the phoenix cat

scout was impossibly tiny when I brought her home

A few weeks ago I discussed my love for our cat Dada.  We adopted him in December of 2008 from the Burbank animal shelter.  From the first moment I picked him up I could tell he was a special cat.  If you would like to read more from that first post about him click here, dada was my favorite.

Jaime grew up Catholic, I am not nor have I ever been religious.  The closest I ever got were a series of Hanna Barbera videos depicting bible stories through animation.  Easter was not a particularly special day for either of us.  We decided to make the most of a day off, which began with a nice brunch at Jaime’s restaurant.  We followed that with a walk around Silverlake and a trip to Trader Joe’s where we bought a leg of lamb for dinner.

The rest of our day was spent lounging around watching movies and snacking.  In the early evening I decided to go ahead and get dinner started.  I was prepping the lamb when Dada came over to his food dish in the kitchen and proceeded to pull out all the food onto the floor.  He then stood over the dish and squatted over the dish, clearly trying to go to the bathroom.

I don’t have to explain to you that this was not normal behavior.  I reached down to touch him and it took only a soft stroke on his back to raise his hair.  He let out a low base moan, one that you only hear when a cat is either extremely pissed off or in a considerable amount of pain.  Something was seriously wrong.

I called over to Jaime and we watched as Dada moved about the apartment finding different corners trying to pee and letting out deep moans of pain.  It was Easter Sunday so there were no Vet clinics open, but after a search on the internet we were able to find an overnight clinic in Pasadena.  We hopped in the car and rushed in over, hoping that this was a minor problem with an easy fix.

The Vet determined that he had a urinary tract infection. The infection had swelled so that he could not pass urine through his urethra.  It was explained to us that we had two options, either a surgery to remove the blockage or antibiotics which hopefully could begin to open things up a bit.  Just as with Esteban, money was tight and surgery just wasn’t feasible.

We decided on the antibiotic treatment which the Vet explained to us should begin to take effect immediately.  However if he wasn’t better by the morning we should take him back in for the surgery.

We took Dada home and forced the antibiotics down his throat.  By this point he was refusing to walk more than a few steps, he just stood in place trying desperately to pee.

We went to sleep without eating our lamb dinner, neither Jaime or I could choke down anything with Dada in such pain.

I made up his little bed next to ours and gently laid him down.  That night was full of dreams, eerily similar to the ones I had about Esteban when he was sick.  In the dreams I would wake up to find Dada out of his bed and cured, he was happy and rubbing up against my leg purring so loud that the floor boards shook.  In reality I woke up early in the morning to find that during the night he’d  crawled from his bed into the living room where he refused to stand, instead he just laid there shivering.

His regular Vet still wasn’t open and the overnight clinic we’d taken him to the day before was closed.  The closest we could find was an emergency clinic near Culver City.  Once again we got back in the car and rushed off to another animal hospital.

The Vet took us to a room right away and after a brief exam she hurriedly took him to run a quick test.  Jaime and I waited in the room not saying anything to one another, but we were both thinking the same thing.  “How could this happen again?”

When the Vet came back Dada was not with her.  She explained to us that she’d had some difficulty feeling his bladder, they x-rayed him and found that it had ruptured.  Jaime immediately began to cry while I stood in shocked stillness.  There was nothing we could do, no surgeries or medications could delay the inevitable, Dada was going to die.

It wasn’t until the moment that the Vet told us that his bladder ruptured that the idea that he might die entered my mind.  The night before the Vet had been so nonchalant that I didn’t believe that death was a real possibility.

They took us to a special room, one that was clearly designed for grieving pet owners who’s pet were about to be euthanized.  The room had dim lighting and a couch that looked like it had been stolen from a Venice beach hotel in 1991.  We sat down our eyes so full of tears we could hardly see when Dada was brought in wrapped in a blanket.  Before we left the apartment that morning I assured Addison that Dada would return just as soon as we go him fixed up.  I just couldn’t believe this was happening, seeing him sedated and barely conscious.

In many ways Dada’s death was much harder to accept than Esteban’s.  With Esteban we were prepared to make this decision if it came, we were able to spend a long weekend with him, making him as comfortable as possible.  For Dada it was so sudden and unexpected that neither of us could really believe that this was happening.  Dada was still just a kitten, just barely half a year old.  We bawled uncontrollably as the phenobarbital was injected into his vein.  We had such a brief time to try and say goodbye before his body relaxed and his eyes went empty.  Jaime quietly asked if he was dead, and I assured her that yes, now he wasn’t in pain.

