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Epitaph
for a Friendship
by
Laura A. Moretti
Mouser died today. It had been 13 years since the six-week-old
kitten had come into my life (we called her Mouser to make
Dad happy about controlling the mice in the barn). And I think
she wanted to live up to her name as well; she was an aggressive
mousing cat — except ...well... except she didn’t
seem to know a mouse from a dog. And it was dogs she chased
from the house, and it was dogs she lay in ambush for in the
front yard and chased down the street with me running after
her, screaming for their lives.
“You’ve
got to do something about that cat,” Mom would warn me.
“She’s terrorizing the neighborhood.”
But
I didn’t do anything about that cat, and not because
I wouldn’t, but because I couldn’t. Mouser made
it clear from the beginning that I belonged to her. Later,
when my car was stolen along with my house keys, and the locksmith,
hired by the apartment manager, arrived to change the door
locks, I got an urgent call at work. “You’re going
to have to come down here after all, ma’am,” he
said kindly. “Your cat won’t let me in the apartment.”
But
as determined as she was at voicing her opinion, she was equally
affectionate — with me, that is, her possession. I’d
lie on the sofa, tap the center of my chest, and say, “Kiss?
Kiss?” and she would oblige, leap onto my chest, press
her forehead against my lips and take as many kisses as a
cat could stand.
She
was also an extremely intelligent cat. Traditional cat games
were out of the question. If you wanted to play with Mouser,
you had to play games by rules you learned as you went along.
“You throw the ping-pong ball to me,” she would
say, “and I’ll lie here comfortably and hit it back
to you. I’m not moving, so if I miss it, YOU fetch it.”
Mouser
preferred, you see, to spend her waking hours eating. When
she failed to remind me to feed her, I’d sneak off to
work or to sleep, hoping she’d never remember —
because Mouser could stand to lose a few pounds. One night,
after forgetting a meal, I was awakened by a horrible cat
cry at bedside. I snapped on the night lamp and leaned over
the mattress. Mouser was sitting there, blinking up at me
with that, “You thought I’d forget again, didn’t
you?” expression while a small can of cat food —
which apparently she had carried in from the kitchen —
sat nestled on the carpet between her front paws.
I
laugh about that to this day — but in the split second
of that memory, I hear again the eternal silence on the phone
line, the vet’s voice in my ear, patient, waiting, hollow
— like the way my heart felt then: “Do you think
we should let her go?” And I could see Mouser, in my
mind’s eye, lying there on that exam table with memories
that had spanned 13 years.
The
vet was telling me what I had feared most: Mouser would be
dead within the week. Both kidneys and her liver had been
consumed by cancer. And I had the power at that very moment,
and would never have it again, to bring her out of the anesthesia,
to give us one more week, or one more day, or even one more
moment, to say goodbye again. If she left me, my heart would
break; I couldn’t bear the pain that hinted at its inevitability:
my life would never be the same without her; she had been
my best friend since I was a young girl.
But
I realized, in those long-drawn out minutes on the phone,
in my hesitation, that it was my life I was fighting for,
not hers — and would she ever forgive me for that? I
remembered suddenly the night before Mouser died. We were
lying together on the cool kitchen floor. There was a dying
light in her gaze that was fixed on the wall beyond me. I
don’t think I’d realized, even after her lengthy
illness, just how sick she was until that night. She had lost
so much weight she was merely a skeleton, and she hadn’t
eaten in days. I couldn’t force one more pill down her
throat; I wept with guilt when she fought me — as if
she wanted to die and I wouldn’t let her.
And I was weeping that night, the night before she died, lying
on the floor with her, asking her with a grief-filled anguish
in the hope she would understand my question: What should
I do, Mouser? What do you want me to do in the morning when
you go on the table for exploratory surgery, when I may be
told that your condition is terminal? Do you want me to let
you go?
I
cried because only Mouser knew what Mouser wanted.
As we lay there and I asked these questions silently, only
my crying audible, a flash of light came into Mouser’s
dying eyes. She turned her head in my direction and met my
gaze. For a long minute that I had wished would be an eternity,
she looked at me, almost through me; my eyes filled with tears
and hers with an inexplicable smile. What? I begged her silently.
Do you have the answer? She was only a few inches from my
face; she pressed her forehead to my lips and asked me for
a kiss.
“Do
what it is best for me,” I believe she said. “I
accept life better than you can; after all these long, full
years, I accept death as well. In the end, doing what’s
best for me will bring peace to both our lives.” So I
did that next day what I believed Mouser had asked for in
her kiss. The kiss goodbye. “Yes,” I finally answered
the doctor. “Let her go.”
If
Mouser’s death has taught me anything, I think it would
have to be this: It is not an intangible number that we are
removing from our midst when we kill the millions of dogs
and cats every year in animal shelters across the country.
It isn’t a single ID number or a solitary statistic that
dies when the light in a single dog’s or cat’s eyes
dies. When we kill a million dogs and cats, we’re killing
a million lives who could touch us and heal us and bring us
a kind of joy and warmth and peace in ways our fellow humans
cannot. We’re robbing a million beings of a million rays
of sunlight, a million memories, a million heartbeats, a million
lights of life.
We’re
killing a million Mousers.
That
shelter kitten is waiting for you. Go. Life has more to offer
than death.
Laura
A. Moretti is now owned by Black, a purebred Manx, who gave
her back her sense of humor.
Top
of Page
Ballad
of the Homeless
Life
on the streets wasn’t so hot;
We were never long in one spot.
Feeling bad, no shelter, no food;
By now I guess you get the mood.
Then, one day a kind person came along;
This one could see what was wrong.
Now, we’re here and life’s okay;
But we’d rather a home without further delay.
Top
of Page
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Ballad
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The
Railroad Tracks by Marion Churchill
How
Didn't They Know? by Kristen Sharer
Unseen
They Suffer, Unheard They Cry by Marion Churchill
Epitaph
for a Friendship by Laura Moretti
Cry
From a Lonely Dog by Unknown Author |
