Three Wishes and a Dream
Feb. 2nd, 2006 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseWhen I was a child, the question they asked as a standard was less "What do you want to be when you grow up?" but the more specific " -- by the year 2000?"
I suspect the reason was to be more concrete, which makes it easier to think. My 24th birthday was in 2000; from the perspective of a child, that's old enough for anything.
Yet my plans for the year were more nebulous than the "I want to be a writer/artist" I could answer to the more vague question. I assumed I'd be living on my own (It took until August, but I did move out that year. I'd also paid off much more of my student loan than I would have if I hadn't presumed on mom's comfort a while longer than I should have, but i didn't foresee loans as a kid). When I was old enough to understand publication, I knew I wanted to have sold stories by then. (I had. One.)
And I wanted Djelibhien, my beautiful, arrogant black cat with her fine white paws, to still be with me.
I knew she'd be sixteen at the start of the year, and turn seventeen that May. I knew it was a long shot.
But I couldn't imagine it otherwise.
Rather, I could. But I wished.
I got that wish.
Djelibhien was given to me on my seventh birthday, a farm kitten, the only black in a litter of greys, the only one with clear white marks. Mom and two of her siblings were grey, and the third sibling was a grey tabby with slightly longer fur. We adopted both the odd-coloured ones, but because it was *my* birthday, I got first choice, and Jeff got the second.
So the little black kitten promptly inconvenienced us by climbing inside the farm-owner's lawnmower and staying there a while.
I named her Jellybean for the way her little white toes stuck out, like a line of jellybeans (They grew neater and less like their namesakes as she grew up). Hey, I was seven. Mom kept trying to convince me, if I was going to name her after candy, to name her Licorice, but I would have none of it.
Her brother, Pussyfoot, stayed with us for about a year and a half, then vanished, which is why we got Tuffles. I like to think he was found by someone who cared for him and just couldn't find us. Not likely, but we don't know. They used to stay out most of the night, and there was a highway not that many blocks off, well within cat-range.
We were apart for October and November when I was nine, while I was away on the other side of the world. We were also somewhat apart the summer before, when Jeff and I stayed at Grandma's cabin, where the cats had to live in the garage and spend their whole day outdoors (They did NOT mind - we've theorised that was the best time of Tuffles and Djelibhien's life -- all the mice and chipmunks, and, hey, if they were ambitious, birds!) So I had to be outside to visit them. I didn't like that so much, as I was used to the cat who slept on my bed. Who crept through my roon in the dark, when all I could see to identify her was the inverted triangle of white that was her chest, and sometimes the flick of a pale paw.
Otherwise, Djelibhien stayed with me all her life. Through and past the year 2000. Her solid black fur went brown in places, particularly on her shoulders. Under sunlight, you could see two shades of black/brown as you couldn't in regular light - and they ran in stripes down her body. She'd tricked us all those years. She wasn't a solid coloured cat at all. Secretly, she was a black on black tabby.
Into the apartment, when we decided it was better to leave Tuffles with mom and her other cat, Tam Lin, the super-fat super-nervous late addition to the family. Djelibhien was always a bit of a snob to her own species (To humans, she was a perfect 'lap slut'. She'd cuddle everyone who would pet her instead of pushing her away. She favoured me, but not to anyone else's exclusion.) She never liked Tam Lin at all, and liked Tuffles well enough, but not in a way that distressed her unduly when she found herself the sole cat in the new place.
(Djelibhien, if you're wondering, is Terry Pratchett's fault. We pronounced it the same, of course, but suddenly, the short version was DB, which puzzled people outside the family. Then again, she answered perfectly happily to 'Beautiful' and 'Sylkie' as well as anything pronounced like 'Jellybean'. Yes, she sometimes did come when I called. Sometimes, but often enough to be unmistakeable.)
In her last years, she was physically spry, still well able to hop onto the bed then the window ledge, though, for reasons of her own, she stopped sleeping on the bed with me in the apartment. I think the feng shui of the bed was wrong for her. She was going deaf -- the screaming horrid fire alarm in the apartment intrigued her when it went off, because she could hear something, and we'd all gone quiet on her some time before. The younger cats who came later hid, as she would have when she was young.
