A Hard Goodbye

About 12 years ago I went over to my mom's acreage and came home with two freshly weaned kittens, which I promptly named Sparty and Athene.

Sparty was the bigger and more athletic of the two brothers, though you wouldn't know it by how he behaved. He was black and white and anxious all over, never a fan of new places or people.

Unlike his brother, who is shameless about demanding the attention he clearly feels entitled to, Sparty took the more passive approach. Which is not to say that he didn't seek out head pets and belly rubs, just that he would be more subtle about it. His preferred tactic was planting himself in the exact spot that you could see him staring at you out of the corner of your eye, patiently waiting for you to notice him.

He was quiet too. Where his brother is all too happy to loudly let you know what he thinks, Sparty's vocalizations were so few and far between that it was easy to forget that he could meow at all. The only times I ever heard anything out of him was when he was in a new place or when I had overly delayed filling his food bowl.

As the keen-eyed have probably deduced by my use of past tense, Sparty is no longer with us. Shortly after the New Year he started struggling to breathe. He was put on various medications, trying to diagnose the problem through process of elimination. While he didn't seem to be getting any better, he didn't seem to be getting worse either. Until last Tuesday that is, when he took a sudden downturn.

One frantic drive to the animal hospital in Ames later, we had a better idea of what was wrong, sadly paired with the knowledge that it was probably too late to do anything about it.

I am no stranger to losing loved ones. I've attended more funerals of relatives and friends than most people my age. I was young when I had to learn to accept death as the inevitable result of life.

This reality is especially applicable to pet owners. Sparty is not the first pet I've lost. I knew when I got him and his brother that it was likely I would see the end of their lives. And though Sparty's end came sooner than expected and faster than I'd like, it was an eventuality I'd been preparing myself for in the back of my mind over the last several weeks.

What I wasn't prepared for were the choices I had to make.

All of my previous cats, whether indoor or outdoor, have always passed without my involvement, vanishing in the night to never be seen alive again.

With Sparty, I had to be an active participant.

I had to weigh his options, to determine if the guaranteed trauma of medical intervention was worth the low chance of survival. I had to consider that even a best case scenario would only be delaying the inevitable by a few months before it all happened again, and recalculate the formula of time and quality of life he could expect.

And, of course, I had to feel the sickening guilt of factoring expense into the equation.

I am, in most things, a pragmatist. I have always found value in the understanding that sometimes the best option is just the least bad one. However, that cold logic provided little comfort last week as I forced myself to sign the paper that would authorize the final action.

It's one thing to measure quality of life in terms of months and years. It's another thing to measure it in terms of seconds and minutes. To pick out exactly which breath would be his last.

With Sparty curled in my lap, mildly sedated and half-heartedly trying to move his head away from his oxygen funnel, I struggled to find that moment. Just 15 more minutes. Just ten more minutes. Just five more minutes. A half dozen times I picked up the pen and moved to sign my name to the paper, only to have my hand involuntarily stop before touching the page.

I questioned whether my hesitation was for Sparty's benefit or my own. Was I extending every precious moment of his remaining life or just prolonging his discomfort to delay my own pain?

I couldn't tell you if it was resolve or resignation that finally got me to sign the paperwork and press the call button for the doctor to come in. I can tell you that it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

The next 24 hours were a bit of a blur, by design. Knowing that any attempt to sleep would be thwarted by my brain second guessing every decision I'd made in the last six weeks, I opted to avoid that by thrusting myself into video games, exercise, and work.

I don't know if that's particularly healthy, either mentally or physically, but I've found that it's a lot easier to process grief once you are a day or so removed.

In my experience, losing a loved one is like being thrust into a new reality. The people in our lives are the touchstones we use to define our world. Remove one and your world suddenly changes. It takes time to get used to the new world you now live in.

I lived with Sparty for 12 years. I'm still getting used to living without him. Used to a world where he's not here to beg for tortilla chips or sleep at the end of my bed.

Meanwhile, life goes on. It feels awfully rude of the world to just keep moving while you grieve, but that's what it does. The days continue to pass, the things you did before still need to be done after, and you eventually realize that your new world isn't so different after all.

It just takes time.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is glad to have this column as part of that process.