The Ancient One

This is just an essay about a dead cat. It’s not anything more than that, and why I feel compelled to write it I do not know.

Her name was Luna, like everyone's cat. She came with the name. I didn’t pick it.

Maybe it’s because my husband finally remembered to pick up the plaster paw prints and the ashes in a decorative tin box  from the vet a couple of weeks ago. I've probably made five trips to the vet for other animals since putting her down and didn't remember once to ask after her remains.

My heart was always a little hard toward her.

She wasn't mine you see.

I called her "my mother's cat" for at least three years after my mother died. I didn't choose her. And to be fair, she didn’t choose me or any of us. Luna’s heart had a protective coating on it exactly as hard as mine.

When my mother was in hospice, she apologized to me that her dying process was such a bother.

‘You only have one thing to apologize for mother…" I said ominously.

"What is it?" she asked.  I was touched because she seemed a so vulnerable and receptive, so unlike her.

"You owe me an apology for turning me into a crazy cat lady!"

 See,  we already had three. And when my mother moved out of her apartment to begin the work of dying in earnest, we took home her two, which meant we now had five cats.  And of course, the two cat-gangs - mine, and hers - hated each other, and we had to keep them separated- and it was all pretty much a nightmare of agitated and traumatized cats and too many litter boxes.

I never really liked my mother's cats - they seemed weird and twitchy and always hid under the furniture when I came over, even though I was the only one cleaning their cat litter.

‘Fair!" my mother said, obviously relieved my demand was no greater. "No one should have five cats!”  She laughed through the oxygen tubes in her nose.

I inherited this old Luna cat from my mother. But my mother had Luna foisted on her when she went to put her own cat down, and the Brooklyn Heights Grateful Deadhead veterinarian shoved Luna in my mother's arms on her way out saying: "Its destiny! They just dropped her off because her owner died, and your cat just died so you belong together!”  My mother was pissed but brought her home anyway.

“What was I supposed to do? Just drop her on the floor in the waiting room?”

While Luna lived with my mother, she seemed to be a pretty old cat already. She had some congenital eye problem because her eye-lashes grew in the wrong direction and constantly irritated her crusty swollen eyes. “Her eyes are just like that” my mother said.

Luna wasn’t friendly but she wasn’t mean. She was just aloof. Uninterested in anything other than eating and looking out the window. She never approached people but didn’t always run away if you approached. She stood guard, like a watchman at the window.  Avoiding contact, tolerating an occasional stroke -  but never more than one.

A female ginger cat was rare, my mother said and infertile. Luna’s perceived rarity, and the mystery of her backstory, her station at the window and her functionary aloofness made her a very particular kind of presence in the house.

It was after my mother died, and then a dear friend who had helped me care for my mother, died right after each other of challenging and rare cancer diagnoses- and a few short months after I was diagnosed with an impossible cancer as well  - I wondered just how many caretakers had Luna outlived?  Maybe she was sucking the life out of us one after another. For all I knew she’d survived the Salem witch trials by feeding on the souls of the women who were unjustly hanged.  “You aren’t gonna get me Luna”  I’d whisper to her as passed her on the stairs, clinging to the banister weak and nauseated during the chemotherapy years.

These were my shittier moments of cat care-taking, when flashes of fury spiked, enraged with all my mother had left behind for me to take care of, which was almost exactly as angry as I was that she had left me at all.  And how deeply and how consistently she’d left me over the course of our lives.

And I wondered if she'd left me a killer-cat too.

But eventually, we struck a truce, Luna and I. A distant guardian, who lived in our house, through the years of trouble. Or maybe she was just a weird little angel, and I was too sick, too stunned to see that she was holding down the fort,  anchoring the corners for us through the time that we surely need protection from all four corners and from the heavens too.

She moved with us across country to New Mexico the second my cancer went into a tentative early remission. Luna, the ancient one, traveled with us, in the smallest under seat cat-box I'd ever seen and the only size that Delta airlines approved.

Like a champ.

She lived in a cold empty stone house while we unpacked and furnished it and learned how the wood stove worked to heat the first floor. In this fire warmed rock-cave, Luna took up residence. And became a little kinder, sillier, a wee bit more social. She reigned over the beagle and the chihuahua and her neurotic Siamese sister, who my mother had also bequeathed to us.