Then, just before Tuffles was put to sleep, she had a truly scary medical problem. And I wished so fiercely I felt my whole body pushing at the wish, the way I feel when I feel the spirit (Christian or Pagan) moving, when I felt I was doing somethng magic that might actually affect the world, that this wouldn't be it for her.
And she lived, and we lost Tuffles, in such rapid succession that I couldn't help linking the latter to my wish. Magic costs. Wishes have a price. I accepted that, though it's one of the several reasons I feel more trouble over Tuffles. Had I wished less hard for my second wish, would things have changed? Logic says no; he was already sick for a while at that point, and her problem turned out to be easily fixed, even if more of the liquid meds got on her fur than inside her. But guilt is sneaky about dodging logic.
Those liquid meds. The most fastidious cat I'd seen to that point let the bloody meds dry in her fur, and would not wash it off. She hated them that much. (In the end, she had to have a bath, which was hard on both her and us, as she grows extra limbs if threatened with immersion.)
After Tuffles was put to sleep, I made a point of holding my hands to her nose as soon as I got home, letting her smell what there was to smell. She seemed to acknowledge it, to register the combination of scents -- be that simply the sickness that meant Tuffles didn't smell like himself, the slight scent of the incubator where they kept him the last few hours, the dinner we'd had, or the actual message I meant to send -- then get on with being herself.
Then, the end of January, scarce few months after we lost Tuffles, she began to grow weak and listless. Fast. Within two days, we knew it was liver failure, utterly fatal. She was already dehydrated from being unable to process as usual, and the dehydration was what was killing her fastest.
I could spend thousand on thousands of dollars to give her a few more months, maybe, with great luck, a year. Of dialysis, and misery, and too many trips to the vet, and her not understanding any of it except that she was miserable already and it would get worse. It's not like you can explain as if to a human, and have her choose.
So, at eighteen years, and three quarters more, I asked the vet for one more day. He could, and did, give her subcutaneous fluids, to bring her back from the dehydration.
But what I wished for wasn't so much a day like the last few, of a listless, weak, kitty withered away from what she'd been, scarce aware of much past the way she felt bad. I wished for one last day with the cat as I knew her, old now, more inclined to curl up than to play, but still spry, and alert, and full of her own self.
I wished. And I got what I wished.
The fluids, or something, perked her right up, almost to normal. You could see her come back from that brink, once they'd absorbed in. I sat with her basket beside me and watched a comfort movie, with a friend over, and my brother, of course, as part of that final time.
I freaked out my brother a bit, though. I'd pulled out a piece of pottery I'd made four years earlier, a round squat vase-thing with a plug at the top, in the shape of a cat sleeping on a cushion. A brown cat, because the black glaze didn't quite go black, with off-white marks, because it did bleed a little into the next colour. But the shape and sleekness fairly right. There are marks around the edges, like some kind of foreign text as decoration. It wasn't foreign. I can still find some of the letters in it. Just brushwork alphabet made to obfuscate what it said. A litany of names, all the things I'd called her over the years.
He picked it up, remembering a bit when it was made, and I said something about nobody else having figured out what I actually intended it for, even when I made it. He darn near dropped it when he got the implication.
She'd been fourteen, and in perfect health, when I threw the urn for her ashes. I wanted to make it with love, not hurt, and I wanted to have it around, familiar and comfortable, on the shelf for a long time before it was used.
I can't say I never foresaw what was coming.
Here's the weirdest thing in her last day. When I went to bed, Djelibhien joined me, and curled up next to me where she used to curl up, the precise spot against my side that ahd always been her place, and which she hadn't used most of the time in the apartment.
Like I said, I got the third wish, too. Better than I'd hoped for.
By morning, she was faded again, and if was obvious the one day could not be two.
At the vet's, the used a tranquilizer that was supposed to make her sleep before she slept. It meant she couldn't rise from lying down, and couldn't fight when the vet arranged her limbs, but after the second shot, she was still awake, and aware, and determined to stay so, and still lifting up her head as she could.
I had my hand on her from the moment the final shot went in, until several seconds after I was sure her heart had stopped, and several seconds more, even though the vet told me it was over. Just to be sure she wasn't alone at the very last.
Then I went home, and cleaned away the litterboxes in the bathroom, and scrubbed down the floor. That floor had never been cleaner before or since.
I can't say I don't miss her, at odd moments, in spite of Elise strong and healthy and very present. But I had my three wishes, and I had the chance to say goodbye in every way I could.
