This post is hard to write. I've had cats before, and I knew all too well that welcoming one into your life comes with the knowledge that you'll watch their entire life unfold over a decade or two of yours; that they will grow up and eventually grow old before your eyes, and at some unknown day in the future it will be time to say goodbye. There will be a last day, a last repetition of every morning cat routine, and a last photo. And whenever that day comes, it's always too soon.
For Taz, that day came back in July, at age 14, after a short illness. At first, back in late May, the vets thought it was just an ear infection, but then further tests revealed a rare and aggressive cancer of the middle ear, possibly originating in the gland that makes earwax, of all things. This has a very poor prognosis in cats, and the odds when people come down with it (which is a thing that happens, it turns out) aren't much better, frankly, and I suppose this is the "RT to raise awareness" part of this post. Not that there's anything you can do (that doctors know of) to lower your odds, and your starting odds of getting it are already quite low. But cats and people do get it, and their odds were quite low too. In any case, it's one more unpleasant medical condition that you didn't know existed and now you do.
A month or two after that day, I realized there was an upcoming annual tradition that was about to be awkward. Every year since 2013, my last post of the year here has been a recap of Instagram cat photos I posted there over the last 12 months. This started as my version of the "Year in Review" articles that newspapers and magazines like to run at the end of the year, as a way to fill space while everyone's out on vacation. Or in my case, a way to be sure I can hit my current goal of a whopping 1 blog post every month, even if life gets crazy over the holidays. Which doesn't sound like much, and it isn't, but I've managed to pull it off monthly since late 2005, albeit with a few close calls over the years.
Anyway, I thought about holding on to this post until New Years Eve and posting it at the usual time. But it didn't feel right to end the year with sad veterinary news, especially not sad news from six months earlier. It also didn't feel right to just drop the tradition and not say another word about it. I didn't seriously consider that, though it was technically an available option. Then in the last few weeks I got to thinking that I should go ahead and post it now, since the plan of record right now is to take a pet hiatus for a while, get out and see more of the world without any cute animals worrying you've abandoned them, etc. So I almost certainly won't have additional cat photos between now and January, so no reason to hold off any longer on posting this. Also, I just realized I didn't do a post like this back in 2012, which was the first year I had an IG account, and I think may have been before Instagram supported embedding photos in blog posts. So I have a draft post that I might publish right after this one, or possibly tomorrow, with cute old photos of Taz at around two years old.
Of course I know all about the Universal Cat Distribution System, and I sort of get that fate and random chance iteract in mysterious ways (and I really only believe in the latter), and future events are unknowable, and life specializes in awkward timing, and if a hungry wet kitten ran up to me in a dark parking lot begging for help, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be able to refuse. So who knows.
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