On the other hand, who knows what I'll do? - Day

5:12PM - Crappy New Year

I spent my New Years Day at the Sorry, Your Cat Has Cancer, That'll be $900 Emergency Veteranary Clinic in Baltimore.

Pokey was listless and crappy; cancer was mentioned because she had swollen tummy lymph nodes. As it turned out, she did not have cancer, just kidney disease. She stayed overnight at the hospital, and went into cardiac arrest this morning at 5:30; they DEFRIRILLATED HER (you'll forgive me if I snicker, between my tears, at the image of tiny cat-sized defrib paddles) but she didn't pull through. We just buried her.

I have been alternately sobbing like a maniac, and laughing, well...like a maniac, I'm afraid. First of all, imagine how pitiful things are at the emergency vet on New Years. No one's there because they think their dog is going to be good as new. There's a certain amount of rueful chuckling at the extreme pitifulness of it all.

There, we met Vito Corlione, an adult pug with an inflamed trachea, who tried to bark and made the oddest sound ever: somewhere between a very small lion roaring and a very old Jewish man trying to get out of a beanbag chair. So that was funny. Dogs shaved are kind of funny, especially when they're actually going to be okay. The idea of a cat defribrillator, honest to God, made me laugh out loud.

Well, she died this morning, and I went to work, since I was up already. I'd been away for a week and there were things that needed to be done. Everyone I told was very sympathetic, and most people had a dead pet story of their own. We bonded. After church, Eric and I had a snivelly lunch, then drove to the vets to sign away our remaining home equity and pick up several-hundred-dollars worth of beloved cat carcass.

This was the saddest thing ever - the vet tech referred to putting her in a "casket", and that almost killed me. We had brought a cardboard box - a cat in a cardboard box, that's the most natural thing in the world, right? That's what cats always want to do anyway, curl up in a box. A cat in a casket, though - that's a dead cat. There's no getting around it. If your cat's in a casket, it's dead. So the use of that particular noun made me totally fall apart in the waiting room, red-faced and aspirating snot in front of all the other devoted pet owners. It was awful. I had to go outside and cry in the parking lot.

As I was out there, the worst-looking dog I have ever seen arrived. It was an adult yellow lab, and it was coming in to have its shunts removed. It had squares and rectangles shaved off in weird random places; it had a discolored scar down one side of its face like a prison gang tattoo. And yet, there it was, hobbling in to get its drains out, and the whole family had come along. I was humbled by the family's obvious devotion to this dog, and the dog's determination to live and be normal again, in the face of an obviously painful recovery. (The family said that the dog has escaped from the cargo hold of an airplane, and run down the tarmac, where it was run over by some vehicle. Maybe the big motorized stairs, I don't know.)

Anyway, while we were all marveling at the Triumphing Over Adversity Dog, the vet tech slipped Eric a box. It was a flat white box with a handle, taped shut, small and heavy; this was Pokey's casket. He slipped it into the car without fanfare and then called me to go.

I got a look at this casket, and honestly, it looked exactly like a take-out food container. The ridiculousness of it - of takeout cat - made me feel so much better. It made it all seem somehow normal, rather than tragic, and we laughed some more. Plus I was pleased that the casket was biodegradable.

We laughed more when we went out to the yard and tried to dig a hole for it. We both dug - you'd be surprised how big a hole you need - through the topsoil layer and the random tree-root layer and the clay layer, and stopped at the rock layer (obviously.) There was some hilarity, centering on me falling into the hole. We each said a few words (after questioning one another's ability to say anything in just a *few* words). We each threw in a handful of dirt, then dumped the wheelbarrow full onto the takeout box and paced back and forth to tamp it down.

I had Pokey for 16 years. She had been a stray. She was a kitten when I started spending time with Eric, and our first pet together.

Man, did she love me.