Today we said goodbye to Ivan. After four years with us, his little body was not holding up. Kidney disease and FIV was too much.
Ivan began with a notion Eric had. We had just moved in together, and to my surprise, my less-than-animal-loving partner began surfing the Internet for cats. Craigslist. Local shelters. I don’t recall requesting a cat, but if Eric told you the story he might say that I talked about it constantly. I think he felt it was something he was doing for me. He would flip through shots of different cats and show them to me, explaining what he liked about them and what he didn’t.
Finally one day we went to a local no-kill shelter where they had special needs cats. We decided in advance that we would adopt an FIV+ cat because we could- because it seemed right. We went together into the FIV+ cat rooms and I hung back while Eric began to interact with different cats. I think Ivan won him over instantly.
We used to say that Ivan was “forever a shelter cat looking for a new home,” wooing friends and visitors by rolling over onto his back, reminiscent of an otter, with his two paws close to his chest and his full stomach exposed for petting. When friends would leave, he would go off into another room, aloof as usual. This is how Eric found Ivan and Ivan found Eric.
Ivan was always Eric’s cat. Eric would walk around the house holding Ivan like an infant and talk to him. I think Ivan softened Eric up. Prior to bringing Ivan home, Eric had little patience for pets and rarely engaged them. Ivan was different – I think they had an understanding. Ivan seemed to be acutely aware of Eric’s tidiness and need for space. Perhaps shared the same tendency. Ivan would sit neatly composed in his bed and seek attention only when he specifically wanted to be pet. Most of the time (with the exception of guests), Ivan was quiet, composed, and private.
Ivan was the first member of our family. In many ways, watching Eric with Ivan endeared me more to Eric - I was always so touched by their relationship. When Ivan began getting really sick, it was Eric who was brave enough to begin discussions of the “right” time to let Ivan go.
Life is fragile, as cliché as it is to say. We spend so much time tending to it, cultivating it, nurturing it, and managing it. It is profound how we perpetually choose it, day after day, when it requires so much care. But we do. We create life - so carelessly and so deliberately at once - but we protect it fiercely all the same for its promise of meaning, companionship, of love.
Choosing to end life is so painful because it is also choosing death, and death is blunt, unchanging, and resolute. It is a decision you can’t afford to regret because there is no way to assuage it, to reclaim it. There are so many ways we deny death or are complacent and passive actors in its process. We hold onto our loved ones and companions when they suffer, we ignore its signs when we see them, we choose not to help, not to intervene, not to bother with death. But to opt into it, and to do so for another being, is something else entirely.
I was resistant to talking about letting Ivan go. I fussed over the boundaries of suffering. If he is animated, if he can respond, if he has moments of play then it can’t possibly be time for death. But as Ivan became more ill, despite these moments, it was clear a decision had to be made lest we allow our cat to suffer and waste away. I think we just needed permission to let him go.
For the past two days we each had our moments with Ivan. I spent time grooming and cleaning him – his ears, his patchy fur, and his mouth full of sores. Eric talked to him, he held him. Ivan slept with us this morning for the first time in over a month, as he always did, nestled between our legs.
When I said goodbye in our home and thanked him for his life and time with us, it was clear he knew what was going on and he hid from me. At the vet he resisted leaving his carrier (which is not typical for him), and settled down quietly on the exam table (also not typical), as we talked to him and said our goodbyes. Eric and I wept as they gave him first the anesthetic and then the overdose that stopped his heart. It was quick and he went limp almost immediately. Uncompromising, finite.
We stayed there with his body, petting him, talking to him Рso much his little self and so far gone at once. Again clich̩, but there is no other way to describe the vacuous presence of something loved in death.
I wanted to take his little body with us – to bathe him and clean him and bury him ourselves. But our culture is not set up to honor death. We leave those tasks to other who consider, tend to it, and dispose of it for us.
Instead we purchased a little plant, mangy and pointy like Ivan, to plant in the place where he began to spend his last days outside. We look forward to watering it and feeding it and to thanking our little furry friend for joining and nurturing the first few years of our lives together.
