The Promise
Trust me, your eyes say, but mine are awash in tears. I hold your little body, hang on to what life still remains in it. I stroke the black and white fur on your head, but your ears don't lift like they did in the past. Once again I hear you say it: Trust me. This is best. I need to go, but you'll be fine.
How can I trust you? You broke your promise. Don't you remember?
Seven years ago you scampered across the barn floor to where I squatted in the square of light the door let in. You leaped into my lap. I grabbed you so you wouldn't fall. You purred right away.
You always did have the loudest purr I've ever heard.
"He must be yours," my friend Angeline had said. I figured she said that just to get rid of one of the six kittens she'd found in her barn. Were you the one who'd cried the loudest when your mother stopped coming back? Did you purr for Angeline, too, like you've purred for me and for everyone who's ever held you? "An easy pickup," we called you because there's no one whose heart you couldn't charm and cuddle your way into.
I didn't want a cat, especially not an abandoned barn kitten. Still, I held you that day, and you squirmed and wiggled and settled into my arms as easily as you settled into my life. Your sweet little eyes looked at me and said, I will love you forever.
I trusted you then. But forever was supposed to last at least fifteen years, not seven.
I took you home that day, holding you on my lap as I drove, because of course I hadn't come prepared to bring a kitten home. You purred on my lap the whole time. When we got home, you dashed into the house, scampered around the living room, ran to every room -- not like you were exploring them for the first time, more like you were checking to make sure they were as you'd expected. As if they were familiar. You told me that day: this was your home and I was your person. And so I trusted you to stay, to love me forever.
But now I hold you, twelve pounds bigger yet still fitting my arms as though you were molded for them. And you say you're leaving, it's time for you to go, and that it's all right. I'm supposed to trust you?
My tears drop onto your head, spill into your eyes. Was that a blink? Did your ear just twitch? I hold my breath, but nothing moves. Even your eyes are motionless, though a dim light still flickers in them, like the most distant star in the sky.
When the vet said you had diabetes, I steeled myself for your death. But that was two years ago -- two years of daily insulin shots, daily blood tests, daily erosion of my armor. Two years you waited, until I believed your promise once again.
I watch the light in your eyes recede farther into that blackness where I cannot reach you. With a soft step, the vet enters to check on us. He'd said there was nothing more he could do, the seizure drained too much of your life. I look at him now, searching for hope somewhere -- in his flannel shirt, behind his wire-rim glasses, under the hairs of the mustache that makes him look like everyone's grandpa. Nothing.
I have been holding you for hours and my bladder is full beyond belief. I gesture to the vet. He nods, reaches out his arms. "Wait -- I'll be right back," I whisper. "Promise me." As I release you to the vet, I look in your eyes. I still see that that scrap of light; you'll hold on a little longer.
I rush from the room, down the hall to the tiny bathroom, where the vet and his employees clean up after taking care of the sick and dying. I try not to think of washing my hands of you in this square box of a room. I pee and run back, still zipping up my jeans.
Unlike the vet, I do not enter the room softly. I rush back in, ready to grab you from the vet's arms. But his bent back faces the door; the arms of his stethoscope stick out of his ears, and I slow down. He hears me, straightens, and with the stethoscope still plugged in his ears, turns and hands you to me. A tiny wet pool in the corner of his eye overflows onto his cheek.
I refuse to breathe as I take you. I hug you tight, your body so still. I don't want to look into your eyes, but finally I do. A sob explodes from my throat. Your eyes are empty. You couldn't even keep your last promise.
I hear your voice in my head again -- It's all right; we're not leaving you -- but I know it's a lie; it's not you, you're gone.
A long time later (or so it seems), after the crying, the vet's consoling words, the cremation arrangements, I must take my first step back into the world without you. I am exhausted, numb, scared of the world's emptiness. But the vet's eyes tell me it's time to go.
I use the bathroom again, and this time I do wash my hands -- of broken promises, of dying, of your death-smell -- but not of you.
As I walk down the hallway toward the vet, a door on my right bursts open. Into the hall scampers a tiny ball of fur, followed by one of the vet's assistants. The black-and-white furball runs toward the vet, then abruptly turns and runs in my direction. It zigzags across the floor, stumbles and rolls over, gets up and shoots off again, darting straight toward me.
I make ready to move out of its way, but when it is inches from my feet, it stops as though it hit an obstacle. It rolls over, then stands up and shakes its tiny head. I hold my breath as it looks up at me, smug and grinning (in the way cats do). Its twinkling eyes stare into mine for just a second more, and then it lays down on my right shoe and begins to purr.
It is the loudest purr I've ever heard.
Copyright by Joan Kremer
