R.I.P Aria, 1991-2005

Today I had to have one of my oldest friends put to sleep.

She'd been sick for some time, losing weight due to an overactive thyroid, and despite the pills I'd been wrestling into her since April, she was getting skinnier and skinnier. The vets said as long as she was eating and got checked every couple of months, it wasn't a worry. Then a couple of weeks ago she came down with pinkeye, so another medication got added to her collection. It didn't seem to be helping much either.

Last night I went into the downstairs bath and she was stretched out behind the toilet. I picked her up and she was just boneless, unresisting. I thought maybe she was just reacting poorly to the heat--the other four cats were in varying states of inertia as well--so I gave her her pill and put in her eye ointment, and put her down near the fan. Sometime during the night she made her way back to the bathroom, and this morning she was still there. I picked her up for her morning pill and she gave me that look. I'd seen the look once before, when my tabby was in the last days of his fight with cancer. "I've had enough," it said.

I opened a can of food and put it down next to her--nothing. She sniffed it once and licked it a little (and spat out the pill I'd given her five minutes earlier) and then just looked up at me. The boys were circling the dish, meanwhile, and she didn't even bother to hiss at them. (Aria had the best crunchy-hiss EVER. She could scare off burglars with that hiss, and she used it every chance she got.) This from a cat who, two days ago, would have ripped your fingers off for a scrap of food. A few days back we sat on the sofa together and shared a plate of spaghetti noodles, strand by strand, and I got nipped a few times for my generosity.

I went to work and called the vet immediately. I knew something was really wrong, and when I brought her in, I found out my worst suspicions were correct. The probable diagnosis was kidney failure, though they couldn't be sure without blood work. Regardless, she was a very sick kitty. "It would take a lot of time in the hospital and a lot of blood-work and treatments, and even then there's no guarantee," the doctor said.

She was fourteen years old. Even at the best, they said it might get her a couple more months, of questionable quality. They said without treatment she might not even survive the drive home.

I held her while the doctor gave her the shot, and told her she was a very good kitty, and petted the stripe between her eyes and thanked her for everything she'd been through with me. And she drifted off without a flinch or a whimper.

Aria was with me through some of the craziest times in my life. Firefly and I picked her out from a vet's office in our little college town, on my 21st birthday, a little handful of gray-and-white fur with what looked like a halo around her. Kitten aura, we called it; it certainly didn't signify an angelic nature, because she was a fluffy little demon.

When we moved back to our respective homes at the end of that summer, Aria came with me--my plans were more settled, or something. She was with me when I met JP, when I married David, when I left David, when JP and I moved in together. She sat like an Art Institute lion outside the bedroom door while JP and I lay dopesick in the heat. The night JP died, she broke out of the room we'd stayed in, and spent the next two days hiding under the bed in the spare room at JP's mother's house, til I came to claim her, Tiger, and my clothes. She was with me through move after move after move, through CR, through everything.

I'm not very good with death. It brings up unresolved issues, I guess. I'm sure there are those who would say "just a cat"...but that cat was, in many ways, the last link to a life I don't have anymore, and people who are gone. So yeah, I'm taking this kinda hard.

I got in the car and left a message for Firefly (Aria's "other mom") to call me; then I came home and kissed all the other stupid cats, even Cassidy, the biter.

Rest in peace, Aria. I'm really going to miss you.