Unfinished material
Or, if only grief could be organized as easily as pills
April 6 was the two-year anniversary of my cat Mr. Bojangles’s death. And in the weeks leading up to that date, and the week-ish since then, I’ve thought a lot about what to write here. Partly because some of the inspiration for starting this Substack was that, when Mr. B was alive and in the last year of his life, I was interested in exploring what it means to be in interspecies relationshipping.
You can find a number of past posts about Mr. B and related to the topics of multi-species relationshipping and significant otherness if you go to the Comminglings tags page.
And I’ve written here before that, for whatever reason, when Mr. B died, my desire to write on that theme seemed to die too.
And as I write this, I’m literally sitting here multitasking, simultaneously filling a pill organizer with my statins, my fish oil pills, etc. the prescriptions I take on a daily basis, that was actually originally Mr. B’s pill organizer. It’s an odd, every other week ritual, I suppose, that invariably calls up the physical and emotional memory of filling it with Mr. B’s prescriptions. Though my pill regimen is incredibly less complicated or as in need of organizing as Mr. B’s was.
For a while, it was simply a twice a day dose of felimazole, a tiny little pink dot, for his hyperthyroidism. And those could be buried or hidden in his morning and evening wet food. After his seizure in June 2023, he started taking an extended release keppra pill twice a day, which had to be administered by mouth. His dosage needed to be compounded, so each bottle of two months-worth of keppra pills cost something like $260. As his hyperthyroidism continued to get worse, his felimazole doses gradually increased, which meant I had to split some of the pills for months at a time. And towards the end of 2023, when it became clear that he was also showing signs of chronic kidney disease, he started taking a once daily B12 supplement, an every other day supplement for join health, and the never-ending quest to find the brand of prescription kidney health food that he would actually eat began.
And at a certain point, he just didn’t really want to eat much of anything any more.
It’s so interesting to me that I had around 15 years of a wonderful, fun, lovely, sweet life with Mr. B before things became so difficult. And yet, still two years after his death, most of where my memories go is to the following last year and a half when everything became so sad and challenging.
As much as I loved him, that last year was incredibly difficult for me. The strain and challenges of the caregiving required. The lack of sleep and energy depletion and frustration and constant worrying and slow coming to terms with the gradual failing of his health that I experienced alongside the ailing that he was experiencing.
But I guess that’s just some of the complexity of love and grief and remembrance. That I can feel now just how much he mattered to me mostly through the loss of him and the complicated pain of that loss.
In a piece of writing I started back in September 2023 before Mr. B died, I tried narrating my experience of his seizure. Maybe as a way of processing and working through the grief and complicated emotional journey I’d been on. But of course, I never finished it or returned to it once he was gone. I thought about it many times, even with the idea that I could eventually post it here.
(I also intended to research what the experience of actually having a seizure can be like, what the experience of “altered” consciousness might be like in the different stages of a seizure — the pre-ictal prodrome and aura period, the tonic/clonic seizure itself, and the post-ictal period — so that I might also be able to imagine my way into writing what Mr. B’s experience might have been like.)
Well, I never did that and it’s still unfinished and I haven’t even gone back over what does exist for edits. But I figure maybe if I include it here now, that’ll be that…
Mr. B is lying in his favorite chair, curled up slightly on the old green sweatpants I used to wear in the colder months but are his now and that soften and warm the white bent fiberglass of the Eames knock-off he’s claimed as his own. I don’t know if he’s napping and actually asleep or just resting.
He sits up tall very suddenly, as though something has put him on high alert. I think he’s heard something that startled him, but I didn’t hear anything. He looks this way and that way, and again, looking from side to side, and it seems like he is very, very scared of something. Or very, very confused.
After a few (frightened?) turns of the head back and form, Mr. B is trying to stand up and turn around, and his body suddenly seems not to do what I think he wants it to do, and he collapses, a bit twisted up in the fabric of those sweats. And his body begins to go wild.
I scream/shriek “oh my god,” my voice already warbling with fear and sob, and his whole body is quaking. His legs are all reaching and paddling and his head is looking around and his mouth is opening and closing repeatedly, and there is so much movement, and it’s as if he’s trying to crawl or get up, that he tumbles from the chair, down the cat steps, to the floor, his body seizing in constant movement all the while, and my whole heart and being is shattered. I am crying and screaming, and maybe this is it. Maybe he’s gone into shock and these are his final moments alive.
I kneel down on the floor next to him as his body continues shaking, his legs paddling the air frantically, his eyes completely wide-open and staring off into space, his mouth chattering, saliva pouring. And then everything stops.
He’s lying there on his side, no movement, my pang is he’s dead, but I do see he’s breathing, unconscious. Probably for no more than a handful of seconds, but the during the whole event, for me it feels like time has stopped and I have no idea how much time has elapsed because I am so terrified. But he opens his eyes, lying there, and he looks obviously confused. He cranes his neck up slightly, looking around, looking at me. What just happened? We’re both asking. He meows at me. He meows a few more times, and I am crying, and he sits up, then gets up.
I’m on the phone to the emergency veterinary hospital—Mr. B’s vet is closed on Wednesdays—my voice shaking and I just need to get him there. All the while, Mr. B is up and walking around, and constantly meowing. Calling out. I put my lunch away and get things ready to take him to the ER, need to get his carrier down, and he is just following me around, meowing. I pick him up a couple of different times and hold him close to me, and he’s calm and comforted. But when I put him down he returns to wandering around the apartment, continuing to meow on and off, and whenever he sees me he follows me, meowing at me. I have no idea if he’s confused, if he’s hurt or in pain, if he’s trying to tell me he needs something.
I’m scared to pick him up and put him, back legs first, down into the open carrier, scared that he may have been hurt from falling off the chair and tumbling down the stairs to the floor, and he hates going in his carrier. For a regular trip to the vet, he struggles hard, pushing against the edges of the carrier door with his back feet, trying to hang onto the metal spokes of the carrier door with his back claws, pushing against me with his front feet, claws and all sometimes. But while there is a very gentle struggle this time, he goes down into the carrier quite easily. He meows and meows inside the crate while I call an Uber…