I once had a cat who was
deathly ill. Not for long, of course.
Really, he was my wife’s
cat, a cat that she’d had when she was a teenager, some 6 or 7 years earlier.
Now we were newly married, and one day she got a call from home, her mom
telling her the cat was doing poorly and she was thinking of having him put
down. My wife thought that she just might be able to save the cat, or at least
that she’d rather blame herself for the cat’s death than blame her mom, and
that prompted a quick drive to Mom’s house and the introduction of a very old
and boney Siamese cat to our small household.
We already had a younger
cat — maybe two, I’m not quite sure — but this new addition did little to
disrupt the local feline social structure. Mostly, he slept. Occasionally he
would move. He would also eat a little, poop a little, make a God-awful
vocalization now and then — something like Eartha Kitt, but angry and with a bad
sore throat — and every few hours, we’d give him a subcutaneous infusion of fluids
(sort of like an I.V. drip, but it doesn’t go directly into a vein) since he
wasn’t drinking any water and tended to be dehydrated. My wife worked for a
veterinarian, and got the sub-Q equipment there.
So anyway, here lay this
old cat at death’s door for weeks and weeks, even months. Much longer than
you’d think anyone could linger at that particular threshold. Day after day,
the same routine: Sleep. Eat. Sleep. Poop. Sleep. Fluids. Sleep.
Then one afternoon I
notice he was up, exploring around the apartment. He seemed curious; at the
very least, he was looking for a new place to sit or lie down.
I was so happy! Here was
improvement at last. He wasn’t lying just lying around anymore. He was becoming
more active. He must be feeling a lot better. What a wonderful, encouraging
development!
Within a day or two, of
course, the cat died.
I had seen his change in
behavior as a sign of improvement, while a more fact-based view might have seen
the change as nothing more than that: a change, period. He had lingered long,
just this side of death; now something prompted him to change his behavior, and
it should have come as no great surprise that this change might very well give
him just the teensiest extra bit of a shove that was needed for him to cross
over.
“Fascinating,” you might
say. Perhaps with just the hint of irony in your voice. But what exactly is the
point of this story about a cat’s journey into death? Well, I’ll tell you.
The main thing is that
it’s good to be aware of one’s own natural tendency to put a positive or
negative emotional spin onto any change in circumstance that may occur. You can
see something as a change for the better or a change for the worse, but on the
most basic level it really is simply a change, nothing more and nothing less.
If your general
disposition is to see just about any change as an opportunity for improvement,
you’re pretty much on the right track in seeing changes in a positive light. Likewise
if you’re generally disposed to see change as a bad thing. That’s pretty
natural. The big mistake comes when you unconsciously assume that your own
personal and selfish preferences happen to run in parallel with the inevitable,
natural course of history. The fact is, a coin is just as likely to come down
“tails,” even when your own personal preference is for “heads.”
So, accept change.
Embrace it. And watch it, to see where it leads. You may find yourself
celebrating new possibilities, and that’s wonderful. It’s a lot of what
encourages us to keep on trying. But don’t be too surprised if, in the end, those
rosy possibilities don’t turn out to be “certainties,” after all.
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