And yes, the time to get ready, the willingness to think about it before it was upon me is why I don't mourn her quite the same way I do Tuffles.
Except. There was a dream I had, some months after I adopted Elise -- I think just before we got Irina, too. In the dream, I had the power to make whatever I imagined happen. And, after some other odd prelude bits, I inadvertently thought of her, and brought her back. You could tell it was a dream; she sniffed at Elise in a friendly way, metting this new cat without objection, and this new scent with what looked like approval, from a human's bemused standpoint, half able to translate the body language, and half missing the cues. But she didn't hiss or howl, like the Djelibhien I knew. She simply wanted to see who was with me now.
But I spent the rest of the dream, until waking, talking to her. I understood, in dream-logic, that having come back from the dead, she did now have the power to understand words, as she didn't when she was alive. I kept telling her she was dead, and as happy as I was to see her, she had to go back. She had to stay that way.
And she had to choose to go back, because I couldn't control my thoughts enough not to be glad that she was there, and real, wrong as it was.
One of the most vivid dreams I've had. One of the hardest to wake up from. I'd have rathered, in that moment, have the power and do the utterly wrong thing, than to wake and know I couldn't really manage it, and she wasn't there.
And yet -- I know these are still practice rounds, in a way. Not small losses, but there are bigger ones to come, unless I'm unfortunate enough to be the one lost instead of the one losing. These are warnings for the future as well as memories and losses in themselves.
About what is right and wrong when facing death. About avoiding denial. About fighting, and about knowing the cost of the fight, and when to yield. About how to wish, and how not to.
About what we'd do if we could, in our internal battles against ourselves.
I suspect the reason was to be more concrete, which makes it easier to think. My 24th birthday was in 2000; from the perspective of a child, that's old enough for anything.
Yet my plans for the year were more nebulous than the "I want to be a writer/artist" I could answer to the more vague question. I assumed I'd be living on my own (It took until August, but I did move out that year. I'd also paid off much more of my student loan than I would have if I hadn't presumed on mom's comfort a while longer than I should have, but i didn't foresee loans as a kid). When I was old enough to understand publication, I knew I wanted to have sold stories by then. (I had. One.)
And I wanted Djelibhien, my beautiful, arrogant black cat with her fine white paws, to still be with me.
I knew she'd be sixteen at the start of the year, and turn seventeen that May. I knew it was a long shot.
But I couldn't imagine it otherwise.
Rather, I could. But I wished.
I got that wish.
Djelibhien was given to me on my seventh birthday, a farm kitten, the only black in a litter of greys, the only one with clear white marks. Mom and two of her siblings were grey, and the third sibling was a grey tabby with slightly longer fur. We adopted both the odd-coloured ones, but because it was *my* birthday, I got first choice, and Jeff got the second.
So the little black kitten promptly inconvenienced us by climbing inside the farm-owner's lawnmower and staying there a while.
I named her Jellybean for the way her little white toes stuck out, like a line of jellybeans (They grew neater and less like their namesakes as she grew up). Hey, I was seven. Mom kept trying to convince me, if I was going to name her after candy, to name her Licorice, but I would have none of it.
Her brother, Pussyfoot, stayed with us for about a year and a half, then vanished, which is why we got Tuffles. I like to think he was found by someone who cared for him and just couldn't find us. Not likely, but we don't know. They used to stay out most of the night, and there was a highway not that many blocks off, well within cat-range.
We were apart for October and November when I was nine, while I was away on the other side of the world. We were also somewhat apart the summer before, when Jeff and I stayed at Grandma's cabin, where the cats had to live in the garage and spend their whole day outdoors (They did NOT mind - we've theorised that was the best time of Tuffles and Djelibhien's life -- all the mice and chipmunks, and, hey, if they were ambitious, birds!) So I had to be outside to visit them. I didn't like that so much, as I was used to the cat who slept on my bed. Who crept through my roon in the dark, when all I could see to identify her was the inverted triangle of white that was her chest, and sometimes the flick of a pale paw.
Otherwise, Djelibhien stayed with me all her life. Through and past the year 2000. Her solid black fur went brown in places, particularly on her shoulders. Under sunlight, you could see two shades of black/brown as you couldn't in regular light - and they ran in stripes down her body. She'd tricked us all those years. She wasn't a solid coloured cat at all. Secretly, she was a black on black tabby.
