Prayer Request

Prayers for my little black cat Sophie as she makes her way across the great river. She has been hanging on valiantly for over a week, clearly not wanting to leave.

Her passing is making me thoughtful about how we rush death.

She is 18, long-lived for a house kitty. My dad gave her to me, when his farm cat had kittens. She has been with us since a year before he died, much too quickly, of a blood clot. He died very quickly, so quickly I wasn’t there for him. She is teaching me patience as I sit with her now.

I keep looking at her and thinking, “Should I do something?” But she has water, and a bed. What would a doctor do? Pump her full of drugs and turn her into a Frankenstein kitty to be kept alive a few weeks longer? Or tell me to put her out of her misery (aka kill her)? She doesn’t seem ready to go yet. And yet she is clearly dying.

I am thinking maybe the worst thing about the vaxx is how it is making people die suddenly. Taking their last moments away in a heartbeat. When my cat has spent the past month preparing to pass.

I didn’t give my dog Joy this time to pass. She died two years ago, almost to the day (October 27, 2020). She had lost all her blood—no red cells, no white cells, no platelets, nothing. We gave her a transfusion and it kept her going for a week, but then she crashed again, spent the last week incontinent. I sat with her for an hour in the emergency room (a quiet room for sitting, it was actually compassionate), and then the vet gave her the heart-stopping medicine.

Giving our pets good deaths is an object lesson in how we ourselves die. It just seems all the crueler how many of our grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, have died alone and/or “suddenly” these past two years. With no time to say good-bye, if only until we join them.

Sophie (Autumn 2004-November 2, 2022)