Jezebel

Friday, November 19 2004 @ 09:05 PM PST

Jezebel died a little after 4:00 yesterday afternoon, gently put to sleep with an overdose of anesthetic.

She's been struggling with kidney failure since September. She had some ups and downs in September and October, sometimes pepping up and seeming a little more like her old self. But a week ago, she began to slow down significantly, and seemed to be in pain. On Saturday evening, she stopped eating; on Sunday we tried force-feeding her, and on Monday we took her to the local vet, with whom we've been increasingly dissatisfied, and they weren't much help. We learned that she was anemic and very cold; her temp was 95, six or seven degrees below normal. Her heart had developed a murmur.

On Tuesday, we took her to Redwood Animal Hospital, recommended by our friend Shanie. By the time we had to leave for our afternoon appointment, we were convinced she was beyond saving. I broke down when it was time to put her in her carrier; I had this overwhelming feeling that if I could just stop, not do the next thing, that we could enter a sort of limbo state, and she could keep living.

Going down the stairs, half of me was relieved nobody was there to see us, red-eyed and crushed, carrying our cat to the car. Half of me resented the fact that nobody was there to ask what was wrong, and admire the stripey little cat who had made such a powerful impact on our lives. She deserved more than a couple of broken-hearted people, unable to muster any words. She deserved a screaming throng, lining the streets. It pissed me off that it wasn't there.

We arrived about half an hour early, filled out the paperwork, and met one of the vets. She ran a couple of blood tests and a urinalysis, and decided there was a decent chance they could pull her through and give her 3-6 more months of quality living. She had to stay two, maybe three nights, with IV fluids and various other treatments, to try to bring her around and get her eating on her own. We left her behind, somewhat in shock; after all the preparation and tears, we found ourselves in limbo after all.

We visited Tuesday evening. She seemed to be responding moderately well to the treatment; some of her numbers had come into the desired range. It was still touch-and-go; they were trying to hydrate her without turning her anemic blood so watery that it killed her. She also had lesions in her mouth, a side-effect of advanced kidney failure, which further explained why she wouldn't eat. But they felt it was still worth continuing to see if she improved further.

On Wednesday morning, the hospital called Nicole. Jezebel was not responding any further to treatment. She was hydrating, but her body just wasn't producing more red blood cells, she still wouldn't eat, and their prognosis was significantly poorer. They no longer believed they could give her more than another month, and it would be a month of injecting fluids under her skin every night and giving her nutrients through a tube.

They didn't say this, but Nicole knew it was true, and I agreed when she called me: if we went any further, we'd be doing it for us, not for her.

I met Jezebel on my first or second date with Nicole, depending on how we count. I walked her into her building and to her door, and when she opened it, a little grey streak shot out and scampered down the hall. She took a turn by the front door and ran down the stairs to the door at the bottom, which presumably led to the basement and laundry rooms. She then stopped and stared up at us, very pleased with herself. That was roughly five years and one month ago.

I didn't see her again until Nicole moved to her condo in Poulsbo and I began spending a night or two there each week. I came to know her as a finicky, talkative, frisky, and frankly somewhat bossy girl. She could jump really well, but didn't like to jump at the toy bird I bought her; she preferred that Nicole drag it back and forth across the floor, like some mutant feathered mouse, and she would stampede after it like a herd of rhinos. She liked it best when Nicole did it, but she didn't mind if I did.

She wanted to eat what she wanted, and when she wanted. In Jezebel's perfect world, every hour on the hour, we would have opened a fresh can of food, given her one teaspoonful on a new plate, and thrown the rest of the can away. If she wanted food in the middle of the night, she would stand on or next to Nicole, extend a single claw, and gently press it against Nicole's lower lip. She would repeat this every ten seconds or so until Nicole got up and fed her, or burrowed under the covers far enough to escape the reach of The Claw.

When I began spending nights there, Jezebel was at first put out by this strange man in bed with her mom. I knew I had finally been accepted after a few weeks when, after Nicole buried herself under the comforters, I was myself awakened by The Claw.

Moxie and I moved in with Nicole and Jezebel for a couple weeks in the summer of 2000, bridging the gap between my move-out date at the house in Ballard and my move-in date at the condo in Kingston. Jezebel was always very good with other animals; she would ignore them as much as possible, and try to get along civilly when their paths crossed. Moxie was not so accommodating; her first action upon being released into Jezebel's home was to chase Jezzie into her litter box and then sit there, growling and hissing at her.