The clinic was really wonderful, they charged us only for the euthanasia, not the visit or the x-rays which they had not received our consent for before hand.  

Back at home we greeted Addison empty handed.  She was expecting to see Dada, she was expecting that fuzzy kitten to rub up against her and purr, but now she was alone again.

Jaime and I cuddled on the couch and watched Pet Cemetary.  For dinner we ate our lamb Easter dinner in memory of Dada.

* * *   

Two Days later Jaime and I drove twenty three miles out to the Baldwin Park animal shelter.  We spent the day before calling around and this was the only shelter with a kitten.  Baldwin Park is not exactly a beautiful place and the animal shelter was even more terrifying.  A bunch of rundown buildings and litter strewn walkways, if I hadn’t know better I would have thought I walked into a war torn city.  The cats were kept in outdoor cages, the pen next to the cats was full of chickens snacking on a half eaten bag of Dorrito’s.  On the otherside were bunnies and inexplicably, squirrels.

There was as promised, just one kitten, a black and white shorthair.  Just four weeks old she was impossibly small, her eyes still sapphire blue.  Her microscopic frame dwarfed by the size of her cage and all the older cats surrounding her.

Just as with Dada she would need to be neutered before she could be taken home, though both Jaime and I knew that she was still far too young for the operation.  I was told that I could pick her up the next day after she had a check up and was neutered, (Jaime and I rolled our eyes when the animal control employee insisted that she was old enough).  On our way home Jaime and I discussed whether it was the best choice for us to adopt her.  It wasn’t that we didn’t want her but there was concern that she would not be healthy, I was especially afraid that because she was so young that she might end up having health complications and we both knew that we could not put down another cat.

We wouldn’t come to a conclusive decision until I found myself the following day driving back out to Baldwin Park.  I rolled my eyes again when the animal control employee informed me that she was too young to be neutered.  I was told however that if I made a deposit for the neutering I could bring her home that day.  She then followed that by saying,

“You don’t have to take her, but if you don’t she’ll probably die.”  To me that meant that really, I didn’t have a choice.  I paid the deposit and took this tiny kitten home.

Addison should have rejected her, three cats in two years should have hardened her, made her act cruelly toward this new kitten.  She accepted her with open... paws.  There was no question of what to call her, she had no fear, after walking through the door we plopped her down on the floor and he immediately began to take charge.  Scout would be her name.  Scout, the mischievous tomboy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

As I prepared to write this story I was reminded of the mythological Phoenix bird, who bursts into flames at death, then from those ashes is reborn anew.   Scout was the total opposite of Dada but my fears of an unhealthy cat have, three years later been proven incorrect.  Then I began to think about Jesus, who according to my Hanna Barbera videos was resurrected on Easter.

my digital immortality

does this calm you? not if you have allergies

If you could write one last email that would be released after your death, what would you say?  What would it say about you?  This was the question I was asking myself while starring at the blank text box on the website deathswitch.com.

About a year ago while listening to an episode of Radiolab on NPR I heard about a website named deathswitch.  The creator was a neuroscientist, David Eagleman.  My first experience with him came in the form of something much less scientific.  Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives, was a collection of short fiction.  The book is exactly as titled, forty different stories about possible afterlives, some funny, some sad, some thought provoking, and some down right creepy.  While the afterlife is not exactly a scientific study, many of the stories rely heavily on Eagleman’s research as a neuroscientist.  It was one of the best books I’d read in a very long time and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Deathswitch as he described it, was a kind of digital immortality where you never truly die because through their system of email releases written by you, your digital form will continue exist.

In my continuing quest to experience more in real life and in my cyber life I decided to join deathswitch.com and reflect on the feeling of knowing that I was now digitally immortal.

So what is deathswitch?  Put simply it is a website that allows you to store encrypted emails that would be dispatched at the time of your death.  The trigger for determining this is by a non response to a “prompt” which is sent to your email address at predetermined intervals.  The information contained in the message is entirely up to you.  Their suggestions are: bank account numbers, passwords, unspoken secrets, final words, or the last line of an argument.

