Goodbye, Tee!

The “player to be named later” has gone free agent. 

He came into the family in 2004, brought home from the vet’s office with his brother Alvin.  They’d been abandoned by their mother as tiny babies, and were bottle raised by the vet until they could be adopted.  We meant to adopt only one…but by the time we went to pick him up, Alvin and his little brother were the only 2 left in the cage.  We couldn’t take one and leave the other.  So we took them both—Alvin was the original draft choice, and Theodore was “the player to be named later.” For much of their lives with us, the boys were not really individual cats; each was half of the pair.  Salt and pepper.  Bread and butter. Yin and yang. "Ow" (Alvin) and "Tee" (Theo.)  

Theo was the sweet one.  His expression was always one of pure innocence and cuteness.  He had a loud purr and a quiet voice…he’d look you in the eye and open his mouth, and nothing but the tiniest squeak would come out.  He also had a stubborn streak a mile wide.  From the time he was a kitten, if he decided he wanted something, he literally put his head down and charged right after it.  No barrier we ever tried to erect between him and something he wanted was proof against his iron-willed head-butt.

He loved sunshine and soft pillows and snuggling with his brother and the rest of the crew on the bed or any available chair.  

He and Alvin had lived their whole lives in our house in Scappoose.  And more than any of the rest of them, the move was traumatic for Theo.  He hollered balefully for the entire two-hour drive from the old house to the new house, and hid in closets and behind furniture for weeks during the unsettling process of transitioning all our stuff—all his stuff—to the new house.  Though he did eventually seem to settle in well enough, I’m not entirely sure that the trauma didn’t weaken him to the point of being susceptible to life-threatening illness.  I read somewhere that cancer is a disease of opportunity, and that it can take hold when an immune system is compromised by emotional trauma.  I fear that may be what happened to our Theo. 

We’d had him to the vet to have some teeth and a skin tumor removed back in October.  He was fine for a couple of months, and then he seemed to have trouble eating.  He lost a bunch of weight.  I was convinced that the new vet we had chosen had somehow botched the tooth extraction, and that he now had a raging infection in his mouth and sinuses.  I’m still not sure that wasn’t the problem, but during pandemic hampered vet visits, as far as I know, she didn’t even look in his mouth or explore that possibility.  Hard to know when you drop the kitty off at curbside and they come out and get him, and try to communicate the exam by phone. 

It’s just as likely that the one suspicious skin tumor that was removed was cancerous, and the cancer had migrated to some vital part of his body.  In this time of pandemic, with the husband looking at the end of his 26-year job and our small business in pandemic-related hiatus, we could not afford a battery of tests and multi-thousand dollar treatments.  And I’m not sure I would have done them if we HAD unlimited funds.  I’m not much of a believer in prolonging life—ANY kind of life—at any cost.  We do that to our fellow human beings, and it doesn’t seem like a very positive thing to me, most of the time.  I can’t endorse inflicting our stubborn struggle against death on our companion animals.  When it’s time for them to give up their flesh, they should be allowed to do so, with as little pain and anguish as possible, of course.  But we need to LET THEM GO. 

So we did what we thought was enough.  We put him on antibiotics, pain killers and other supportive drugs, along with administering fluids from an IV bag once a day, for a little over a month.  We watched him rally, and we watched him wane.  He would eat well for a couple of days, then turn away from food for another day or two.  Every time I thought we would wake up to a stiff, cold cat body curled up in a corner somewhere, I’d open the door to the family room in the morning and he would come striding through, looking to take up his station by the water dish.  He took to spending his waking hours in the closet in Matt’s office.  I would bring him plates of blended cat food every 90 minutes or so…and if he managed to lap up a teaspoon or so at a time, I’d rejoice.  But no matter what we did, he didn’t get better.  We had to admit he was still on a steady downhill slide.  

And a few days ago, we lost the fight to keep our boy alive and comfortable.  To save him that last traumatic car ride and vet visit, we had a mobile vet come to the house and help him on his way.  With social distancing, mask and glove-wearing and staying six feet away from an outsider human, it wasn’t exactly a kumbaya moment... 

But he is free now to return to the Creator and play among the stars until we're together again…in another life, on another world, in another form.

Until we meet again, my Theo!