fare thee well

grieving an animal familiar

If you listen to this week’s Everything Is Fine podcast (recorded last Monday), you’ll hear me talk about the challenge of caring for a geriatric pet in an already taxed family system. And it’s true: For months, our cat Ruby was in decline, failing to use the litterbox with any consistency, vomiting and other assorted body-fluid unpleasantries on rugs and furniture at least once every day. She’d been to the vet a few times. We knew her kidneys were in rough shape. She’d slowed down grooming and required special food, which she didn’t always eat. Still, hope springs eternal: the last blood work report was looking up.

Then, on Wednesday night, I couldn’t find her in any of her usual spots. I realized she hadn’t come to her bowl for food all day. When I finally coerced her out from deep under our bed, she was visibly weak and thin, dragging her back legs a bit. We rushed her to the ER where they found a mass on her colon, then another mass on her pancreas and another after that. After an overnight in the hospital, the vet told us we could try chemo, but it would be invasive, expensive and possibly buy her months, not years. Forty-eight harrowing hours later, when we saw no improvement, when she had showed little interest in eating and had begun urinating in her bed, we decided it was time to end her pain. It was among the hardest decisions I’ve ever made.

Ruby was born in a bodega in Brooklyn in February 2008 and died in my arms in the Los Angeles sun on Saturday, October 5, 2024. She was my first adult pet, the first animal I chose on my own, though perhaps, in a way, she chose me. There remain few things in this life more comforting and uncomplicated than an animal’s unconditional love. This is especially true for those who’ve experienced violence and neglect in the past. Ruby loved me ferociously. She carried herself like an elegant empress, but she had the acute intuition of a witch. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she came whenever I called. I wrote two books with her sitting in my lap; a living, breathing safety blanket, a generous and always-available emotional support. She was a discerning bitch, my animal familiar. I was lucky to know her and she knew I knew it.

Once I understood she was dying, I built an altar, lit candles in her name. I told her how grateful I was for her life, sat with her for hours, meditated and prayed. I re-listened to my favorite parts of Pema Chodron’s How We Live Is How We Die, the most grounding text I know of for getting right with death (and life). I made her favorite meal and fed her by hand what she’d take. I attempted to quickly find my center, a sense of meaning and purpose, a shortcut to peace, trying (as always) to be productive and outrun my grief.

On Friday night, before I went to bed I told my husband, “I’m going to wake up early tomorrow and take the cat outside for her last sunrise.” But when I woke up at 6am, she was nowhere to be found. Not in the closet where she’d be lying for 24 hours, not anywhere in the house. Finally I found her: She was sitting on a couch outside, paws tucked and crossed, staring out at the sunrise. She could barely walk but managed to drag herself out a mostly closed door and down a flight of outdoor stairs. She made her way to her last sunrise on her own.

It seems like it will be a long time before I can find my own peace with her passing. But that morning, outside at dawn, I felt sure that she’d found hers.