Bonden's Death

Death, even that of a cat, fixes a place. Killick and Bonden came into our lives as kittens thirteen years ago, and their first service was as jolly oblivious comforters during the days after 9/11. Our last four cats, including these two, were named after characters in Patrick O'Brien's great novel series about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Jack and Sophie, the previous cats to honor those books, were named after the main character in the series and his wife.  We knew right away that the kittens were much too unruly for major roles. Bonden was a young coxswain and Killick was Captain Jack's disgruntled steward. The names never quite fit with their personalities, and strangers tended to call them Bondage and Killer, but the names stuck anyway.

We have never been sure if Killick and Bonden have liked it up here.  After we brought them to the barn for good last October, we encouraged them to watch the birds in the feeder outside the kitchen window, but it failed to amuse.  The barn apartment is quiet and much sparser than our Manhattan one, which claims a set of stairs, various closets and nooks, lots of stuff, and interesting sounds.  

I think Bonden particularly missed the city. On visits back to New York, after vomiting, shitting, and peeing throughout the ride, he always seemed to calm down and perk up when we hit the West Side Highway, where protective buildings and familiar traffic noises surrounded him.  He also had a tighter relationship with our sons than Killick had, who is more a Mama's/Papa's boy.  So I always thought Bonden was homesick, but I may be transferring.

Bonden visibly began to die only about a month ago.  He had been limping for a few days but we couldn't see anything wrong.  Then, one morning, I lifted his right front paw to see a gaping hideous bleeding wound looking like a way out for Alien 1.  Even weirder and worse, his back right paw was the same.  We rushed him to the nearest vet, about five minutes away, who was new to us. An elfish man, very vague and gentle, he gave Bonden a shot of antibiotics and sent us home with pills. 

The feet started to heal slowly over the course of the week but he was still limping and was losing weight.  I Googled "bleeding feet in cats" and found a forum with a disconcerting entry describing these symptoms and a diagnosis of lung cancer.  And that's what it was.  When we brought him back to the vet, he gave Bonden two weeks max after showing us his desolate gray and white X-ray with clouds of tumors hovering around the organs beneath his fragile bones.  We took Bonden home with some steroid pills and prepared ourselves for his loss. 

My youngest sister, who has a horse business, recommended I talk to Marlene, an animal psychic who has been helpful with her own creatures.  My sister left home at four years old when she rode her first horse, from then on living in stables every day from five in the morning until dinner, fitting in school, college, and kids in her few free minutes.  For years, she and her business partner have been teaching, training, showing and boarding horses and her house has always been an open petting zoo for cats, dogs, and the occasional rabbit.  She's the least sentimental and most competent person I know, and she swore that Marlene has weird powers and could be helpful in communicating what our cats were going through.  Marlene lives in Pennsylvania and relies on the phone lines to transmit her vibes back and forth, so my sister gave me her number with instructions;  "There's a process. You leave a message saying what you want to talk about, and her assistant will get back to you and set up the appointment and get your credit card information."  Hmmm.

I made the call and within minutes the assistant returned it.  I told him that Bonden was dying and that my sister believed Marlene could help find comfort.  He was sympathetic, but said "Unfortunately, Marlene isn't available for three weeks, " in the soothing tone of a concierge of an expensive overbooked hotel.

"Oh, I don't think he'll make it by then. But I'll keep the appointment anyway.  Maybe she'll have thoughts about his brother, and whether he's feeling sad."

He responded gently, "She's also very good at helping those who are going through the transition." And added,  We'll need your credit card information but you can cancel within 24 hours without a penalty."  

Over the next few days, Bonden deteriorated.  He continued to lose weight, and his back leg became paralyzed so he had to drag it when he walked. (This was not his wounded back leg, which had healed.  It was the other one.) But he tried to maintain his routine and gamely hauled himself down the hallway at meal times, when he and Killick regularly shared their food on a paper plate.  Bonden would eat a tiny bit, drink a lot of water, and stare into space.  I would carry him back and put him either in a nest in our closet or on our bed where he slept until the next deeply sad meal.  It was horrible to watch, but he didn't seem in pain. 