Luna owned the kitchen breakfast nook.

Luna on the back of the breakfast nook, standing watch

And then we put her neurotic sister down for a cancerous tumor on her foot, and then, maybe a year later, it was clear Luna’s body was shutting down.

"This is an old cat” the new veterinarian said when we’d first brought her in. We told him we had no idea how old, and asked if he had guesses:

 "Old." he said.

We took care of her old lady problems, and she developed several, set her up with heating pads in her cat cave, where she would inevitably relax so deeply, she would pee in her sleep. And she ate and pee-slept, and we washed and tossed the covers and cat beds until they disintegrated  and then switched them out for new ones.

She was tired.  She was deaf. Her eyes were still always puffy and crusty. She'd had a few strange seizures – some big ones, some small -  called “Tom and Jerry Syndrome” they occur in old deaf cats when certain high-pitched noises penetrate their deafness. Cats may make wacky startled faces like a cartoon cat just before the fit.  And she wasn't just peeing in her sleeping spot, but wherever she sat down for a bit,  tiny pee puddles whenever she had been - and I am not one who would ever, ever, consider diapers for a cat.

The last straw came when she developed a painful limp. And yes, she was still enjoying food- but seizures whenever the tin roof squeaked, and pee everywhere, hard of hearing and seeing, and now, more pain- it all seemed like a lot for a cat who never we had never chosen and who had never chosen us.

She was declining  but -  in the weeks when we knew it needed to be soon, but  before I scheduled the appointment  - she had a few silly rallying days where we would have a good cuddle with each other, now that we finally had space in our hearts.  Now that we had made it through some things, and I didn't die on her - she could flirt with me and enjoy a chin and even a brief tummy scratch or play with a toy on the stairs.

The Ancient One. It was time for her to go. and a time for me to protect myself from all the relentless slow, dying, dying, dying. It was time. For her, for me.

Maybe she’d needed someone to stay alive so that she could be one to go.  

When it was scheduled, and it was time for me to take her- David offered to do it. "It’s your Mom's cat, you don't have to do it..."

"No, I want to. It’s our contract. One of us was always going to out-live the other.”

We both wanted it to be me. She probably understood the terms of the contract from the beginning, maybe even before we met.  Maybe since she fled the gallows of Salem. It would be one of us. And she needed to leave instead of being left.

And she’d stood guard for me. Just as  my mother would have wanted her to, during my journey to the edge of the abyss.

I always think that the animals who enter and exit our lives seem to have carried me from one phase of living to the next.  Little bodhisattvas, there to require things of us, and forgive us in our struggles, and make sure things are staying on course. Devoted furry psychopomps traveling alongside us through all our joys and sorrows. Even on the journey to hell and back.

It doesn’t mean you are freed from hell or done learning your lessons when they leave (you must free yourself).  But it always seems to mean a new chapter of living has begun and their teacher-pet-guardian responsibilities are finished.

This was our deal. Luna was the last living bit of my mother, and I wanted to make sure I showed up. I knew in my bones that my mother would be at the exact address, thousands of miles from where she had died, in a state she’d never traveled to, to collect old Luna. I didn’t want to stand my mother up when it was the only time I was sure she would be there.

So, I filled the cat carrier with blankets and catnip, my lovely son came with me, and I put her box in his lap for the freeway drive to the vet. She didn't meow much.

My son waited in the car while I held Luna for a while in the examination room which she barely tolerated. We looked out the window at the birds in the juniper bush until she got too wiggly and annoyed.  I told her to look for Mom and go straight to her.

And I apologized that I hadn't gotten to know her as well as I might have.

"But you know Luna, it was a lot. Burying the all the dead, and raising kids, and being sick, and trying to stay alive, I could only do so much...’

I was bawling now, asking Luna for her forgiveness thinking of all the ways that my resentment toward my mother, the trauma of her death had spilled over on to this rare female ginger cat, who I never treated as if she was precious. How bereavement and my own cancer  had collided and become inseparable. Watching my mother's dying had made my own diagnosis so much more terrifying- with such a fresh, flashbacks of my mother's final agonal breaths. My mother's death burdened my own treatment, haunted my sleepless nights.

