ACCOZZAGLIA

As a kitten, September 1989

For all the times I’ve heard about others dying, or relatives dying, of my childhood dog, Sam, dying, or watching shows about death on television, there simply was no way for me to understand.

The other night, I knelt before someone who had been my companion for exactly half of my lifetime. I knelt, my head on the floor, gazing intimately and intensely at the crystal blue-green eyes that had been as familiar as my own fiery hazel irises. In her final minute, I watched her pupils constrict tightly, then release.

For a moment, she continued to look at me, even after she completed her last breath. Then, after I spoke to her — tenderly, gently, impassioned, devotedly — her pupils dilated to an extent which I’d never before seen. I found myself locked deeply in an inky blackness which couldn’t have responded to me, because there was no longer anyone there.

At 3:07am, on Saturday morning, the 21st of May 2005, I carefully cupped Smug’s gentle head in my left hand and held her paws in my right as she died. She was 15 years, 11 months and 26 days old. In feline years, she lived to be 79.

* * *

Since Friday morning at 3:11am, Smug’s terminal condition had started to deteriorate. Following Monday’s fluid extraction procedure at the vet, which yielded about 200mL of fluid from inside her ribcage, she had been able to breathe with far less effort than the weekend previous when I was sensing that she could die at any moment.

For weeks, her energy level had retreated dramatically, and her ability to eat diminished. I think it started in March, though I was told later by the vet, Dr. Coon, that the oncological time bomb inside her had probably been growing for years. It was, in her words, “encoded in her DNA from birth”, a geriatric disease which was inevitable. While it was never confirmed, she and the other vet, Dr. Kissinger, both suspected it was lymphoma. In all likelihood, based on Smug’s symptoms, the cancer had begun to metastasize to her liver and possibly to both her lungs and her kidneys.

Her first vet visit, when the diagnosis was made, was April 19th. On that afternoon, my reality changed; no longer was I going to have her with me for the seemingly indefinite future. At that moment, I became aware that each day thereafter was being offered as a special blessing, a gift, to share time with the creature who had been by my side through some of my most terrible, difficult and harrowing moments.

* * *

She came into my life one afternoon in August 1989, just as grade 11 was beginning for me. I knew for a day or two prior that my grandmother was getting a fourth cat for our house. Since my arrival a couple of weeks before as the fourth person living in her household, it made sense that I have a cat, too.

When I left her house in 1992, just after she transferred ownership to my uncle, who had never left home after he turned 20 some 14 years previous, I took Smug with me, naturally. My uncle, a vengeful man — taught by the same father who showed my ex-mother what abuse and hate were — engineered a scheme to blackmail my cousin in exchange for extra time to live in his newly-acquired house. The price was that my cousin would have to turn on me by kidnapping Smug from my apartment and having my uncle hold her hostage.

My cousin succeeded. A few hours after I’d moved into my first apartment at age 18, he was able to grab Smug and take her with him as my friend and I were looking elsewhere. The getaway car, driven by my uncle, took Smug away from me.

For the next six weeks, I implored my grandmother, newly wed to her high school sweetheart after being apart from him for fifty years, to help her return Smug. I remember one night at her new husband’s house where the two of them were sitting at a table and hand-shelling a huge bag of pecans. I sat there and cried, trying to compel her to intervene.

One afternoon, while at work, she called me on the phone and said that she would be driving up to to the parking lot to hand Smug over to me. It felt like a deep-cover covert mission: she drove up aside my car, got out, handed me a corrugated cardboard pet carrier, a can of Iams cat food and some other accessories, and then, with a tense hug, she got in her car and left.

Smug moved once again into my apartment, this time to stay with me for the next 13 years. She moved with me to Austin, where I lived at three different addresses over three years. She stayed by my side in Rochester, NY, where I also lived in three places over 17 months. She came with me to Minneapolis, living briefly with me in a residence hotel while my company completed my relocation. Five years later, after sharing the same apartment, she came with me to Everett, Washington, before moving with me to Seattle in 2003.

Seattle is where she died. It was nearly sixteen years after her birth in Houston, on 17 June 1989. That was on a Saturday. She died on a Saturday.

* * *

For the last four weeks since her diagnosis, Case and I had been hand-feeding Smug with an oversized syringe filled with a high-calorie prescription canned food and giving her daily subcutaneous injections of Normosol, which were electrolytes from an IV bag.

