Euthanizing Sirius Black
By Claire McCully
The cat meows in his carrier
For nearly all twenty minutes
Of our drive to the animal ER.
When he finally falls silent,
I worry that he’s already dead.
In the waiting room, my nine year old son
Points to a glossy magazine picture,
A cat like our own, but one that’s healthy
And playful. My boy plays Scheherazade
To my heart, tells a story
Of miracles, of a cat that survives
His faith in living things
Is full of boyish defiance,
Forevers-and-evers.
He hasn’t spilled a drop
Of his endless summer.
But I tell him the odds are bad.
It’s probably a blocked urinary tract,
And they are likely to put him to sleep.
Over the phone, the vet
Has already told me as much.
It will cost two grand to save the animal,
And I can’t even borrow that much.
He says that if the cat’s bladder bursts
He will die a horrible and painful death,
But for one hundred dollars,
They can humanely euthanize.
We wait in the white room
With the stainless steel table,
With its shelves of cotton balls
And tools I cannot name.
The cat does his best to find a corner
Where he might hide
From his pain, golden eyes blazing,
Maybe trying to see backwards,
Two days ago, when his bladder
Wasn’t the size of a softball
Pressing against his spine.
My six year old notices my tears,
Tells me, “it will be okay Maddy.”
But I know now, in so many ways,
This isn’t true, the way an adult
Can carry so many tragedies
Like blurry stamps pressed into a passport,
But still has to keep traveling and holding
Out her little book for the agent to inspect,
For the right to keep catching the next day,
A day that’s never delayed, that cannot be missed,
That waits reliably at the gate
With the little steel ramp
Inviting us aboard.
The doctor feels around the cat’s midsection,
Takes his vitals, and asks if we would like to hold him
While he dies. I nod, knowing it was me
Who failed him, who didn’t get him here
Soon enough. I had thought
He was merely constipated,
That he would recover on his own.
He was a cat after all.
I ask my two boys if they want to stay,
To help send Sirius to catnip heaven.
Their eyes grow wide and sad,
But they also nod.
When the vet returns with our cat,
He is sedated, the flickering gold
Of his gaze has dimmed.
But I think I see a plea for
Comfort and understanding,
And I want to offer more,
The way I offered my lap to him,
The way I offered my chin
As a place to rub his head.
In the end, we do what we can:
Give the cat a few last scratches
Behind his ears, a pat or two on his head,
Stroke his beautiful coat of sable fur,
Matted somewhat with a world
He can no longer clean away.
It has always been the innocence
In an animal’s eyes,
The unknowing about everything,
The lack of philosophy, the lack of faith,
And the simple instinct of now
That has broken my heart
In their final moments.
I’ve seen it in the faces of people too,
The ones I eventually tried helping
With CPR: their eyes always
Seeming to search beyond
The impossible end, their brains
Working over a riddle that can’t be solved,
A ball of string that can’t be untangled.
Maybe their minds
Make one last cat-like leap
To the top of a favorite bookshelf,
But find only emptiness, air opening,
And a realization that no leap
Will ever again reach the top of anything.
And of course, it’s really my mind
That can’t make the leap,
That can’t land on all fours,
That keeps scratching
At philosophy, reading, and knowledge:
A ball of string my mind plays with,
While the thoughts of the dying
Are as mysterious as black cats
Slinking into impenetrable dark,
Consciousness folding itself
Into shadows.
When the sodium pentobarbital
Reaches our cat’s heart,
He simply stretches back his head,
Stops blinking, and stops moving.
The vet tells us that a cat’s eyes
Do not close in death,
That we can’t draw them shut
With the sweep of a hand,
The way we might with a person.
But when my six-year old
Reaches out to pat him goodbye,
The cat bares his teeth
And hisses violently,
As if it’s held all nine lives
In this one last breath.
My son jerks back,
As if bitten, hurt
By something none of us
Really understand.
Claire McCully is the parent of six children. She grew up in a family of six children near Yosemite National Park, worked as a seasonal firefighter, and in public libraries before becoming a professor of English at Western Nevada College. She earned an MFA in poetry from California State University, Fresno. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Normal School, Trampset, the Kokanee journal, Sandstone and Silver (an anthology of Nevada poets), and in the latest issue of the Sierra Nevada Journal. She was a contestant in Reno's first Literary Death Match and completed a TedTalk in October of 2017 on her journey as a transgender woman
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