Then a few nights after the doctor's visit, we woke suddenly around midnight to a terrible shriek from the closet.  I turned on the light and saw Killick hanging around the doorway and Bonden on his feet, shaky and disoriented.

"We have to put him to sleep," I said to Michael and wept.

We wanted Bonden to die at home, as Sophia and Jack had done, but our vet didn't do house calls.  He recommended a one who did, a woman whose practice is about fifteen minutes away in Germantown.  The big snowstorm was brewing and predicted to hit within 24 hours.  Bonden seemed ok in the morning, not in much discomfort, but certainly not getting better, and we didn't want his pain to become acute with three feet of snow hurling to the earth, so we made the call and the vet said she'd be there at 9:30 the next day. 

The blizzard started up that night, and when Dr. Kervorkianette was due, it was coming so hard that I hoped she might cancel, but at 9:30 sharp she showed up with her bag of death.  She turned out to be extremely pretty, young, and incredibly kind.  She made sure that Bonden was indeed as sick as we said he was and assured us that we were doing the right thing.  She took her time, even though her husband, who had driven, waited patiently in their car outside while snow built up around his windows.    She finally administered the anesthetic overdose to Bonden, who was breathing and warm and then he wasn't.  We put him in a box, which was slightly too short so we had to jostle him into it.  I couldn't get rid of the conviction this was hurting him, which made everything worse. The vet left with him without taking a check, saying we could pay her when we got his ashes.

About a week later Marlene's assistant called to tell me that there had been an opening.  I told him that we had put Bonden down, and he said with a floral kindness, "I'm so sorry.  As I said, Marlene can also communicate with those who are in transition and can help Bondeen pass over the Rainbow Bridge."

"Umm. Ok." My sister may have some weak spots.

It turned out that Marlene was pretty comforting and there were a couple of eerie moments: she described gravel in Killick's urinary tract (stones have indeed been problems for him in the past) and that he was a "doggy cat" (which is how we describe Killick).  She also said that Bonden forgave him for "bumping him" a few days ago.  The shriek?  She also said I didn't have to feel guilty, that Bonden forgave me.  For bringing him to Hudson?  Most of the 30-minute one-hundred dollar session however, involved long peaceful silences while she gathered Bonden's spirit in to comfort Killick, Michael, and me.  Michael was working at his computer, Killick was sleeping next to him, while I breathed into the phone and went into a mild meditative state.  It wasn't clear where Bonden was.

A few days later, we were talking to Dave, our good friend and landlord who owns the land on the other side of the road, which at one point joined with ours as part of a large apple farm. He also owns the structures that went with it -- the old Dutch farmhouse and the barn, where we have our apartment. On his property is an old graveyard that holds the bones of the original 18^th and 19^th century family. Dave and his wife are still weekenders, but he comes up on Thursday, earlier than she does, with his own three female cats.  We were talking about Bonden and Dave suggested we put his ashes in the old cemetery. "I plan on putting the girls there along with Hazel's ashes [his own beloved city cat long dead]. All our cats could go there.  We could make kind of stone with their names on it."

Jack and Sophie are lodged in dry form back in a bookcase in our New York apartment, nestling in tin boxes, ornately printed with pretty Victorian flowers.  Jack has been gone for nearly 15 years and Sophie for almost 10, but because they were city house cats all their lives, I hadn't had the heart to bury them in the country, which was like leaving them on Mars.  But I immediately was drawn to Dave's idea.  Bonden had died here.  No doubt so will Killick.  Sophie had helped rear the boys when they were young, and Jack had been her good companion before he died.  Here the whole ship's crew would be together, Jack, Sophie, Killick, and Bonden, ruling over their tiny piece of Britannia forever.   And even though I'm still not sure their ashes won't drift south toward the city, it seems ok.  Better than struggling over the Rainbow Bridge, anyway.