

The fact that she cannot put him in the sweater upsets Amber further. She doesn't want him going into this without his comfort. She hands me the sweater back. I drape it over top him.

"A little kitty cape," Amber says, and leaves it there.

Dr. G, a small woman who was the one to tell us Jareth had feline leukemia, says that we are doing the right thing. They have to say this. No one is going to tell suffering owners that they should reconsider, especially not with a cat who is suffering. No one wants to hurt us more.

She enlists Amber to help with the cat, in a way they would not ask a normal owner. I don't know if this is easier for Amber, but it is what she does.

Dr. G gives him the sedative and ask if we need some time with him. He falls asleep in moments, seeming the most peaceful he has been for weeks. More than once, he fell asleep on me and was this safe and tranquil. Amber rests his head on her wrist. I want to keep him this way until we can heal his cancer, a medical coma, but that is not survivable.

We stand beside Jareth, petting him as much as we can. I wonder if it is too late to stop this, though of course I won’t, and we shouldn't. These are the last moments I will have Jareth in my life.

I want to take care of Amber, but I don't know what to do or say, so I say nothing and hold her when I can.

A tech comes in and assists Dr. G in finding a femoral vein for the Blue Juice. I can't watch, so I hold Amber and stare at the top of her head, only hurting myself with a few glances.

I listen to his breathing. It is not quiet, but it is easier than it has been, when he was so stressed being alive. Then a breath doesn't come and continues not to come.

Dr. G puts the stethoscope to his body and pronounces that he is gone.

I look at the shape on the table and it isn't Jareth. I don't mean this in some attempt at poetry. I mean I look at it and my brain doesn't register that as Jareth anymore. That is a dead animal. I want to look around to find Jareth, in some sense. He was just here. I was petting him.

We did everything we could for him, including this.

I wanted Jareth to fully recover and live a long life cuddled with us. I wanted him to always be happy, and he would have been had he lived. But I also had come to the point where I wished to wake up to him dead. I wanted taken from my hands having to decide to have him euthanized. If he died, then the decision would have been made. I could mourn more purely, without the guilt of always wondering if I had made the right decision, if a little more medicine there or another week of his suffering would show improvement. But he wouldn't stop having lymphoma. He wouldn't have recovered. He would not have gotten better, but if he somehow did, his immune system would push him back to the brink of death again and again until we ended up in that little room in the animal hospital, saying our messy goodbyes to a cat who was ready to leave this life. It would always be too early for me, though less than a year is the exact definition of "too early."

Amber goes into another room for a moment, leaving us there. When she returns, she says, "They said they asked each other if there would be anyone in here with me. Otherwise, they were all going to be in here to hug me."

At home, Kit-Kat has no idea what is going on. I don't know that he will realize to miss Jareth. What is missing to him? He has our couch. He has food. He has us. He has a blanket to hump.

Amber puts Kit-Kat on her torso, but it is not a substitute. Kit-Kat doesn't want to be there, except that it places him a foot above the sofa. He is not light. He doesn't show his love this way. He is not, in short, our baby cat, just a cat who lives with us and loves us in a less fond way.

The world at once contains much less love for me, and I for it. If Jareth's love could have been quantified, I lost at least a quarter of the love for me that existed in the world, so vastly did he care.

All our dreams for him, deferred because of his leukemia, are lost forever. We will never have those hikes with him, that camping trip. We will never move him to a new apartment. We will never give him another Christmas sweater. All gone.

He lost his beautiful eyes first, covered in crusting, bleeding lymph nodes. After his diagnosis of feline leukemia, I petted him and told him how much I liked them. The physical contact then meant so much more to him than the wasted compliments.

Amber looks at our squeaking, energetic rats and tells them that this means she will have more time for them. They don't care. She had spent so much of herself trying to keep Jareth alive. She hates that there is some relief now that she won't have to do this. The rest of the pets aren't that difficult. They do not require spoon feeding. They don't need force feeding and having a piller stuck down their throat.