He held Smug and did his part to keep her calm while I’d stick a 16-gauge needle into the loose nape of skin just behind her shoulder blades, and administering 150-200mL of fluid. This was necessary, because she had stopped drinking water and was dehydrating badly when I brought her to the vet the first time. I also dispensed her food, patiently letting her eat and swallow, catching the portions in my hand which didn’t stay in her mouth and feeding those paste-like morsels through the syringe last.

I also gave her medicine. Each day during the first couple of weeks, I gave her an antibiotic to clear up a kidney infection. I also gave her, up until last Thursday, Prednisone for reducing the swelling inside her abdomen. In the last couple of weeks, I also gave her Lactulose, a liquid oral laxative to help with her failing gastrointestinal system. I was told by Dr. Kissinger that Lactulose was flavoured like tuna. Smug took to it quite nicely, chewing eagerly on this medicated liquid as I fed it to her with a syringe.

Per vet’s orders, this was the hospice care I gave Smug each day. I added many hours of massages and brushing each day. In her last three weeks, I bathed her twice, once as recently as her final Monday, shortly after returning from what would be her last visit to the vet.

* * *

And I made the most of the remaining time as I knew how. On the Sunday before she died, Case and I brought Smug to a nearby urban park containing about an uninterrupted acre of lush, green grass. Case brought along a digital video camera for shooting nearly an hour of footage of Smug — looking about her, getting up, walking a few feet hither and thither, and meowing with a returned sense of curiosity.

But things went unexpectedly while we were filming her.

Her breathing inexplicably improved to the point of deceptively seeming like she wasn’t really terminally ill. She chewed on some grass, much like she did when she was a much younger cat. At one point, she made our eyes bug out when she raised up on her hind legs to swat at a mosquito. It had literally been years since I’d seen her stand upright like that. Her vivacity in this visit revived with verve – given her opportunity to explore these grand, new surroundings. For her, she was again a kitten, just as she was when I took a picture of her in my grandmother’s back yard when she was barely three months old.

Six days before her passing, 15 May 2005

And while she lounged in the grass, a larger-sized dog ran over to where we were. The dog, named Rufus, spent a long few seconds before Smug, who was calmly lounging in the grass. They stared at one another for several seconds, face to face with one another. And yet, neither did the dog growl nor did Smug hiss. Each expressed mutual curiosity in the other creature. It was peaceful, even cinematic. All of this, thankfully, was captured for posterity.

Once we brought her home, however, her entire demeanour returned to the belaboured state of struggling to breathe, so much so that I was worried she was going to die from the inability to inhale oxygen. She fought for each breath with all her might, opening her mouth wide and trying to gulp whatever she could. Like the night before during feeding, she fell on her side just after making this horrific, indescribably unreal sound of her trying to purge something that wasn’t there. It shredded my heart to hear it. I stayed with her in both instances until she managed to sit up again.

And in both moments, I was gravely anticipating her to die then and there.

So Monday I returned her to the vet. Dr. Kissinger briefly broached the topic of euthanasia, but switched the topic when she learned that a previously recommended procedure to relieve pressure on her lungs — puncturing her ribcage to extract fluids accumulated by cancerous growth — hadn’t been performed yet. Dr. Kissinger took her back to the operating theatre to shave patches on either side of her chest for the procedure.

Around 45 minutes later, I was invited back to where they had her. Smug was in front of an oxygen feed and was showing a little more strength. Her breathing was still haggard, but far less strained. The anti-inflammatory, diuretic and muscle relaxation injections they’d given her were helping on those respective fronts, and they cleared her to return home with us.

* * *

She had peed on herself a bit earlier, so when I got home, I gave her a bath. I tenderly cleaned her body while she rested docilely in two inches of warm water. She wasn’t putting up a struggle to get out like she’d always done before. She just looked on, eager to get it over with.

About a hour later, after I’d finished drying her with my hair dryer, she relaxed considerably, even to the point of purring when I tended to her comfort.

Looking back, I now know this last week was one of closure, and instinctively, I think both Smug and I were quietly aware of this. It just wasn’t something I wanted to think about, since it was each passing moment I was more interested to explore.

This week of closure held some beautiful surprises.

For instance, each time I laid down on the sofa bed where Smug also spent most of her time, she would cozy up closely to me, resting her head and placing her paw atop my forearm. I was quietly stunned by this, because for all the times I wanted her to do something like this, she’d ordinarily have no part in spending much time that close to me before getting either bored, impatient or annoyed with it.

Each night, Smug went to sleep with me, and she slept literally by my side. Aside from using the litter box and trying to nibble at dry food with her grinding, TMJ-addled jaw, she’d return to my side, looking at me when I’d shift around.

