Tuesday. Would I like to come in today with her, or would tomorrow be better? I look out the window. It’s grey, rainy, dreary. Tomorrow’s forecast is sunny and mild, pleasant. It’s not a hard decision for me to make because I have a feeling I’ll need the sunshine. And this way I get one more day to discover her peeing on the rug. One more night to feel her delicate, fragile weight resting on my chest, keeping warm as she sleeps.

Monday she rallied a bit, eating some more special renal diet cat food with apparent enjoyment. To keep Sputnik away from it I have it in a reused cottage cheese tub and I put it on the kitchen counter, then set her down in front of it. She gums the food as best she can, having only one tooth left since the far-too-necessary extractions of a couple years previous. She cannot jump up to the counter herself; it’s now too high for her. Just the year before I came in more than once to find her lurking on the cabinets just below the ceiling. I check on her every few minutes until she’s finished. She can’t jump down either; she knows this. To let me know she’s done she sits patiently and waits for me to lift her and place her back onto the kitchen floor. I can feel every rib, every rise of her spine. She feels as though she is made of glass.

Sunday evening I was actually pleased when she peed on the couch. That was the first time she had substantially urinated in several days. She has rebounded somewhat from her most rough hours, but every time she comes back up the peak is noticeably lower than it had been last time. She is failing. She is tired. I don’t reprimand her for her accident. There’s nothing she or I could have really done to prevent it. We’re both beginning to learn that we have to cope with inevitability.

I strap the carrier carefully into the passenger’s seat. As delicate as she is now even sliding forward suddenly might be enough to do her some damage. She settles as best she can as I start the engine and begin my standard perky monologue, the one I always use to try to comfort my cats when I take one of them to the vet. They don’t really like the trip and generally begin yowling about a minute after we start moving. The sound of my voice seems to help them settle down. But she is silent. After a while I stop speaking as well. The air is heavy. Contemplative.

Saturday she was noticeably crashing. When she does use the litter box there are only small quantities of urine. Perhaps a teaspoon at a time. Almost none for a cat. And she hasn’t had any bowel movements at all for at least a day. She can’t keep her balance very well; whenever she shakes her head her back feet seem to slide out from under her. She has a slight limp when she walks. I think she got hurt trying to jump up onto one of the window ledges. The ledges are about two and a half feet high. She can’t make the distance any more and always ends up falling off.

I take her inside the vet’s office, into the exam room, and open her carrier so she can do whatever she wants. She just sits there. She doesn’t huddle against me in tense worry. She is not shedding fur — always a sign of distress. She is too thin, too faded now for worry. It could be the dehydration. It could be the arthritis. It could be the sores that appear on her and never seem to heal, the sores that could be cancer. But she’s not worried, not afraid. She’s just tired.

October and I see that her weight is gradually dropping away. It’s not so easy to detect with her because she’s always had a rounded, almost spherical appearance, and her long fluffy hair makes it difficult to tell just by looking whether she’s a feline tub o’ grease or just fuzzy. So that I can see it happening, that I can actually see her body beginning to waste away, is not a good sign. She hasn’t been grooming herself lately and I have to brush her every few days. When the bristles snag in clumps of matted hair, particularly around her haunches, she cries in distress, hisses, and tries to bite me. The arthritis is raging in her.

The vet assistant comes in and we take her to the scale to weigh her. Even knowing how poorly she’s been doing lately I’m shocked at the results. My cat, who just six months ago tipped the balance at better than seven pounds, is down to three pounds, two ounces. There are kittens that weigh more than that. I take her back into the examination room and she settles onto the old towel in the cat carrier once more. I have to be careful whenever I set her down because of the fire in her joints. She nestles onto the terrycloth.

July or so I noticed she was having “accidents” — peeing outside the litter box. For some reason she staked out a small patch of floor to the right of the couch, apparently having decided it was the ideal place for her to relieve herself. Sometimes I catch her in the act, pawing at the rug just before squatting, but more often I don’t, and sometimes I get to her too late, alerted only by the sound of liquid dripping onto the floor. I take to cleaning out the litterbox twice daily in case she’s become too prissy to deal with litter containing “clumps” and such.

I continue to pet her head and scritch along her chin until the vet comes in and I talk with her about what’s been happening, about what’s been taking place. Her attitude is always matter of fact, even when I’m talking about something that really can lead to only one conclusion. Mira continues to sit on the towel until the vet takes her temperature. Cats don’t like that and I can’t say I blame them. She shows some vim, yowling at the indignity of it all, while we wait for the digital probe to beep and signal that it knows whatever it needs to know. Her temperature is low. That’s not a good sign. But then I didn’t really expect one.

