Death is a strange bird. No matter what you do, no matter how you prepare, no matter how well you think you’ve dealt with the immutability of the eventual demise of someone you love, you’re always surprised when it happens. You’ve watched the jocular weatherman’s five-day forecast, you see the clouds coming, and you wear the raincoat and open the umbrella and roll up all the car windows, but somehow you still get wet. Soaked. Sopping.
This is what ran through my head as I was mopping tears off my cheeks a few weeks ago, and looking down at my cat, who had just expired on a stainless steel table in a veterinarian’s office. Since the night before, when I found her in front of our other cat’s water bowl, suddenly underweight and stinking of litterbox, I knew there was something rotten in the state of Mavis.
When I took her to the vet and he said immediately that she was critically ill, I knew I was going to have to make The Decision. When he prodded her kidneys and said he couldn’t tell them apart from the other organs, I knew I’d be driving home alone. When he showed me the x-ray, and told me her kidneys had somehow ballooned to the size of lemons when they should be about as big as a pair of dried apricots, I gulped and made the final arrangements in my head: Someone who has been my roommate for the past three years is going to die.
I’d known it all day, and I’d gone to bed thinking it the night before. I didn’t hide from the truth; in general, I’m naturally pessimistic and cynical to the point of wondering if the whole universe is just a big joke on me, so I wasn’t expecting any miracles. I was emotionally prepared for this. I opened the umbrella.
I got soaked.
Since then, I’ve thought of Mavis’s last minutes, prodded and probed and punctured on a cold table with a glass rod full of mercury in her rectum. I’ve thought about how she yowled when the technicians had to push on her bladder to make her pee in a vial. I’ve thought about how she yowled louder when the vet wrapped a tourniquet around her foreleg because he couldn’t find a vein. I’ve thought about how melodramatic I must have seemed afterward, slumping over the table and blubbering into her fur, even though I was still alive and comfortable and it was Mavis who had spent the last hour on a table in a lab, excreting water faster than she could drink it and facing the business ends of needles and rectal thermometers and unfamiliar fingers.
I thought of the signs of her illness that I should’ve seen but didn’t. I was changing the kitty-litter twice as much as usual; I’d just figured Mavis had developed some sort of litterbox treaty with Simba, the other cat, who she normally hated. Mavis started peeing when I was in the room, something she — a former stray — had always been too defensive to do; I thought maybe she was finally letting her guard down around me. I thought of how she had seemed just a little too uninterested in me, or food, or anything, over the past few weeks.
But I also thought of the time when she brought a sparrow, squawking like the Dickens, from the balcony and placed it in front of me in the bathroom and then sat there proudly, maybe waiting for me to stick it to the fridge with a magnet or something. When the sparrow tried to hop away, she would bat it down with a paw, then look at me again, with the same I-done-a-good-job-boss look on her face, like I was a Casa Nostra boss and she an up-and-coming kneecap-breaker.
And the times when she would curl up in bed next to my head and purr loudly and sometimes knead the pillow, tearing the pillowcase to shreds, and I would say “DAMMIT MAVIS I am trying to SLEEP!” and she wouldn’t move and I would roll over with plans to unceremoniously chuck her onto the floor, and she’d look all adorable with her eyes shut and her little paws working, and I’d lose my nerve and sleep on the couch.
And on warm nights when she would sit on the balcony waiting for me to come home, and meow like crazy when she saw me rounding the corner of the house, then be at the door when I opened it and practically fall out onto my feet.
And the time when she first came into my life, when I sat on my front stoop with a bowl of Bumblebee tuna and she ate the whole thing, and I tried to coax her upstairs into my apartment but she decided she’d rather curl up in my lap right there, and we enjoyed the warm night and said hi to passing neighbors. She came to live with me a few nights later.
These memories were better, and greater in volume than the one where she sat dehydrated on the vet’s table.
That’s the secret. You can’t prepare yourself for someone’s death. You can’t. Just forget about it, Kemosabe, ’cause it ain’t gonna happen. Even if Grandpa has been hooked up to machines for a year, you’ll still sob like a toddler when he finally goes away. No matter how waterproof the mackintosh, you’ll get wet.
But you can prepare yourself for the aftermath. You can dry off, eventually. You can’t help it. If you love someone, you’re prepared to dry. You’ve already got the memories, the mental Polaroids of how they looked when they were asleep, how they smiled when you bought them presents, how they laminated that cover of George magazine with the cast of The West Wing on it for you, how they talked about you in the acknowledgements of their dissertation. How they told you how great you are just at the time when you were feeling like a royal putz.
Last year, my grandmother was in the hospital, and my mother called me and said it might be a good idea for me to come home. She wasn’t responding to the medication the doctors were giving her, and she could barely sit up in bed. Soon after I got to the hospital, the medicine started working, and a few days later she went home. Nobody said the obvious: We were all terribly scared those would be our last moments with her.
Until Mavis died, I thought that I was prepared for my grandmother’s death, that when it finally happens, I would take it a bit easier, since I had been through the emotions before.
Now I know I’m wrong. When my grandmother passes on, I’ll be a wreck. There’s nothing I can do to get ready. It’ll hit me like a tidal wave, and pull me under for days, weeks, months.
But you can bet I’ll remember the hug she gave me that day at the hospital, after I had driven four hours in a rental Toyota because a reckless driver had totaled my Oldsmobile a few days before. It wasn’t the hug of a 75-year-old diabetic woman hooked up to a saline IV. It was the hug of a Navy SEAL leaving his family before a suicide mission, of a slave hugging her brother before the slavers dragged him to the auction block. Of a grandmother hugging her grandson who she feared desperately that she might not see before she died.
I’ll remember that hug, just as I’ll remember the last nuzzle Mavis gave my hand in the waiting room of the vet’s office. That hug, and that nuzzle, are what drags me out from under the riptide.
Mavis is dead now, and I’m still wet. Soaked. I’ll be that way for a while.
The secret is getting dry.