There is this image I can't get out of my head:
When Sena, Aiyana and I were driving back from Montreal after Christmas, just before we got to the US border, we saw a cat walking right near the highway. It was limping and it was bitterly cold outside. I couldn't pull off and stop safely right away, so I kept driving, and by the time we had decided what to do, we drove a ways. But we did turn around and went back to look for the cat. We found it, and just as we were about to get out of the car, another car had also stopped to help it.
By this time, the cat was in the middle of the road and clearly disoriented. The guy who got out from the other car and I were trying to have a look and decide what to do. The poor cat was in terrible shape. There was so much stuff oozing from both of his eyes, and he smelled terrible. The fur on his paws was almost gone.
The guy from the other car said he couldn't take the cat. We clearly couldn't just leave it on the road. It was way too cold. We had no idea where a vet was, but Sena got on her phone and found one half hour away and we put the cat in a cardboard box we had in the car and drove to the vet, which was back towards my parents' house, the opposite direction from where we were initially driving.
In the car, the cat just curled up in the box and was motionless for most of the time. He smelled really bad.
Our hope was that when we got to the vet, either they would take the cat or tell us where we could drop him off, like an animal shelter nearby. However, when we got there, they were about to close and they told us we couldn't leave him there, and they couldn't see him for a consult either. The closest other place we could bring him, they said, was back near my parents' house, about one hour back to where we had just come from. They called a couple of animal shelters who said they could not take him.
While sena and Aiyana and I were deliberating what to do, a nurse came out and said they'd take a look at the cat if we wanted, but they still could not keep him. We said okay. The vet was super nice, and when she examined him she said he was in really bad shape. He had been out in the freezing cold for a long time, she said, so much so that his body temperature was too low to even register on the thermometer. He was severely hypothermic, and he was missing an eye. All that stuff oozing from his eyes made it hard to even tell what was going on, but she confirmed that this was the case. He was also missing a bunch of teeth and she said that he smelled so bad because he was probably riddled with worms and had really bad diarrhea. She concluded by telling us that the kindest thing to do was euthanize him. She said that if we brought him to the emergency clinic, it would be at least $1000 and she didn't know if he'd make it anyway with all his problems.
We would have had to turn back to Montreal and either stay while he was at the emergency clinic until he got better if he got better, or leave him with my parents and then try to find a home for him. Clearly, we could not bring him to the US, across the border, with no papers and no information.
None of the options seemed good, and the vet strongly suggested that the kindest thing for him was to put him down. So we went with that.
Before we did it, we did our best to make him comfortable, warming him up with a heating pad, and petting him. He seemed very weak, to the point where he could not stand, but he seemed at peace and as we were petting him and speaking to him, I hope that he felt cared for and at ease for the last moments of his life.
After putting him down, there was a whole other thing, because we could not just leave him at the vet. They could have cremated him but it would have cost an additional $90 on top of the cost of the euthanasia so instead we opted to take him with us and bury him.
Now the problem was that we were supposed to cross the US border soon, and we couldn't just cross with a dead cat who had also just had all kinds of disease. We had to bury him, but the ground was frozen stiff. Sena and Aiyana and I went to a hardware store and try to buy a shovel. They told us they had no shovels to dig in the ground because it was winter.
We then started deliberating whether we should just leave him in a patch of woods on the side of the highway (Sena didn't like this option because other animals might eat him and get poisoned by the euthanasia medicine); or should we just throw him in a garbage bin instead? This would possibly avoid the predator poisoning problem, but Aiyana and I didn't like this option for moral and aesthetic reasons. We didn't know what to do but we realized that the cashier, who was this 14 year old boy, was probably freaked out quite a bit by this time, as we loudly and in a panicked kind of way argued about where to bury the body, without once having mentioned that we were referring to a cat. We left the store and got back to the car.
We started driving away still not knowing what to do. I think we probably would have gone with a woodsy option, when crazily enough we drove right passed a cemetery. We all agreed on the spot that this was the right place for him, so I did a U turn yet again and we pulled on the side of the road. The cemetery was covered in snow, but there was a brush pile to one side, which was bordering on a large field, and that's where we buried him. We covered him with some sticks and snow and said goodbye.
It was quite an adventure, and by the end it was so ridiculous, with the disposal of the body argument, that we ended up laughing quite a bit.
Still, the suffering of this poor little cat, the sheer amount of difficulty it endured has stayed with me and every once in a while I think about him and my heart breaks every time to imagine him alone, trudging through the snow for who knows how long, hungry, sick, and alone. It just seems like so much suffering makes no sense and the only thing I can think of is "why".
I hope so much that he felt a sense of relief, maybe a little comfort; maybe he was able to relax a bit feeling that he was cared for his final moments.
Peace
