The End of the Long, Winding Road

Kia passed away last May.  (Cinco de Mayo, to be exact.)  She did so well for so long.  Her appetite began slowing down towards the end of February but she still appeared healthy.  She and Kirby went back to Ohio to stay with my parents for a bit while I spent my birthday weekend in Seattle, and I had yet another roommate change the following Friday, so I thought she might just be stressed.  But on Easter weekend, I went down to North Carolina with my boyfriend and came home to an entirely different cat.  She looked gaunt, weak, and her eyes were extremely sunken in and fogged over.  It was shocking.  I took her to the vet on Monday and they upped her chemo treatments back to 3 times a week, but their best prognosis was that the lymphoma was probably catching up to her and it was only a matter of time at this point.  I spent the last 2 weeks of her life feeding her extremely mushy food through a dropper.  It was a long, tedious, and painstaking process.

The night before she died, I cleaned off all the dried up food from her paws and face, then put her on a warm pad, covered her up with one of my sweaters, held her paw, and listened to serene gospel music with her.  While I was doing that, the song "I Surrender All" began playing.  I suddenly remembered my grandmother's final moments in the nursing home as her cancer was taking over and her entire body began shutting down: She had barely moved in several days and didn't even appear to be with us anymore.  Then that song started playing on the TV in her room and she sat up in her bed, raised her hand and began singing along to it.  Then she laid back down, went to sleep and never sat up again.

I held Kia's paw and told her that I was surrendering her.  If she was ready to go, then she had my blessing to surrender as well.  I came home from work the next day and found her lying on the floor of my room, in the sunbeam of the window next to my bed.  As heartbreaking as it was, I was so relieved that she went on her own, peacefully.  I've never been comfortable with the idea of ending another being's life using a syringe full of poison and I knew it was a decision I would never be able to make for any of my babies, so I'm glad it happened naturally.  I miss her so incredibly much but I'm happy that she's free now and that she went on her own terms.  I decided to have her cremated.  Her ashes are on a little shelf in the corner of my room next to a framed copy of the Rainbow Bridge poem.  I take comfort in knowing that a part of her is still physically present.

Although my life has stabilized in the 400 or so days since my last post, it's still not been without its shakeups.  Losing Kia was the worst part.  Besides that, I got rear-ended in January and, although the damage wasn't terrible, the insurance company declared my car a total loss since the cost to repair it exceeded the car's blue book value.  It looked like I was going to have to say goodbye to the beloved Mustang I had spent several years searching for and fought like hell to keep throughout all those periods of unemployment and roommateless-ness.  But, she's still plugging away and getting me where I need to go, just not looking quite as pretty as before.  Clearly a 15-year-old car is not going to last forever, but I will hang on as long as I can.  I also had to find a new roommate in February (since, apparently, living in the same place with the same person for more than one year is completely unattainable in DC).  Fortunately, this roommate and I signed a 14-month lease, so we're locked in until April 30, 2015.  That means I can at least get through my next birthday without spending it stressing out about finding someone and coordinating the change-over.  There's been a lot of changes at work, too: one of the attorneys passed away suddenly just before Thanksgiving, then 3 of my co-workers left this past spring/summer, and another one of the attorneys is leaving at the end of this month.

On the plus side, I've done a lot of traveling this year: Seattle for my birthday, North Carolina with JP for Easter, the annual beach camping trip in June, Napa Valley for JP's birthday in August, now he and I are preparing for a return trip to NC next weekend, and a visit to Ohio 2 weekends after that for my parents' anniversary.  I still can't seriously plan more than a month ahead, though.  Halloween is about the cut-off point right now, and even that's a little fuzzy.  Currently, I am looking forward to drinking wine and watching football with JP today and the rest of this weekend up through Monday night (Pats v. Chiefs!).  Other than that, this duck continues to float on the water along with the current.  Fortunately, I've found a current I like and will continue to ride it out for however long it takes to reach the other side.  I have no time frame for doing so nor am I in a huge hurry to finish.  If anyone else wants to join me on the journey, it's completely up to them.  All in all, life's going pretty well right now.  So, here's to not rocking that boat!