April she started to seriously slow down, going off her food, occasionally vomiting nothing but bile. Something is seriously wrong with her internally, but I have no way of guessing what. I wonder if it’s related to the sore on the right side of her muzzle, a sore that has been there for much longer than I realized at the time, that has never seemed to fully heal. Oh no, I wonder, could she have cancer? She goes to the vet posthaste and is given an ultrasound. No tumorous masses, but she’s dehydrated. I’m given an IV kit and shown how to administer a hydration drip to her. She hates it every time I do it but after a while seems to come back, to get back some of her old steam. It’s around this time that she stops purring.

We talk about options. About putting her in observation for a day or two with an IV running directly into her vein to rehydrate her. About how that might work, how it might get her kidneys going again — or it might not. And even if it does, the remission would only be for a few months, most likely, and then she’d be back in the same predicament. And the hospitalization would run between three and five hundred dollars. That is more — far more — than I can manage, and even if I could the results still wouldn’t be guaranteed. The phrase quality of life has been floating around in my head for several days now. It is an important thing to consider.

June ’02. After the initial settling in phase she has learned that the new apartment is fairly pleasant. She still has her toys — more, actually — and bats them all over the living room. I have to go looking for them at the end of the day; they’re lodged under bookshelves, out of reach. I wonder if she doesn’t get frustrated and decide to bat Sputnik around when her toys have all disappeared.

Another option is to let her disease run its course. The vet corrects herself; Mira is sixteen, and that’s geriatric for a cat. Old age is not a disease. It is simply part of the life process. I understand that. I also have an idea what would happen if I were to let things unfold with minimal intervention. Her arthritis would only get worse; as it is she can barely move now. And her kidneys would fail. Renal failure in a cat is grim. Terrible. They do not just go to sleep one afternoon in their favorite sunbeam and never wake up again. They can have seizures, vomiting, losing bowel and bladder control, spending their last few moments of consciousness, of life, suffering terribly. And she is still malnourished, eating so little that she is losing muscle mass. Her body is devouring itself. That could be the end of her before her kidneys cease. Starvation is torture. These are not options. They are damnations.

Late ’01 and her teeth are all out now save one. She had such severe gingivitis that there was no way to save any of them (well, with the one exception). I’m astounded at the difference this makes for her. She is perky, resilient, bright-eyed. Full of her old healthy dose of hell. Her fur becomes glossy again, shiny, soft and satiny. She begins putting on weight even though she can’t properly chew her food any longer. I hadn’t known until then how entirely crucial to overall well-being it was for teeth to be healthy. That knowledge now affects how I look after my own enamels.

The final option is euthanasia. I feel the tightness swell in my chest and constrict my throat as we talk over this last possibility. It’s the most humane and reasonable. I can’t keep her dragging on like this, so unlike how she used to be, so unresponsive. This cat who used to know she was pretty, who demanded that she be paid attention to and petted because she was pretty, who would go up to anyone and insist on being noticed. This cat now so sadly deteriorated that I have to wash her myself. This cat who can barely hop onto the bed at night to settle onto my hip or thigh and drift off to sleep, who I have to hold in place when she settles like that so she doesn’t fall off. She always loved to perch like that and would purr for an hour, sort of floating in half wakefulness, bliss incarnate, satisfied and sweet.

Early ’01 and I can’t stand her cat breath any longer. The clincher is when I find a yellow-grey lump in her food dish one day and, on inspection, see that it is a molar. It’s in horrifying shape, distorted and lumpy, and it worked itself free while she was eating. She needs to see the vet and get her teeth cleaned, as soon as possible. While I’m in the examination room I mention her recent loss of energy, how she seems to be tired more often than normal lately. But she is fourteen and I suppose I can expect her to be slowing down a little.

There are still more options. Do I want to take the body with me for burial in a garden plot? I live downtown, surrounded by concrete. Do I want an individual cremation so I can have the ashes do do with as I see fit, then, or do I want a group cremation, where her ashes and those of other cats will be handled en masse? I almost consider the individual cremation, but realize that would give me no sense of true closure. What would I do with her ashes? Either keep them or scatter them. Keeping them would represent a stalling, a clinging to the past. I can’t do that. Scattering them — well, she was nomadic with me, moving form apartment to duplex and elsewhere. There’s no single spot that would suit, just as there’s no garden plot. There’s a heaviness that I cannot sigh free of as I opt for the group cremation.

