An Aging Kitty

When I got home Friday night, I finally, vividly realized something that's been happening every morning when I get up and every evening when I come home from work.

Many of you have been reading here for a long time. So you'll remember the day I came home and found my cat Scotty going into a diabetic coma. (I had no idea he was diabetic.) He survived, to the delight and astonishment of my vet. Since then he's been up and down.

Recently, it seems it's mostly down. I continue to administer insulin every morning and evening, but in the past month my glucose tests suggest the insulin is doing almost nothing to control his glucose levels.

I've moved my laptop now so that I can blog and Web-surf from the sofa, with Scotty nestled up against my side.

Usually, when I get up in the morning or come into the house after work, I will find Scotty standing on the bathroom vanity, waiting for a drink of "living water." He has trained me that my first job every morning and evening is to turn the bathroom faucet onto a trickle, so that he can drink this fresh water. (I think he learned this from Shug, as he never did it before her death.)

I am growing more and more worried about Scotty's glucose levels. If he's staying in the 400s, I expect bad stuff is happening to his organs. But the vet is at the end of her ropes, with no more ideas about the root cause. Of course, being 17 years old may be the root cause for Scotty.

When I came home Friday, Scotty did not meet me at the door. Nor was he on the vanity, waiting for his living water. I put down my things, poured myself a drink, and then began looking for him, room by room. Fearing the worst.

Thanks be to God, I finally found him under the bed. We'd had thunderstorms in the morning, and Scotty is terrified by them. So I guess he "went for cover."

I don't know what it was Friday evening. Something just told me that it might be the day when he died. This brought me face-to-face with the fact that, one of these evenings or mornings, he's probably not going to come to me. I'm probably going to find him somewhere, having slipped quietly away.

To some of you, this will probably sound like a hideous segue. But I'm pretty sure that my concern for Scotty and my heightened sensitivity to mortality is related to Caminante's news that Naomi died Thursday. When I read that news, I was more grief-stricken than I expected. I cried and cried with the sadness of a life ended too soon.

I hate death. I hate it with a never-ending hate.
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
And so I do.