by Bernard Jan
Do you remember, my old buddy, how you attacked Mom if she wouldn’t give you food when your programmed timer signaled it was feeding time? When she left you waiting too long, or she didn’t please you because you were overweight? You ambushed her and then grabbed her legs and arms! A real little rascal! It’s hard for me to connect the image of you playful and full of energy with what I see now: you so weak, scrawny and fragile, a pale copy of what you used to be. As if it isn’t you! I will tell you a secret though. The older and more powerless you became, the stronger my feelings for you grew. No, my precious, you didn’t come to a family which gets rid of the helpless when they grow old and cannot entertain them any longer, or whatever. You hit the jackpot because this family is not ready to give up on you. We will fight for you no matter what, no matter how much it costs us—financially and emotionally. You were lucky you didn’t come among egomaniacs who throw their pets onto the street when they are no longer interesting to them. You have come to your home. You are no longer an abandoned and unwanted creature, but a full member of the family, with all its rights and privileges. You are loved.
Suddenly you raised your head, waking up in a flash. As if all this time you were faking it and listening to my thoughts. I unwrapped myself from the blanket and once more carried you to your bowls. This time your legs held you. Forty-five minutes of rest helped.
I have to admit, these abrupt reversals of the situation, when your legs can’t support you and you can’t stand on them, rather confuse me. They awake and kill hope in me, and I don’t know what to think. For example, when I returned on Saturday from our regular info stall, the weather was beautiful. Even before I got home, I decided that I would take you out to the balcony so you could enjoy the sun and fresh breeze. But when I took you in my arms and sat with you on the balcony threshold, you were so calm and disinterested that even the pigeon, The Winged, wasn’t afraid of you but kept watching us from the railing. I thought you’d enjoy that moment, but you surrendered to my will, lying in my lap like a rag puppet. You stretched your long legs while I could count all your vertebrae just by feeling them; they pressed so much into the arm you were leaning on. I cleaned us both of your hair that was shed and fluttered around us and brought you back under the table. While I was making more comfortable accommodation for you, I locked eyes with the pigeon, The Winged. (My old folks called him that because one of his lowered wings looked as it was broken.) Leg to leg he moved on the railing and stretched his neck, peeking into the room to see what we were doing. It was one of the defeats that shook me. A bell rang a silent alarm in me. You are not well, love, you are really not well.
When you get up for the third time to quench your thirst, you are faster than me. Overcome by the vigil and exhaustion I had fallen asleep, and catch up with you only when you have already reached your bowls, scratching with your nails on the floor. This time I can’t persuade you to take a pee, as at two and then three in the morning. Your bladder has widened and become rounded again, but in the dead of night I can’t do much about it so I carry you back to sleep. A similar thing happens at four o’clock and then again at quarter past five. Waking up after five, you visit Mom’s pots in search of a little greenery and eat her asparagus. I must give you credit for your fight with time and your body, and the love for life you show in every step. You have not surrendered even though you’ve lost most of your teeth (it had to be a shock to you), but you relentlessly crush crackers with your gums, pull grass and swallow pieces of white chicken meat that Mom and Dad, in spite of my protests, still serve you.
I feel great relief when you finally urinate after six o’clock. Both last night and tonight you got up seven times (and me together with you). You drank long and a lot (for two and three minutes), and only two times you went to pee. I’m sorry I counted and monitored your every step, but I had to for your own good. Mom tells me you peed two more times between the time she got up (at seven o’clock) and I came out of the bathroom (around eight-fifteen). On both occasions you didn’t even wet the newspaper with which we covered the entire hallway and part of the living room next to it—including the parquet which we rarely managed to protect with newspaper or nylon, no matter how hard we tried and how clever we were—where your toilets are.
A new day promises a lot. Since both of us spent the night more or less okay (excluding the fact that you were still in pain and still suffocating, but less than before, and that I was groggy from lack of sleep), I leave the house in a relatively cheerful mood. I expect a pile of work will be waiting for me in the office, but after the regular checking of e-mails and paying bills with online banking, I am lucky to spend the second half of the day driving with Luka and Maja from a mechanic to the store with vegan products, visiting the printing office to see the proof copy of the brochure against animal experiments and going to the bookkeeper for a statistical report. Everything hints that the day will end calmly and well, until, somewhere around half past six, I come home. Then my world turns upside down.
Saša is sitting by your head. Mom is behind your back, while Dad is standing in the middle of the room, red in face, his eyes wet with tears. They don’t have to say anything for me to understand what is going on. It is not good. You are very sick. You choked the whole day. They think it no longer makes sense to torment you.
I drop the backpack next to the locker for shoes that stands between the living room door and my (sorry, our) room, take off Geoff Rowley vegan sneakers and fish cell phones from the pockets of my pants.
