Ever since last summer, I've been steeling myself for having to soon say goodbye to someone who has meant so much to me in such a short amount of time. Chiara has been the apple of my eye since I adopted her in September 2009. I could not imagine life before her or without her and I felt so lucky to have been granted the chance to be her mom, even as a senior at 13 years old. Initially I was worried that she wouldn't warm up to me, but within a couple of days she followed me around the house and loved to jump onto my lap as soon as I sat on the couch to watch TV. It was the perfect owner-pet relationship. It was what I had always wanted. Even if she didn't like to be carried.
Most nights she would find a spot to sleep next to me in bed and sometimes she'd try to wake me up if my alarm clocks (two!) failed. In her first year with me, she would try desperately to leave the house with me when I went off to work. And when I came home, I would have her to look forward to seeing (and blocking) as I entered the door.
Giagi took her on walks to the front lawn to eat grass, sometimes a few times a day. All it took was a few looks from Chiara and he would give in. Ma shed her lifelong cat-aversion and ended up treating Chiara more like a grandchild than anything. She had a way of maneuvering around all of my mom's fragile trinkets (of which there are several) without knocking anything over. She was a clean, petite, and careful cat.
I don't mean to be using past tense through most of this, but the reason that I am is because I am trying to accept the facts. Her health started deteriorating while I was in Italy last year. The vet was surprised that she had made it. I prayed that I'd get to see her again. And when I came home in September, I was shocked to see how much weight she had lost. When we got her she was already light at six pounds, but after her infection she was closer to four. I took each day as a blessing, and when her appetite increased and she gained more weight, I was hopeful that she'd be fine for awhile, even if we had to take her to the vet a few times each week for subcutaneous injections and feed her daily with vitamin supplements and other medication. She had renal insufficiency, anemia, and high blood pressure--but cats can survive years of kidney disease. They're the one animal who can continue to function for a long period diagnosed.
I still remember my first scare with her some months after I adopted her. She had to get most of her teeth removed since they were in such a severe state. And then weeks later I noticed that her pupils were uneven, which I attributed to a side effect of her surgery but worried that it could be brain damage. Now that I think about it, I guess it was never that easy with her health-wise, but as much as everything costed, it was worth her feeling better.
I remember how she was the one thing holding me back from pursuing my dream in Italy. I didn't want her to feel that I had abandoned her and I was worried about how she would cope. My parents did an excellent job of caring for her and Ma would always follow her with the laptop on our Skype dates, just so I could see how she was doing even though she never seemed to notice me.
For the past few weeks she has not been her usual self, always sleeping in her bed and barely eating at all. Then she started having accidents in her bed and not being able to jump onto a chair. Some days she was a bit better so I thought maybe it was just a tired phase, but yesterday I decided to take her for an appointment with the vet and I was told that these are signs of kidney failure. They can hospitalize her and give her IV fluid to see how she responds, but basically this is the end stage and I will need to start thinking about putting her down so that she will not suffer for that much longer. She has been there since yesterday morning and will stay overnight again today and then hopefully I can bring her home tomorrow so that she can spend her last days comfortably.
I have had this at the forefront of my mind for weeks and could only now find some catharsis for my emotions. It's not something I can talk about or share the way things are usually communicated nowadays. And since I have felt this coming for some time now, I regret to say that I had already started distancing myself from her as a means of avoiding her condition and becoming accustomed to her absence. It is so selfish and cowardly of me.
Right now I know what I will have to do but I don't want to think about when I'll have to do it. I've never had to say goodbye to someone close to me and I never would have wanted the responsibility to decide to. It's all very overwhelming to me.
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