Late ’98. She is fascinated — both cats are — with the rabbits that hop across the lawn in front of the duplex in Wausau. Cottontails and jacks. The jackrabbits are almost as large as Mira is but she doesn’t look like she’s intimidated. She looks like she would just love to get outside and … play with them a while.

The vet asks if I want to have a few minutes more with her and I nod, turned away, unable to speak. She leaves and I gather myself, then pat Mira gently and bend to kiss her head. I love you so much, I tell her. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Pretty bit. Pretty kitty, pretty little bit of kitty crit. She rests on the towel. Calm.

She likes the duplex on Second Street in Tucson. She likes it because her toys roll and bounce gaily across the hardwood floors and she can scamper after them, unable to always get traction. I suspect she enjoys the giddy sliding around she does. She certainly seems to act like she’s having a hell of a good time. She also likes the duplex because sewer roaches come up through the toilet from time to time. Two inches and more long, they scuttle rapidly over the floor and she chases them, then picks them up in her teeth and, meowing triumphantly, takes them to an open spot in the living room to watch them run off when she sets them back down — only to be chased again. It would be cute if it wasn’t so obnoxious. Roaches just aren’t suitable playthings.

Do I want to be here in the room when it happens? Yes, I suppose I have to be. Should we try for a vein? She’s so dehydrated that it might not work, it might be very painful. Through the chest wall then, near the heart. The vet uncaps the hypodermic, filled with transparent pink fluid. Mira yowls for a moment as the needle enters, then again as the injection is given. I feel a horrible sense of panic. Wait, I want to say. Wait, is there an antidote? Ice in me. The vet steps back and says she’ll leave me alone with Mira for a little while.

I don’t know how the hell she got onto the roof (or outside, for that matter), and by her nervous expression neither does she. It’s equally clear that she wants down, and right now if not sooner. But cats aren’t exactly keyed to the idea of fully trusting humans, so my reaching up to her and encouraging her to jump — intending to catch her in my hands — doesn’t have the salutory effect I might wish. I go back inside and look around for something that might help, finding a long low bookcase. I remove its contents and take it outside. Standing on its end, it comes to about two feet below the roofline. She understands and leaps to the platform. I can reach her from there and bundle her back inside. In minutes she’s lying indolently in a sunray and licking herself, the trauma all forgotten.

She droops against the towel in the carrier and I lift her out of it, going to the chair in the corner and setting her onto my thigh. She settles there, lying down, and rests her chin on my leg. It doesn’t take me more than ten seconds to be seated, and even by then I realize that the injection is taking effect. She seems so exhausted suddenly as she rests on me, seems to welcome the touch that she has spent so many years enjoying, seems to sink against me in comfort and relief. Pretty bit. Pretty little bit. Pretty Mir.

She’s learned to do a nose-to-nose sniff. It’s cute to the point of almost being sickening. She’ll jump onto the back of the couch and I’ll lean my head back and look at her. She walks right up to me and delicately, daintily, briefly touches the tip of my nose with hers. This earns her much petting and praise. She has also learned that humans are warm and fun to lay on, and does so with insouciance, rumbling a mighty purr that can be heard from across the room and that goes on for half an hour and more at a time. Everyone who meets her is charmed by her; she is forthright when a new human appears in her territory and walks right up, expecting to be petted and complimented on her astonishing good looks. It’s a remarkably effective tactic.

In moments I see that her breathing has stopped. I can’t feel her heart any more. She is limp. There are two brief, small spasms, then a third. The vet comes in again and examines her, then softly tells me she’s gone. She puts her arm around me and I cling to her for a few moments as she says I’m sorry. I lift my cat and curl her to my chest, then hand her to the vet, and she leaves the room and I can’t see any more as I close up the cat carrier and gather myself. In a little while I leave. Life stops, life goes on.

This cat is driving me nuts. They both are. I just wanted a pet or two to have around the place, some furry kitties I could pet and enjoy after a day’s classes. At first it was just a grey tabby that I thought I’d take from the Tucson Humane Society, but as I was making that selection I noticed a sweet little calico longhair that mewed at me as if to say What about me? Can I come home with you too? How could I resist? The grey tabby I’ve named Sputnik, which is Russian for fellow-traveler. The calico is named Mira, after a three-star cluster in Cetus. I thought they’d be relatively docile, but they chase each other all over the place, especially at night when I’m trying to sleep. They run around and leap over me as I lie in bed. The other night Mira did that and I woke up just enough to catch her in midair. She was as surprised as I was. But as frustrating as these cats can be sometimes, I have to say I’m glad I brought them both home to share life with me.