Is it that bad? I ask and get from Saša a brief but clear description of your condition. When he came to see you on Monday, he was taken aback by how much you had deteriorated in the two days he was away during the holidays. He didn’t tell us then because he wanted to treat you with the injection therapies. He hoped to prolong your life for a few days, weeks, months.... But the improvement that had occurred due to the injections was only temporary and your condition has deteriorated again. He strokes your head while you breathe, relaxed, calm, with your mouth slightly open.
You are better because you have received an injection of painkillers, Mom adds, but what if you die during the night? We all struggle with ourselves and our feelings, Mom, Dad, Saša and me, knowing what is the right decision, but still postponing it. As if we expect a last-minute miracle.
I don’t want to rush you, Saša continues. Think about everything overnight, but, if you want, I can do it today. His words sink in. Tired from lack of sleep, crying and under invasion of all kinds of thoughts and memories that besieged me during these last three days as you grew worse, I realize what Saša is saying.
You can do it now? I blurt out while my voice gains and loses its strength like a failing sound system.
I can do it tonight. I just need to get back to the clinic to pick up injections because I didn’t bring them with me. I thought we would treat him, but all this has become a great burden and torture for him.
You could really do that? Mom looks at me, asking for confirmation. Dad wants to jump out of his skin.
There’s no problem at all. I will be back in fifteen, twenty minutes tops.
And then you will take him with you? It seems Mom wants to have everything covered.
Yes, I will take him with me....
To the incinerator, I add.
I’ve been thinking about burying you in the backyard of our cottage in Zagorje, but I’m obviously not too fond of that idea or I would speak in favor of it now. Everything seems complicated. I don’t know how we would drive you there because both Dad and I would be incapable of driving; and that place doesn’t mean much to you because you visited it only a few times and you were stressed about it (apart from your morning expeditions and quests with Mom and jumps from the terrace after which I was running after you all over the yard). Your home is here, in this apartment. Since you can’t stay here, it isn’t so important where you will end up. Don’t you think so too? Am I at least a little right???
But how will you take him? Aren’t
you on foot? I ask Saša. You’re not thinking of carrying him on the tram?
I’m going home toward Dubrava, anyway. When I get home, I’ll bring the car and drive him. You prepare a bag for me so I can carry him in something. The rest is my concern.
And cloths. We will put him in the cloths he slept on and with which we covered him. I continue this morbid dialogue in front of you. I can’t understand how one can have such a bizarre conversation at the time of extinguishing one life, when you are about to kill your favorite person.
You watch and listen to all that, silent and struggling for each breath. Calm and majestic, like the sphinx, the pride of the pharaohs. You still care little about what’s going on around you, as if you have also made the same decision.
Stroking you again, Saša gets up.
Maybe I’ll ask a colleague with the car to take him there, he says, remembering this possibility.
Thank you very much, Saša. You helped us a lot. I don’t know how we would do this without you, Mom says.
It’s nothing, please. I know how you feel. It’s not easy for me either. The two of us bonded and I think it is okay if I do it. I could send someone else to do it for me, but it wouldn’t be fair to him....
Once more he confirms that he will be back soon, and then he puts on his jacket and leaves. Bitter is the trace left in us as the door closes behind him.
This was approximately how our conversation went before the countdown of the last minutes you will spend with us, in your family. I say approximately, for I cannot claim with certainty who said what in these very emotional moments. But I think I have pretty well reconstructed what happened, with small omissions. It is true that, since I came home, I haven’t been in control of my body, mind and, least of all, feelings. I change my T-shirt, but I keep on the pants I wore to work—I don’t know why. I use the opportunity of being alone and quickly wipe my eyes and blow my nose. I don’t want you to see me like this, neither you nor my parents. I have to be strong, for you—so you can go surrounded by love and gratitude, and not tears and lamentations, but also for Mom and Dad—to give them strength with my calmness to get through this hard, hard day. The hardest day of my life, and I’m not ashamed to admit that.
It is a long and, at the same time, such a short twenty minutes. I sit beside you while you lie on your soft pillow, barely responding to my caress. As if you are entirely focused on your breathing, on each new breath that will prolong your life a little. You resemble more the breathing apparatus than the person with whom I have spent almost fifteen years of life, which can’t be redeemed by all the treasures of this world.
Mom is also sitting next to you and strokes you, repeating how this is the best for you, assuring you that our kitty will find his peace now, and that nothing will hurt you where you are going.
I don’t know who came up with the idea to shoot a few last photos as a memento. Maybe it was me. It doesn’t matter now. It was one thing saying that and quite another doing it. Mom and Dad try to explain to me, distracted as I am by being nervous, how the camera works, but I can’t shoot one photo of you! Frustrated, I give the camera to Mom. And Mom, and Dad after her, take a few pictures of you without a problem. Only later, six days after you are already dead, when we develop the film, it will be obvious they weren’t too successful either. Only seven of them will be good; others will turn out blurred and smeared, like too-diluted watercolor on wrinkled rice paper.
