Life’s Endings Part 2
At thirty-four, when my husband Paul and I moved to Massachusetts, I felt happy when we found a house that we could afford in an excellent neighborhood for schools for our daughters.
One morning, looking out to our small backyard with the neighbors’ woods and a bigger yard past a thin hedge, I witnessed up close a bloody cat and squirrel fight that horrified me, leaving me unable to move. This brutal reality of nature caused memories about death and dying that I was holding to now be released in a long poem of my feelings that would soon help me decide on a new role with our daughters.
They were eleven and three in 1977 when we moved into our new home and by Christmas morning, the wide-windowed sunroom off the kitchen had a home for guinea pigs, the first one having given birth during the Santa Claus hours on Christmas Eve, so that there were two in the cage where Santa had left one. Our daughters named them Fern and Scamper. Supermarket cartons became future homes lining the back wall as the population of guinea pigs grew. When death came, each pet was honored by a cardboard box-burial with flowers and a white cross. The girls would go in procession with Paul in the lead, carrying a shovel, to choose a resting place in the neighbors’ woods behind our home.
Years passed. Two rescued cats, one for each daughter, lasted until Calico, who only our older daughter could hold, disappeared. I had taken Calico to a friend’s to visit for a week (our older daughter had moved out), but between a different home and that friend’s cat living in it, Calico spent her week traumatized. Upon our return, she promptly disappeared without a trace, saddening me for my mistake to have taken her with me.
Our younger daughter’s cat, Mellow, had lain quietly tucked under her arm from first grade on as our daughter read until eleven o’clock at night. (I’d fall asleep having been assured by the pediatrician that she would be fine and that this was good parenting.) But as Mellow grew older, he began passing stools all over the basement, climbing onto our daughter’s shoulder when she practiced violin, and clawing the window ledges. There was no diagnosis our veterinarian could make. I thought Mellow should be put to sleep, while our daughter and a young woman veterinarian intern living with us during her thirteen months of internship said no.
Finally we reached a time for my decision to be acted on. We learned that there had been a medical reason for Mellow’s unwanted behavior and that he had been in pain; still, the end was hard. I sat sadly alone in the waiting room, while both daughters, crying, held Mellow in the exam room, as the veterinarian used the needle that put Mellow to sleep. As they were not going right home, I was grateful to be allowed to carry his cloth-bound body out of the building. As I stepped behind my car onto a city street, a large truck zoomed by so close that, feeling as distraught as I did, I hollered a rasping, rarely spoken “F--k” at the driver. At home, I chose a space behind the small, white tool shed under a large, long-needled pine for Mellow to remain near.
My realization is, “By allowing children through teenage years to participate in the dying and death of a pet, we are giving them an important rite of passage that may also support them in facing the loss of a family member or a friend.”