Killing My Darling

bye bye Baby

I feel a little embarrassed publishing this TED talk, but I wish I had had this to read before going through this last week so, I’m putting it here.

I got my cats Baby and Rascal in 2020. I had just broken up with my partner of four years and was living alone for the first time since I was 21. It was the year that most of my close friends had children. It felt pretty on-the-nose, especially with Baby being named Baby, but I have done plenty of much more humiliating things that have been a lot less rewarding.

My criteria for cats: I wanted them to be an elderly bonded pair so that I wouldn’t have to have them for too long and could leave them in one another’s care when I traveled. This desire felt evil: that I didn’t want to make a long-term commitment, that I wanted the freedom to abandon my charges, especially since everyone was praising me for being so humane, adopting two 15-year-old ladies. I also didn’t want cats who liked playing; I wanted cats who would just sleep and cuddle. Worse yet, I found the girls by searching for “white cats” because the only cat I had ever bonded with previously was an ancient deity named Helga, who was a white Siamese Flamepoint.

I can’t believe it’s not Baby.

I have a type, like a pervert.

One of the most annoying mental diseases that people have in relationships is not owning their desires. It feels like some kind of ethical imperative: don’t make demands, be forgiving, don’t expect too much. It always leads to misery. I felt guilty at the way that my cats gave me exactly what I wanted. They slept in my bed every night, on either side of me. All they ever wanted was to cuddle, preferably on me. Baby sang a special song when she purred. The girls were obscenely beautiful and they loved me tremendously, in exactly the way that I wanted. And now, in exactly five years, both of them died, just liked I had planned for them to, although I did help with the last one. This sounds sentimental, but they really did teach me that just because you get what you want from another being doesn’t mean that what you want is bad-selfish. What it means is that I chose my companions taking in mind my habits and capacities. Which is not at all to say that I didn’t also stretch myself significantly to take care of the girls in their ailing. But still, I departed from a level of commitment and compatibility that I felt secure in. The hardest part of it was deciding to put Baby down when I, technically, could have continued to nurse her.

This is another moment when the ethical considerations feel murky. Yes, it would be expensive and inconvenient for me to give Baby medicine 2-3 times a day, get someone to help me give her sub q fluids at least once a week, and pay my catsitters extra to do this when I left even for a short period, but I felt guilty and ashamed at my reluctance to do it. I felt ashamed that I didn’t think I could stay on top of it adequately. I imagined another person who was a better nurturer and caretaker. If I want to, I can continue nursing these feelings. What helped me was realizing that everything bad that I felt—about myself and about the actual loss, the pain of grieving—was self-pity. Which is okay, but, thinking about “what is right to do,” it had nothing to do with Baby. Baby, a girl of around 20, would only experience a small amount of discomfort and then she would never again experience anything. If I didn’t medicate her at all, she would suffer, and she hated having stuff shot down her throat and being poked with a needle. I needed a lot of support and reinforcement from friends to stick to this decision, and I still feel uneasy saying “it was the right one,” but we did it.

I’d also already had the privilege of doing a much worse job with Rascal—not catching onto to the fact that she was much sicker than I imagined and then, horrifically, having her die very suddenly after I’d sat on her and given her Gabapentin, a painkiller. I’d had to forced it into her, and then she staggered away from me, fell over three times, and gave up the ghost as I held her up, terrified, with Sadie talking to me on FaceTime. Baby falling over while eating earlier this week, after I had given her Gabapentin, without which she had stopped eating, was the last straw in making my decision. After that, I thought it was funny that I was afraid of what it would be like to put Baby down, considering the fact that I had already lived through the most violent version, of killing my own cat on accident.

When I first got them, I thought about these things all the time: which one would die first, who did I want it to be, would I be able to bear it. With Baby, she got very sick last week, and she was, really, on the mend, which I realized was the best time since she wasn’t, I hope, in pain or under stress. She didn’t know what was happening. And it was extremely calm, at home. She died laying on my chest, at twilight, surrounded by extremely gentle women. It was very scary to me, the dread, and feeling it all happening on my body—the euthanizer shaving her leg, putting the needles in, petting her as the drugs were slowly poured into her veins, her heart stopping, resting against mine. And afterwards, feeling this paradoxical euphoria, a rush of endorphins, in gratitude to my Baby for seeming so calm and peaceful and leaving us quickly, doing such a good job of supporting me through an extremely frightening moment, which I spent thinking about how much worse it will be when this will be a person, my mother, my father.

You cannot conflate the relationships between pets and other people, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t things to learn from them. I find myself acting like Baby after Rascal died. I am okay, just a little bit down. When I circle the house, I keep looking at places she would be, seeing she isn’t. I am deeply aware that I am much more susceptible to the cold now. In bed, at night, where I felt most afraid I would miss her, I also can’t help noticing that I have more of myself to myself. RIP Baby.

Baby on her deathbed (me)