Who Can Say?

I knew it when I caught myself smiling and smiling as I listened to the lady 60 with her long hair and her big hands sitting on a  pakr bench, singing a Moody Blues tune: I would be fine. The world would once again beckon to me, charm me, call me out of my private sadness.Wonderful people wrote me yesterday, Facebook friends, strangers, regular and first-time commenters on this blog, and many asked how the death went.This is what happened: The vet had prepared us well. Merry and tender Dr. Kevin Fallon bounded up the front steps of our house on Sunday. “How’s he doing? I’ve been driving around for 24 hours with this shot in my car! It’s a kind of super-cortisone. Let’s try it and see what happens..."He administered it to poor Abe who had lost so much in those last two days: the desire for water, the desire for food, even his remarkable  (A young friend of mine named Rayvoughn still swears he heard Abe talk. Once, when I left him here to go fetch his friend Tristan, he said Abe came right up in his lap, peered into his face and said, "Who are YOU?” “I couldn't believe it, I was speechless!” said Ray afterward. “But he kept looking at me. Finally I said “Uh, a friend, I’m I’m I’m….just a friend!’ and the cat got down and walked away.”)Anyway, six hours after this shot the cat stood and began gobbling from the food dishes we had set up on the end of our bed. Not just the special super-caloric kind that smells so good I kept almost eating it but even the kibble he hadn’t gone near in  a week. Dr. Fallon had warned us though that this would be temporary. “We’re talking sometime in the next week,” he said. “That mass we feel in his leg could be one of many.”Sure enough, Tuesday morning I was on the phone in tears. We made the appointment for early that evening.Dr Fallon was off that day but his associate Dr. Lisa Oswald could not have been nicer. Nor could the many compassionate techs who greet every arriving animal like their own long-lost pet.Once she gently confirmed the fact that we were all three ready to say goodbye, she explained what would happen: a shot of what amounts to anesthesia following which, over a course of five or ten minutes, the cat would grow drowsy and finally drop into a peaceful sleep. We were of course welcome to stay and hold him when that second shot went in, the one that would end brain activity, but sometimes there was a reaction, she said; twitching, or the loss of bladder or bowel control. But  Abe had always been so tidy in his personal habits; why would I want to witness that last loss of dignity? More important, how could I watch as all that lovely electric energy that is the life force so suddenly…. vanished?I had my hand on his back as he began to dream. David had his hand on mine. My whole shirtfront was wet with tears and David kept blowing air out of his mouth which is what he does in times of sharpest grief. In a few minutes, Abe extended his front leg in a long luxurious stretch and I knew he felt just fine. We left by the back door, sorry sight that we were, so as not to spoil the bright aura of heath and jubilation out front. We drove around for a while in the hills of Arlington. And when we got home, David send me upstairs and went to work removing every food dish, litter box and cat carrier in the place.I kept his collar and his leash though and set it on the window-seat of the upstairs study here where I do my writing, and yesterday morning - what do you think? - for the first time since I bought it last winter my gardenia plant offered up what you see here below. Who can say what life is then or where next it will flower forth?