Waiting on a Cat

I've been spending more time lately looking at our old cat - when she deigns to come up and spend time with us. Being a cat, she frequently prefers her own company but will come up and lie in the middle of the floor when I am trying to get dinner on the table.

I am looking at her more frequently now to see how fast she is failing. Not a pretty thing, but after putting our other two (elderly cats of 17 and 15 respectively) to sleep in the past year due to kidney failure and diabetes, I know we probably don't have much time left with her. She is 18.5 now, and while in better health than the others (I guess females do live longer - the other two were males) I don't think she'll make her 19th birthday. She has gotten shockingly thin, particularly deaf, and her hind legs don't always seem to do as she wants. She can still hop up on a couch or chair sometimes, but the counters she used to hop up on so easily even last year, are now beyond her. So is walking sometimes as the hind legs will frequently give way on even the shortest jaunt. She spends a lot of time collapsing on the floor in the kitchen, and then snoozing. And don't even mention the litter box - missing it seems to be the bane of the elder cat's existence.

We picked her out of a litter of 3 kittens many years ago. She was the runt, and had the most peculiar (and ugly) color coat. There was a calico - already bid on by someone else, a black and white - taken by some friends of ours, and this little black cat with no other colors but a slash of cream on her nose, a cream paw, and a cream curl up the rump. Of course, the ugly duckling kitten grew to be a beautiful tortoiseshell cat whose coat was remarked upon by many as being gorgeous - especially as she lay in the sun.

It seems hard now to compare the little cat who climbed up my nylons (to my dismay) and the little old cat who can now only walk between the den, kitchen, and cellar. To my son's delight, she will still play with string held by them, but the huge leaps and falls she took as a young cat have been replaced by slight pawings and sinkings to the floor.

It is remarkable that we don't really feel the passage of time within ourselves, but we see it so acutely in others. How is it possible that the sons who were only just babies are now on the cusp of adolescence and one is as tall as me? How could it be that the cat we brought into our home when we were so newly married is now frail and elderly? Have we really been married that long? Where did the time go? And why don't I feel much different than I ever did? Time plays tricks with the mind. As I said when I was home with my sons when they were tiny, "the days are long, but the years pass quickly". I don't know how, but this is so.

That being said, we are waiting on a cat, waiting for her to give us the sign that her time is through with us. I'd so much rather find her curled in a cold ball some morning or eve rather than having to take the familiar trek to the veterinarian's waiting room and then the kindness of ending the cat's life through euthanasia. With my other cats, when they started to look as though they were suffering, we brought them in to "put them to sleep." We'll do the same for her should the need arise but it is such a sad trip - and she hates the car.

So, we'll watch and wait, and hope for the best. But she'll always be my "pretty kitty in the sun."