On Thursday she even started to drink water again, much to my stunned amazement. It’d been well over a month since I’d seen her do this. It deceptively appeared like Smug was recovering enough for what might have been a longer stretch of good days, an Indian summer of sorts.

Throughout the week, I’d moved where I was working, from my desk to the sofa bed, to be beside her. I found myself kissing her new-found bare spots on her sides where she had been shaved. Each carried a sense of being both undignified and naked, yet being an artifact of a battle not yet ended. Regardless, Smug was nonplussed by her exposed skin.

Frequently I pulled out her Hartz brush, which I must have bought for her in the early to mid 1990s, to brush her body in general. She loved the brush. Throughout her life, Smug never felt moved much by kitty toys, but put her in front of any brush, and she’d go hog-wild. “Want some brush?” always made her perk up. She especially loved having the brush rubbed against her whiskers and cheeks. Even in her sickest moments, she’d respond heartily to the brush.

I gave her full-body massages the best I knew how. Despite having little energy to move around, she purred contentedly, her breathing remarkably relaxed. I let her drink milk from my cereal bowl each morning — something which I largely had not allowed her to do for digestive and health reasons. And as always her style had been, whenever I emoted a kissing sound before her face, she’d crane her neck out to eagerly lick my nose.

* * *

When I went to bed Thursday night, she found a place between my flank and arm, placing her head once again on my forearm and placing her paw there, as well. She was quiet, seemingly comfortable, and happily in the company of this strange biped who had been her companion at every step, changing in all these unique ways, while she held steadfast just being Smug.

A few hours later, at 3:11a Friday morning, I woke up to her making the kind of choking sound one makes when they accidentally inhale water they’re trying to drink. Her breathing had returned to laboured and strained, and every other respiration was accompanied by this choke-cough. When I woke to this sound, she was at the foot of the bed. I brought her back to my side, massaging her deeply and vigourously, though with tremendous care. After fifteen or so minutes, her choking subsided and her breathing, while not as quiet as when I went to bed, had stabilized somewhat.

The next morning, she was nowhere to be found. Then I learned she was in the adjacent room. My worry was that she had done what living creatures do when sense that it’s time to die: find an isolated place to die alone.

After spending the day consulting with close friends about the internal struggle I was facing — that of allowing myself to consider inducing Smug’s death by euthanasia — I arrived at the difficult conclusion to look for a vet to assist with this. I gingerly allowed the idea finally after some very sobering, sage points were made to me by Joan. But I wanted to have it done at home, so Smug could die in a familiar, safe setting — not an alien, clinical environment.

Case and I were working on things late into the night on Friday. All day throughout, while I worked on a client project, I watched Smug struggle harder and harder to breathe. Periodically I heard her meow at me, which seemed to say how much she wasn’t enjoying this.

By midday, the Lactulose, accumulated over several days, enabled her to have a significant bowel movement. I had hoped this would remove abdominal pressure from the cancerous growth and helping her to breathe a little more easily, but this did not happen.

* * *

Around midnight, I realized that I’d spent much of the last hour or two sitting at my desk and doing nothing more than looking over at Smug — instead of getting work stuff done — and maintaining this troubled, but pensive expression on my face. My gut was tied in knots as I struggled with the decision to end her life sometime during the weekend.

Just after midnight, Smug lost control of her bladder on the sofa cover. I gently brought her to the carpeted floor while I stripped the sofa and other coverings to take downstairs to the laundry room. It was clear that she wasn’t in much shape to go through the daily food-hydration-medicine ritual we’d come to know.

Finally, I arrived at just giving her the subq infusion of electrolytic fluid and administering the Lactulose while leaving out the Prednisone pill and her prescription food. I was thinking in terms of weaning her from food — her bowl still had both dry and wet solid food — while keeping her hydrated in what I thought would be her final couple of days. The risk of choking her with the Prednisone pill felt too great, and I didn’t want to risk it.

At 2:50a, just after finishing an enjoyably distracting conversation discussing numismatics on IRC, I stepped away to set up the subq bag in the centre of the living room, just as I’d done every day since April. I had a 3mL syringe of Lactulose readied.

Around 2:54a, Case placed Smug between his kneeled legs, just as he always did, her facing him while I coyly and gently inserted the needle, just left of the middle of the nape of loose skin, aft of her shoulders. I reduced the amount from 150mL to just 100mL.