Into the apartment, when we decided it was better to leave Tuffles with mom and her other cat, Tam Lin, the super-fat super-nervous late addition to the family. Djelibhien was always a bit of a snob to her own species (To humans, she was a perfect 'lap slut'. She'd cuddle everyone who would pet her instead of pushing her away. She favoured me, but not to anyone else's exclusion.) She never liked Tam Lin at all, and liked Tuffles well enough, but not in a way that distressed her unduly when she found herself the sole cat in the new place.
(Djelibhien, if you're wondering, is Terry Pratchett's fault. We pronounced it the same, of course, but suddenly, the short version was DB, which puzzled people outside the family. Then again, she answered perfectly happily to 'Beautiful' and 'Sylkie' as well as anything pronounced like 'Jellybean'. Yes, she sometimes did come when I called. Sometimes, but often enough to be unmistakeable.)
In her last years, she was physically spry, still well able to hop onto the bed then the window ledge, though, for reasons of her own, she stopped sleeping on the bed with me in the apartment. I think the feng shui of the bed was wrong for her. She was going deaf -- the screaming horrid fire alarm in the apartment intrigued her when it went off, because she could hear something, and we'd all gone quiet on her some time before. The younger cats who came later hid, as she would have when she was young.
Then, just before Tuffles was put to sleep, she had a truly scary medical problem. And I wished so fiercely I felt my whole body pushing at the wish, the way I feel when I feel the spirit (Christian or Pagan) moving, when I felt I was doing somethng magic that might actually affect the world, that this wouldn't be it for her.
And she lived, and we lost Tuffles, in such rapid succession that I couldn't help linking the latter to my wish. Magic costs. Wishes have a price. I accepted that, though it's one of the several reasons I feel more trouble over Tuffles. Had I wished less hard for my second wish, would things have changed? Logic says no; he was already sick for a while at that point, and her problem turned out to be easily fixed, even if more of the liquid meds got on her fur than inside her. But guilt is sneaky about dodging logic.
Those liquid meds. The most fastidious cat I'd seen to that point let the bloody meds dry in her fur, and would not wash it off. She hated them that much. (In the end, she had to have a bath, which was hard on both her and us, as she grows extra limbs if threatened with immersion.)
After Tuffles was put to sleep, I made a point of holding my hands to her nose as soon as I got home, letting her smell what there was to smell. She seemed to acknowledge it, to register the combination of scents -- be that simply the sickness that meant Tuffles didn't smell like himself, the slight scent of the incubator where they kept him the last few hours, the dinner we'd had, or the actual message I meant to send -- then get on with being herself.
Then, the end of January, scarce few months after we lost Tuffles, she began to grow weak and listless. Fast. Within two days, we knew it was liver failure, utterly fatal. She was already dehydrated from being unable to process as usual, and the dehydration was what was killing her fastest.
I could spend thousand on thousands of dollars to give her a few more months, maybe, with great luck, a year. Of dialysis, and misery, and too many trips to the vet, and her not understanding any of it except that she was miserable already and it would get worse. It's not like you can explain as if to a human, and have her choose.
So, at eighteen years, and three quarters more, I asked the vet for one more day. He could, and did, give her subcutaneous fluids, to bring her back from the dehydration.
But what I wished for wasn't so much a day like the last few, of a listless, weak, kitty withered away from what she'd been, scarce aware of much past the way she felt bad. I wished for one last day with the cat as I knew her, old now, more inclined to curl up than to play, but still spry, and alert, and full of her own self.
I wished. And I got what I wished.
The fluids, or something, perked her right up, almost to normal. You could see her come back from that brink, once they'd absorbed in. I sat with her basket beside me and watched a comfort movie, with a friend over, and my brother, of course, as part of that final time.
I freaked out my brother a bit, though. I'd pulled out a piece of pottery I'd made four years earlier, a round squat vase-thing with a plug at the top, in the shape of a cat sleeping on a cushion. A brown cat, because the black glaze didn't quite go black, with off-white marks, because it did bleed a little into the next colour. But the shape and sleekness fairly right. There are marks around the edges, like some kind of foreign text as decoration. It wasn't foreign. I can still find some of the letters in it. Just brushwork alphabet made to obfuscate what it said. A litany of names, all the things I'd called her over the years.
