A Tough One

This month I’ve spent more nights away from my bed than in it, though I haven’t slept much. It’s been a rough, strange few weeks.

The week of Thanksgiving, Johnny and I road-tripped to Washington, D.C. to spend the holiday with his family. We made the usual arrangements for our pets, Bo going to his boarding place and Lucy staying at home with a sitter who comes by to check on her. It’s our standard setup any time we travel without the pets, and one the whole gang is usually very content with. On this trip, though, things didn’t go so smoothly.

The day after Thanksgiving, our cat sitter texted me. Lucy wasn’t acting like herself. She was sleeping a lot and wasn’t touching her food. Though it made me a little nervous, I wasn’t too worried. She was 13, after all. She was probably just enjoying being able to snooze the day away without keeping one eye open for the dog. I asked the sitter to update me later in the day.

That night, her report wasn’t any better. Lucy still hadn’t touched her food and was wobbling on her feet when she tried to get into the litter box. That part gave me pause. Though Lucy had been struggling to jump as easily she used to, I’d never seen her wobble. The sitter’s next text made my stomach drop.

“I think you should come home.”

We left D.C. at 5 the next morning and drove nonstop back to Long Island. As soon as we walked in the door, I knew something was wrong. Instead of running to greet us, Lucy was nowhere in sight. We made our way to the bedroom and found her curled up in a ball on the bed. I tucked her into her kennel and walked her straight back out to the car, our bags still inside it, and sped to the vet.

We’d known for a while that Lucy’s kidney function was declining, but we’d been keeping it in check with a special diet and some TLC. For some reason or another, though, things had gone into a tailspin. The next few days are a blur of trips to the vet, blood work, syringe feedings and IV fluids from a bag hung from the back of our bedroom door.

Lucy perked up. Then she backtracked. She had a really good day. Then a really bad day. After a week of this, we got the latest report from the vet. Lucy’s kidney levels, slowly but surely, were improving. With our girl tucked into her favorite blanket, sleeping on our bed, Johnny and I went out to dinner. When we came home, she was gone.

Maybe her body gave in under the stress. Maybe it felt better to let go and rest. Maybe it was “just her time,” as they say, although the timing felt completely fucked up to me. Whatever the case, it was traumatizing and relieving, horrifying and comforting all at once.

My other cat Rick passed away almost exactly a year earlier, and all those feelings of loss bubbled back to the surface. If you’re a pet owner, you know how devastating and conflicting it can be. I’d had Lucy for nearly half my life, Rick almost just as long. It was surreal that they were both gone.

Johnny and I placed her body in a small box and brought it to her vet. Then, we looked at each other, not sure what to do next. Before all this went down, we’d been set to leave on a five-day trip to Mexico for Johnny’s birthday. He had the whole upcoming week off from work. With Lucy being sick, we’d cancelled everything except the nonrefundable flights, which we figured would be a loss.

Now, though, the house seemed weirdly empty. I kept poking my head in the room to check on Lucy, forgetting and then remembering she was gone. The weather was appropriately nasty, rainy and cold. We decided to pack and get on the plane to Mexico.

I hardly brought a thing except a few bathing suits and random clothes I grabbed haphazardly from my “summer” drawer. I had to buy a toothbrush when we got there. The trip was lovely. We surfed. We hiked. We ate and drank. I sat on the beach and did yoga and thought about Lucy. We celebrated Johnny getting another year older.

We came home. A couple days passed and I got on a plane again, this time to spend “Christmas” with my family since we couldn’t be with them for the real thing. Again, lovely. Family time, mom time, childhood bedroom, the whole shebang.

And now, here I am, back in New York. Christmas came and went, and if I’m being honest, I spent most of the day wanting it to be over. I feel horrible saying that; I have so much to be thankful for. And I am thankful—so thankful. I just didn’t feel very rah-rah about it all this year.

There’s always that disorienting lull between Christmas and New Year’s when you’re not sure what day it is or whether it’s appropriate to eat again even though you just said how full you were 30 minutes ago, but it feels like my entire month has been that way. I’m thankful to have had time to decompress, but I can’t tell you how much of a relief it was to sit down at my computer and go back to work today. Normalcy.

There’s less than a week left in 2019 and I’m ready to say goodbye to it. I’m not trying to be dramatic—I realize things aren’t going to up and feel great again just because it’s a new year. Still, it feels like a fresh start, the closing of a chapter I’ll be glad to have behind me.