One of our cats, Ophelia, has had chronic illness for the past year, and early Friday morning she took a turn for the worse. After a half hour seizure--the one and only she had ever had--we took her to the vet and made the painful decision to put her down.
I can't and don't want to get into the details of her last hours because they are too painful, too raw to recall. And in a way, I cannot shake those images from my mind. They replay themselves over and over again, and I don't know if it's because my mind is trying to process what happened, or if I'm trying to torture myself.
Death is a strange thing to wrap one's mind around. It takes its course whether we yield to it or not. Looking on as she seized, comforting her, talking to her--that was all we could do. We kept asking, When will this stop? At the vet's office, we held her, talked to her, kissed her, but we knew that wasn't her anymore. There wasn't anything to do except to say Okay, we can let her go.
This feels like a tidal wave--knocking into me, at times drowning me, sucking me in, and rearranging everything as it once was. I see her toys, at times I think I hear her, I watch her little sister smell and search for her, my arms want to grab and hold her, but there's nothing.
I know healing is on the horizon, but at the moment it's devastating. I want to go back in time and stay there with her, petting her, listening to the rhythm of her purr.
Lisa,
ReplyDeleteMy heart breaks for you.
We had to make the same decision for our beloved chesapeake bay retriever, Kodiak, last Thanksgiving. He was only 4 years old but had suffered from chronic illnesses in the time we had him. We missed the onset of what finally claimed him--severe anemia--and I often find my mind replaying his last month, horrible due to both the sadness of his illness as well as the guilt and self-blame I feel for not catching it soon enough...
You are right--healing IS on the horizon--but it will take some time for the initial grief to pass. Take comfort in knowing that your decision was made out of a pure love and that Ophelia knows that and is waiting for you on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge.
I will keep you both in my thoughts and prayers through this incredibly difficult time...
Natalie (Nov '07 FWI)
I miss her every single day. I'm not sure that will ever go away or that I even want it to. But as tears flow reading this, I take comfort in the fact that most of the time the memories are finally happy ones again and not those awful images of the the morning she passed. But the pain of her absence is ever present, even four months later... just four months later. God, it seems like days sometimes and an eternity just moments later. As we approach what would have been her 15th Birthday next week, the one I so desperately prayed she would live to see, I cry tears for her today just as fresh as those four months ago and my heart aches for our furry gray daughter, Miss Ophelia Peaches.
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