Within a couple nights, though, Moxie was joining us on Nicole's bed at night. We'd be in the middle, with the cats as far away from each other as possible without actually falling off the edge. By the end of a week, they weren't exactly friends, but they were tolerating each other.

The following winter, when Nicole and Jezebel moved in with Moxie and me, the process repeated itself. Eventually, the two became playmates, though Jezebel wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about it as Moxie was. But then, they only had two games: Door and Chase. Door was okay; Jezebel would crouch behind an open door, while Moxie rolled around on the floor on the other side. Occasionally, Jezzie would stick a paw under the door, and Moxie would bat at it. She didn't like Chase so much, though, as Moxie would sometimes decide on her own that it was time to play, and if Jezebel didn't pick up on it fast enough, she'd wind up with a rather large cat landing on her butt. Usually she managed to stay ahead, though, and make it to the living room, where she would jump up onto my maroon glider. They somehow came to the mutual agreement that this was a safe zone; Moxie would chase her over and around any other furniture that was in their path, but if Jezebel made it to the glider, the game was over. Until she got down again.

Moxie was a much happier cat in general from that day forward, whether she'd ever admit it or not. The simple fact that she was no longer alone when Nicole and I went to work made a huge difference.

In one respect, Jezebel was a very naughty little cat: she loved to run outside. She wasn't really attempting to escape; it was a little game to her. She'd run down a flight of steps, and wait for one of us to get halfway down, then she'd run down the next flight, looking back at us the whole time, very pleased with herself. Eventually, she would turn around and run over to the nearest door that was on the same side of the landing as ours (evidently, she didn't think three-dimensionally when it came to apartment doors). Every once in a while, she'd take the game a little further and hide in the bushes next to the bottom of the stairwell. This would get her tail pulled as we grabbed onto it to haul her out; then we'd swear at each other all the way up the stairs and back inside.

Over the years, she accepted me more and more, but she was always Nicole's cat. She'd ask me for food, but only if Nicole wasn't around (or had fed her only half an hour ago, and was refusing to do so again). She always slept on Nicole's side of the bed, if not actually on Nicole. She'd come to me for pets, but only if Nicole's lap was unavailable.

This was never more clear than when Nicole and I were separated last year. Jezebel stayed with me, more for her sake and Moxie's than anything else. But she set aside many of her eccentricities, especially her pickiness with food, without Nicole around. So much of her personality was displayed through her interaction with Nicole that she seemed in many ways a different cat. She still slept on Nicole's side of the bed, but she moved over closer to me; I usually woke up pinned between two cats.

Much of Nicole's stuff was moved out of the condo while it was on the market. Jezebel was the constant reminder of my missing wife, the constant sign of a marriage on hold.

By the time we moved to Woodinville, Jezebel was showing signs of age. She was still active, still her old self, but she didn't run around as frequently. She seemed to be settling into a position as the queen cat of the household.

We don't really know how old she was. Nicole had her for eight years. She had a litter of kittens before that. She was at least ten. Maybe twelve. If we'd been told last January that we had less than a year left with her, rather than four or five, we'd have thought you were nuts.

She had the most rascally, stripey tail. She often claimed (through Nicole, a fine cat interpreter) to have had a tabby cat for a mother and a raccoon for a father.

She had a lovely, soft, grey-orange belly.

She would sit in the kitchen window, watching for us to come home.

She had the best contented squint in the world.

She was our little striposaurus rex, our perfect tabby kitty, our stripemonster.

Our Jezebel.

We arrived a little before four, and they set us up in one of the rooms with a soft blanket laid out on the counter. They brought her in, finally disconnected from her IV drip, with a catheter poking out from under the bandages on her left leg. Nicole held her in her lap for about ten minutes, while we stroked her and talked to her and cried. She purred, tried to stand up, and finally turned herself around, settling into a curled-up position on Nicole's lap.

I felt like I should explain to her what we were doing and why. Even knowing she couldn't understand, it felt right. But I couldn't get more than a few words out without breaking up.

The vet arrived and talked to us about what we could expect, various things that can happen that you never see on TV, things that could disturb you if you weren't expecting them. We moved her to the blanket, the vet prepared her syringes, and asked if we were ready. Nicole said yes.

The vet cried along with Nicole and I as she slowly pushed the drugs into the catheter. Nicole stroked Jezebel's side, and she laid her little head in the palm of my hand, and she was gone.