While inserting the needle each night, Case would pet her head tenderly while keeping his other hand atop her rear end, while I would gently massage around the area I inserted the needle, to disguise any prick coming from the needle. I doubt that she felt it much, given how few nerves are in that area of skin.

The subq completed quickly and without incident by 2:57a. During subq, Case and I spoke aloud about finding a vet referral from someone he knew who used to perform home euthanasia for dying pets. I said to him that I’d agree to it as long as I was the one to administer the injections.

By 2:59a, I began to feed her the Lactulose. As soon as she tasted the first trickle, she began to eagerly chew at the liquid as I squeezed it out in stages, making sure none of the sticky stuff dribbled onto her chin.

At 3:00a, I squirted the last 1/2mL into her mouth. She kept chewing for a moment longer, and then stopped as suddenly, she began to struggle for air in a way not seen since the day before she went to the vet for fluid removal.

By 3:01a, Smug could no longer sit up. At first, she made a move to lie down on her stomach, craning out her neck to breathe. With each furious inhalation attempt, Smug opened her mouth and gulped at whatever she could take in. She started the precursor to the strange, indescribable sound of rejecting whatever she thought was in her esophagus, much like the three times the weekend prior when I thought she was going to die.

I’m not really sure what I said to Case at this point. It might have been something like, “This isn’t looking good,” or perhaps, “Did I inject the last of the Lactulose too fast?” By this point, I’d shifted my seat from cross-legged to kneeled. Smug, meanwhile, was lying on her right side, legs loosely extended aside her, pointing roughly in the direction of where I was sitting.

It must have been well into 3:02a at this point. Just as during the few times she’d reached this troubling a place the weekend prior, I began to quietly sob, tears gushing forth from my eyes and snot falling from my nose while I retained a silent composure, doing everything I could from breaking into uncontrollable crying. I pried off my glasses and placed them on the sofa’s edge, just above where Smug was straining. And losing.

Around 3:03a, Smug momentarily gathered a surge of energy. She got up onto her feet and tried to make a break away from myself and Case, turning around and trying to head for the foyer. Her motivation for this was primal, but she didn’t have the strength to escape from us.

When Smug made this unexpected flight attempt, something inside me snapped into sharp clarity: “Smug is trying to flee. She is running to die, to face this on her own.”

“Case, hold her, keep her here!” I knew.

By 3:04a, Case and I had returned her to the position she had assumed before her thwarted escape. My face was soaked with tears and snot, but I had not broken into heaving sobs. Still kneeling, but bringing my legs more to the right of me while partially sitting on my left hip, I brought my head to the ground, no more than 4 inches from her eyes.

At 3:05a, Cris came into the room, having heard the activity. I think she might have asked, “Is Smug okay? Is she dying?” I really don’t know. My attention was undivided toward Smug. My left hand cradled her head, thumb delicately stroking her left ear and crown. My right hand was holding her front paws. The angle at which my head rested on the floor redirected a string of snot in front of my left eye.

“Stay with me, girl. Baby, stay with me,” I cooed to her.

My eyes remained fiercely locked on hers. Smug showed a look of abject, horrid fear in her expression. Or perhaps this is my projecting human emotion onto non-human beings. I don’t know, and it isn’t really important.

Her pupils constricted tightly. It was 3:06a. They didn’t constrict the way they would in bright sunlight. They weren’t slits. Rather, they were the shape of tiny black lemons, plenty of her rich, blue-green irises revealed above and below her pupils.

My attention was so focussed on her eyes that I hadn’t noticed her respiration stopping. Cris I think said, “She stopped breathing!” Case was still holding Smug from behind, ever so gently.

As I write, the song “Ah Leah!” by Donnie Iris is playing, quite coincidentally, on iTunes Party Shuffle. When I met Smug in my grandmother’s closet, I named her Leah. It was inspired by a girl whom I had held a quiet crush the year before in my prior high school. My cousin, uncle and grandmother teased me for the name choice. I felt it was perfect for her gorgeous, then green-blue eyes, but my family couldn’t agree less.

Leah became Smudge Face to the family, due to her telltale brown spot smeared on and around her nose. It was a birthmark, just as the two brown spots interrupting her otherwise perfectly while front legs were. Those spots on her limbs, when she kept her legs together, formed a perfect circle as seen from above. Apart, they were their own circles on the inside of each leg. This was another birthmark, a product of how she gestated in her mother’s womb in May and June of 1989.