I leave Mom alone with you for a minute. To stay strong and brave, I need to remove the tears that escape unnoticed, and to handle the sobs that torture me. Watching the street, I see the people and the windows of the surrounding buildings. At one of the open windows stands a couple smoking. In others the lights are on. It is dark in my room, and that same darkness creeps into me too.
Conversation with Mom consists of rare and short sentences which quickly fade from my memory. You are the one big thought that fills my whole mind. No matter how hard I try to be a rock, the more I stumble against desperation and cognition that fill me as a roaring torrent filling an empty tank with water. I won’t hear you again, tapping with your feet while coming out of my room, pausing in the hallway and peeking behind a cabinet for shoes. You would scan the room where the three of us sat, gathered in front of the TV, me usually holding a book. Then, encouraged by my words—and whom do I see there—you marched to your bowls with pride and the graciousness of a leopard and, in spite of your illness, ignoring us all.
In the morning you won’t come to my room, sprawl under the table while the radio is playing, and I am getting ready for work. You loved music, and every time I turned the radio on or played something from a CD, you would relax and go to sleep in the blink of an eye. Music was like anesthetic to you and I’m sorry there won’t be music where you are going. I’m sorry I didn’t see you off with music....
Nor will I any longer come home and be greeted by you under the table as if you hadn’t moved from there since I went out. Mom tells me you would lie on the pillow in the living room, and a few minutes before I rang downstairs you would move to my room and lie under the table. You knew I would be home any minute. You felt that. I do not doubt that as I do not doubt that a void will come into your place and swallow me day by day like death swallowed our relationship.
No longer will you jump into my lap while I sit in an armchair in front of the TV and seductively purr while I glide my hand down your hair or scratch you under your chin or behind your ears. Nor will you adorably watch me while I gently lay my head on your stretched belly, curing my headache and warming my face, and listening to your heartbeat and breathing mixed with quiet cooing. And no one will cut your whiskers because they are too long as, half joking and half serious, Grandma wanted to do while she was still alive....
No longer will you take me to your bowls of food. You will not wake up, yawn and stretch as much as you can before you crawl out from under the table. You will not give me that look of yours and seductively blink your big, warm eyes; and I will not drop what I was doing at that moment and approach you to cuddle you. You will not nod at me and coo before I touch you and narrow your eyes even more from sheer pleasure and then go. You will no longer stop after a few steps and turn around to check that I am behind you and, satisfied, carry on with your tail slightly raised after you assured yourself I am following you. No longer you will stop right in front of your bowls and wait for me, and start eating only when I pat you, thus giving you permission to eat. I don’t know why you made up that rule, but the only logical explanation is that it was you. Those were your decisions, procedures and ways, similar to others’, but unique, original and unrepeatable, just as you are.
The more I get into the depth of your character and dive into the sea of kindness with which you abound, the harder for me is everything I have done to sin against you. Everything I denied you.
Forgive me.
Forgive me. It was a beautiful day last week. I think it was Friday. The sun warmed like no other day of the year. There was a pleasant wind, and the scents of flowers and sprouted grass rose from the ground. I thought I would pick fresh green grass for you as soon as it grew a little more. I thought I’d surprise you with this gift. But I will never give it to you, love, and that makes me feel like garbage. If I had known. If I had only sensed—if I had wanted to admit to myself!—you could have tasted the first grass of this spring, no matter how short and unripe its leaves were. But I was a coward and ran from reality! I stole from you the last touch of just-awakened nature, because not even the trees had fully bloomed yet.
I sneak out again, cannot help myself. I escape to another room, blow my pain and bitterness into the already wet handkerchief before I return to you. Dad is still not there. He is hiding from you, us, reality, truth and death, while Mom is waiting for Saša. Minutes stand still. Everything stands still, including my hand that slides down your hair, gray, dark-brown, light-brown, with longer wisps on your belly, shorter, untidy and sprinkled with dandruff on your back, under your nec
k soft and aristocratic, once as fine as the best quality fur. My friends used to tease me they would be glad to wear your fur. If they saw you today, I think they would be ashamed of their own words, regardless of their being spoken in jest or how big a compliment they were to you back then.
You take a deep breath and, while exhaling, roll onto your back. Probably the last time you expose your belly to me; and, as in old days, I caress it with my fingertips. It is the last time we cuddle like this, and you know it. You give in to me completely, trying to remember my touch.
I remember it too, knowing this is the only physical contact I have with some living being, and that in few minutes I will lose it. I panic from the realization I won’t be able to hug you again, feel your warm body on my hands, the tickling of your fur against my face. Fear builds in me from the emptiness I plunge into, and only the ringing in the stairwell saves me from bursting into tears, from which no one could tear me out.