I confess that it was taxing me to imagine how Jareth's lymphoma was going to impact my near future. I was going to tell Amber not to come to the Pine Bush UFO Fair this year, so she could tend to the kitten. Now that doesn't have to happen.

I resented how difficult this was going to be, but I never resented Jareth. I just loved him because he knew only how to be loved.

I don't want people to tell me this is all going to be okay. I don't want likes on a status update. And I don’t want people asking after my kitten's health, because he no longer has health. He no longer has anything. What remains of him will be ashes in an urn on my wall.

I want nothing to do with anyone but Amber right now. I do not want to deal with the pity of others. I want to sit home and cry until my tears begin to balance me, until the ballast of them lessens enough that I can float from here. What weight would it take of tears? 5.8 pounds or 8.5?

It is impossible. I am promised to a convention this weekend, to work sound for Ken, though I don't know what working sound entails. This is a professional obligation that would be good for me. I would be excited for it in other circumstances.

Amber's mother texts her that she just woke from a dream in which Jareth was a pirate captain and he saved us all. Amber breaks down crying at this.

I do not want to cook. We decide on Chinese food.

My fortune cookie reads "Today is a perfect day to give that special person a gift."

Amber's reads "Think about your own mistakes rather than blame on other's faults," which brings back her tears.

I throw the fortunes, but they only flutter to land a foot away.

Amber says around eight that she has been lazy today and wants to go for a walk, but it is too late. The other option, as I see it, is that we keep watching YouTube videos to avoid what we are feeling.

I say we should walk.

I tell Amber that I had never been in the room while an animal was euthanized. It is not commonplace to Amber, but it is a part of her job.

"Even when we had Quest put down, Emily told me that I didn't have to be in there. It had started with her and it could end with her." I felt like a coward then. I couldn't engage with the end of her father’s life, then I let Quest leave this world without me by his side.

"I wish I had known this was your first euthanasia. Then the doctor would have explained what was going on."

"It was evident what was going on."

"No," says Amber, "but she could have talked us through it, told you that they sometimes make noise or lose bowel control, and that this is normal. They aren't hurting."

I wouldn't have wanted this. I knew what was happening.

I ask Amber if she is going to be okay returning to work.

"What do you mean?"

"If we had to take Jareth to my job to have that done, I would want to set fire to the building. I couldn't work there anymore."

It isn't the same for Amber, because she has taken other pets there to be euthanized over the years, before we met. It isn't the same because, a few times, she has participated in euthanizing animals. Still, she wants them to have reconciled the controlled substances before she has to work again so she doesn't have to record the dose that killed Jareth.

We pass by Mercato, and our friend-cat Merky runs out to meet us. I like to imagine she knew we were sad, but she only knows that we like her enough to pet her. She follows us for a while, until we yell at her to get out of the way of an approaching car. Amber talks about renting one of these apartments so she could seduce Merky inside. I tell her that it wouldn't take all that. I could pick Merky up and carry her home, though it is just talk. We are not going to steal Merky from her domain because we feel a vacancy.

I start the shower after our walk. The water cleans away some diarrhea Jareth had left in the shower. I feel a distant sadness that, even though it is effluence, it was a part of my life with Jareth that has washed away. There will be many more times this will happen.

I shower and then go to bed. Amber is still in the shower, the water running so that I hope she cannot hear my wails as this day pours out of me. I flail in the bed, like a child throwing a tantrum. I sob as I could not all day.

After the shower, Amber comes in and tells me that none of that sounded like sleeping.

It is better to have had Jareth's love. My life won't be the same having known him, having for once fallen in love with an animal, having been chosen for his love. I told him I would always love him, and I know that is true. Jareth is a part of me, one of the best parts.

Soon in Xenology: Social Justice Wiccans.

last watched: American Gods
reading: Candy Girl
listening: Damien Rice