I never knew how many siblings she had from the litter which yielded her; I don’t even know if any are alive still. I am fairly certain, however, that none lived in as many places as she did — nor met as wide a panoply of people as she had, melting each heart along the way and somehow compelling self-avowed cat haters to warm to her because she didn’t really act like a cat.

Smudge Face became Smudge. Then her name mutated to Smug. Then to Mug. Then to Muggie — although briefly, before I stepped in and insisted that my family stick with a consistent name to keep her from having a feline identity crisis.

Her eyes had focussed on mine. The constricted pupils spoke fear, but also acknowledged that her life caregiver, her mother, her lifetime anchor of safety, was with her.

It was 3:07a.

When I heard Cris say something about Smug not breathing, I noticed it too. Rapidly, I brought my ear to her chest. I heard circulation and a slowing, weakening heartbeat, but no respiration.

I returned to my head to its original spot, this time an inch closer. Smug had stopped moving, but she remained responsive, her eyes relaxing a little, still focussing on me as well as she could at such close proximity.

Every voice inside my head pleaded, “Tell her. Talk to her.”

My sob burst into crying as I spoke to her:

“Oh honey, I love you so much. You did good. You did so good. Thank you, thank you for being in my life, baby. Goodbye.”

Her pupils relaxed to dilation, plateauing there for a moment. Her body twitched three times over several seconds, perhaps a half minute. Cris, I think, naïvely believed that Smug was reviving herself back to life.

Then her dilated pupils expanded, her expression falling blank. Smug was no longer responsive. Her body relaxed, every muscle disengaging, the hairs on her tail locked in a partially raised position.

As this sentence is typed, it is 3:07a on Monday morning, exactly two days after her passing.

Smug was dead.

My crying escalated into grievous, wretched, heaving sobs. “Oh baby, it’s over.”

I picked up her body to bring to my bosom. It was 3:08a. In that passage just seconds before, every bone in her body seemingly had been replaced with soft cartilage. Her body was perfectly limp, soft, mushy, passive, her nearly black eyes remaining open, maw also slack-jawed and open.

I bawled the way a mother cries for her just-dead child; my girl was gone forever, her power now switched off.

Witnessing a death of a loved one for the first time, I came to terms with the transitional moment this way: everyone has a light switch, and everyone is born with it switched on. It can only be turned off once, and once the switch is flipped, there is simply no going back.

This is how I rationalize it, how I am electing to interpret it, how I’m getting my mind to wrap around this impossibly enigmatic life passage.

Between heaving sobs, I said to Case, “Get me the phone.” He handed me the receiver, and I phoned Joan.

She sleepily answered, formally speaking her first name and surname. It was 6:13a where she was.

“It’s me. She’s gone.”

Between her and Avni, whom I phoned immediately after phoning Joan, I held Smug’s lifeless vessel in my cradled arms, crying with every cell in my body. Somewhere, amidst this typhoon of pain, lament and relief, a voice inside me squeaked, “So, this is grief.”

* * *

Within a few hours after her passing, I came to understand something that wasn’t apparent to me while she was alive: Smug taught me the meaning of unconditional love. She taught me how to be a caregiver. She taught me that any pattern of abuse foisted onto me as a kid didn’t have to be cyclical, what with me refusing to pass it down to those over whom I was responsible. She taught me what it means to remain committed to someone for half of a lifetime, that it really is possible to be with someone that long, if not much longer.

Smug was a cat. She was my kid. She was an angel, and in her passing, part of my heart left with her. In return, my soul was enriched a billion-fold.

She did me great honour to be a part of my life through both thick and thin. In autumn 1996, she remained patient with my feeding her crappy Meow Mix, while I starved for days at a stretch due to poverty. She was tolerant of my moving into so many unfamiliar places. She remained oblivious to my prematurely dying words — “I’m gonna die and I’m never gonna see my cat again!” — when I was nearly swept up by an F4 tornado, only to return home intact and giving her a huge hug of gratitude. She chose to stay by my side when I found myself contemplating ending my own life in order to put to rest a lifetime of clinical depression without treatment.

Smug kept me going. She reminded me what life meant in the moments when I simply had forgotten.

For whatever frustrations I ever had with her, for every mess of hers I cleaned up, for every moment of drama she performed before me, none came anywhere close for me to ever give up on her; had I done so, then I’d have been letting down my part of the bargain.

Her meow, her infectious purr, her penchant for being patted on her posterior and her obsession with the brush are now inextricably woven into my DNA. Her memory will stay with me until I too follow her path.

Good-bye, my dear girl. Good-bye.