And her fucking cats.

I didn't have the energy to spend hours holding myself and a household together and play Snow White to an aloof, traumatized cat I never wanted.

"I'm sorry Luna. I just didn't have it. I just didn't have anything to give."

Luna sat on the metal exam table licking her ulcerated foot.

The vet returned and for some reason said this: “As upset as I get, I know that some people really do put their pets down because they love them and think it’s for the best.”

 "What?!” I thought.  

Is this lady implying that I shouldn't put this an ancient limping seizing pissing deaf blind cat down? Or that I should spend another five hundred dollars on a biopsy on the weird bleeding lump on her foot?

Or that I really loved her? Or that I didn’t? What the fuck? '

“She's been through enough" I mustered a civil reply. “She's been through more than enough."

The vet administered the shots. We have been through this many times with many other pets over sixty years of pet ownership.  I hope I can die this peacefully. I wish my mother could have died as peacefully as her cat got to.

When it was done, I stroked her for a bit- conscious-that it would have made her skin twitch and cause her to run away if she were still alive. The vet came back and wrapped her in a blanket and to take her "to the back.” They must have a refrigerated dead-pet-morgue back there I realized. Luna's orange striped tail hung limp out of the back of the blanket.

That dangling tail remains a visual memory as indelible as the horror of my mother gasping for air like a fish out of water, trying to talk, and unable to say anything.

"I know Mom. I know everything you think and feel for me and want to say. There is nothing now you can tell me that I don’t already know. I promise, I know, I already know. Just concentrate on letting go now."

On the way home I car-talked to the invisible spirit of my dead mother. Apologizing for not taking better care of her cats, and of her.

"I just didn't have it Mom, I didn’t have it…." And I told her, wherever she was,  something neither of us knew when she was alive: "I'm glad you didn't know, and didn't find out, because it would have torn you to pieces, but the doctors think I was getting sick even before your breast lump. Remember how bad my migraines were getting? How I got so swollen and puffy? All of those and strange allergic reactions, and pain in my legs and feet? And how fatigued I was? Mom, that was all the cancer the doctors think, the whole time I was trying to take care of you I was sick too, while I was so worried about you and the kids and everyone else."

As I pulled into the driveway, I realized that Luna hadn't wanted or needed more from me than I had to give. I went in and  splashed cold water on my face and knew that was what I had needed from that feline bodhisattva most of all.

Oh, Ancient Luna, thank you so much for not wanting more. I will love you forever for that.

Today’s Business:

• I reluctantly decided to re-open the 45 Dreams Project after David shared a Trump dream with me and I saw several floating by on social media.  

• And I am still actively collecting Climate Dreams if you have any you’d like to share!

• The Depth and Mysticism Study Group starts reading Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation and new members are always welcome to hop in when we start a new book. We’ll be reading the introductions, notes and prefaces and discussing it this Thursday if you feel like joining.

• Vocation and Discernment Group and the Repurpose and Renewal Group are both accepting new members.  Both are groups for therapists and clinicians who are looking frankly at the limitations of the current mental health practice models: Vocation and Discernment is more for those who are seeking support and looking to avoid burnout and find sustainable ways to reframe and continue in their current practices  - and Repurpose and Renewal is for practitioners who are actively struggling with burnout, leaving their previous practice models, or even the profession itself  behind, and looking for new ways to work in the world that aligns with the era we are negotiating and respecting their own human limitations.  If you are interested and curious as to which group might be a better fit for you I’m glad to sort it out with you.

• Another option for therapists is the Liberation Psychology Reading group where we explore ways to integrate Lib Psych theories into individual and group practice.

• Finally, I’m still super fanatical about trying to assert viable models of healthy community care  - and to that end The Group-Group  is still accepting applications and is open to everyone. When it is full enough I’ll poll the applicants to find the most viable time/day to meet.

All my work is offered on a pay-what-you-can/by donation basis. I see many folks for low-fee or no-fee both individually and in workshops and groups. If you would like to subsidize this work, or these free shared essays at Substack, donations are gladly accepted.