He picked it up, remembering a bit when it was made, and I said something about nobody else having figured out what I actually intended it for, even when I made it. He darn near dropped it when he got the implication.
She'd been fourteen, and in perfect health, when I threw the urn for her ashes. I wanted to make it with love, not hurt, and I wanted to have it around, familiar and comfortable, on the shelf for a long time before it was used.
I can't say I never foresaw what was coming.
Here's the weirdest thing in her last day. When I went to bed, Djelibhien joined me, and curled up next to me where she used to curl up, the precise spot against my side that ahd always been her place, and which she hadn't used most of the time in the apartment.
Like I said, I got the third wish, too. Better than I'd hoped for.
By morning, she was faded again, and if was obvious the one day could not be two.
At the vet's, the used a tranquilizer that was supposed to make her sleep before she slept. It meant she couldn't rise from lying down, and couldn't fight when the vet arranged her limbs, but after the second shot, she was still awake, and aware, and determined to stay so, and still lifting up her head as she could.
I had my hand on her from the moment the final shot went in, until several seconds after I was sure her heart had stopped, and several seconds more, even though the vet told me it was over. Just to be sure she wasn't alone at the very last.
Then I went home, and cleaned away the litterboxes in the bathroom, and scrubbed down the floor. That floor had never been cleaner before or since.
I can't say I don't miss her, at odd moments, in spite of Elise strong and healthy and very present. But I had my three wishes, and I had the chance to say goodbye in every way I could.
And yes, the time to get ready, the willingness to think about it before it was upon me is why I don't mourn her quite the same way I do Tuffles.
Except. There was a dream I had, some months after I adopted Elise -- I think just before we got Irina, too. In the dream, I had the power to make whatever I imagined happen. And, after some other odd prelude bits, I inadvertently thought of her, and brought her back. You could tell it was a dream; she sniffed at Elise in a friendly way, metting this new cat without objection, and this new scent with what looked like approval, from a human's bemused standpoint, half able to translate the body language, and half missing the cues. But she didn't hiss or howl, like the Djelibhien I knew. She simply wanted to see who was with me now.
But I spent the rest of the dream, until waking, talking to her. I understood, in dream-logic, that having come back from the dead, she did now have the power to understand words, as she didn't when she was alive. I kept telling her she was dead, and as happy as I was to see her, she had to go back. She had to stay that way.
And she had to choose to go back, because I couldn't control my thoughts enough not to be glad that she was there, and real, wrong as it was.
One of the most vivid dreams I've had. One of the hardest to wake up from. I'd have rathered, in that moment, have the power and do the utterly wrong thing, than to wake and know I couldn't really manage it, and she wasn't there.
And yet -- I know these are still practice rounds, in a way. Not small losses, but there are bigger ones to come, unless I'm unfortunate enough to be the one lost instead of the one losing. These are warnings for the future as well as memories and losses in themselves.
About what is right and wrong when facing death. About avoiding denial. About fighting, and about knowing the cost of the fight, and when to yield. About how to wish, and how not to.
About what we'd do if we could, in our internal battles against ourselves.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-03 12:46 am (UTC)Lovely piece. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-03 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 01:05 pm (UTC)So. Yeah.
Your coworker sounds like a jerk. Booooo.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-09 12:47 am (UTC)I don't mind petblogging within reason, and especially if it's funny, or at least sincere -- what would be a turn-off (To *me*) is someone who does nothing but. Just like real life conversations, actually -- everybody I know with pets has a few cat/dog/bird stories to share, and a few new ones most of the time, and it can be fun for part of the night, but all of us eventually turn to other interesting topics.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-03 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-03 06:11 pm (UTC)So do I. Tam Lin was found as a very young kitten in a parking lot near an area with open ditches. She was nervous the whole rest of her life -- especially about deep voices and men.
If I ever learned who did that...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-03 11:47 pm (UTC)poke, poke
Date: 2006-02-03 04:36 am (UTC)Re: poke, poke
Date: 2006-02-03 05:16 pm (UTC)Now that I've had a chance to read it...
Date: 2006-02-03 04:44 am (UTC)Re: Now that I've had a chance to read it...
Date: 2006-02-03 06:23 pm (UTC)