I have spent my whole life dealing with and trying to accept my own mortality.  All the plays and stories I have ever written deal almost exclusively with death or afterlives and fictional versions of myself dealing with them.  How it is that some people find themselves able to accept without fear their mortality has always been a mystery to me.  I wish that I could feel the same way because then perhaps I could occupy my time with experiences other than my eventual death, perhaps enjoy life more, or even find pleasure in daredevil activities.  Joining this website was a direct acknowledgement of the fact that I will eventually die and the words that I write in the message would be the last that anyone would ever read.

When I mentioned this to Jaime she asked me not to join, claiming that I was inviting death by doing so.  If I am afraid of death than Jaime is mortified (no pun intended) by it.  For her just to even think about the idea of a website like this was upsetting.  I was finding my experience therapeutic, looking right into the face of death, in a way.  I also found the exercise of writing my final words to be intriguing.

*                                                                                                   *                                                                                                       *

The first image you find on the website is of a field full of golden sun flowers, I took special note of the image because an open field of flowers so often in popular culture is representative of the afterlife.  The other image you find is of a grass covered hillside with a trio of trees  looking out over clouds and more grassy hills.  There are no people, animals, or technology present, only nature.  It could lead one to believe (including me) that the afterlife is a lonely but beautiful and calming place.

I proceeded to sign up using the normal method of email, password, etc.  I was then asked if I would like a basic or premium account.  The premium offers you the opportunity to create multiple messages to send to various email addresses at a cost of $19.95 per year.  I had no need for the premium account but could understand why someone would want one.  I ended up going with the basic account that allows one message to a single recipient.

Once logged in you need to create a schedule for how often Deathswitch will “prompt” you in an email to determine that you are still among the living.  I chose the default; every 15 days with 5 days to respond.  If you do not respond to their prompt your account will go into “worry mode” which is a cute motherly term for the site re-prompting you to respond.  I set my worry mode to re-prompt me 10 times separated by 1 day.  Should I fail to respond my deathswitch will be activated and my final message will be dispatched.  There is also a “vacation” setting which allows you to ignore the prompts for a time without placing deathswitch into worry mode.

I was beginning to imagine that deathswitch was a series of physical beings.  That it was a real person on the other end of the internet connection, one who was assigned to me alone, who would send out those prompts and check in on me.  I imagined that they would honestly worry about my well being and try with all the means necessary to them to find me.  When I didn’t respond they would sit anxiously by the computer waiting for me to reach back and assure them that I was okay.  When it was clear that I was gone they would pause and reflect on my life though they hardly knew it.  Then with all the gravity the action deserved they would send out my message and move on, occasionally on lonely night remembering what it had been like being the caretaker of my last thoughts.

I knew this wasn’t the case, it was just an emotionless computer with built in triggers that we simulated to care about me.  When my deathswitch message was finally sent it would be done immediately and without feeling.

There were only two steps left before the process was complete, to decide who my deathswitch message would be sent to and what exactly that message would contain.  Who it would be going to was easy, Jaime would be my intended recipient, though I imagine she would eventually share it with my family, I wanted her to see it first.  As for the message, I had no idea what to write.

I have no important passwords or account numbers, no unspoken secrets, and at least as of this moment I have no last lines of an ongoing argument.

The text box sat there empty and white waiting patiently for me to fill it with some kind of thoughtful long lasting wisdom.  What would the words I chose to use say about me?  If they were too funny, would it seem that I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation and was inconsiderate of the readers feelings?  If they were too serious would my final words be dishonest, since I am a man who often prefers to make light of dark situations?  This was a rare opportunity to design the last words that anyone will ever read by you and the pressure to make them count was great.

I let that message box sit empty for nearly a week, straining to think about what should fill it before I understood what was causing me to have such difficulty.

While joining deathswitch was a direct acknowledgement of my mortality, I was not looking death in the face.  I feel perfectly healthy and expect to live a long full life, trying to boil my everything down into a simply message box is almost hopeless to do right now.  I imagined that I would need to be writing this from my death bed or having just experienced a near death situation.

My original intention was to blog about the experience of joining the website and then present my final message to you.  Once that message was written I realized that to publish it here for everyone to see would diminish the quality of its impact completely.  It would become just another thing I wrote in my life and was simply forgotten until my death.  So I will not be presenting it here for all to read, I will say that the message is simply an extension of my life as it currently is without fear or sadness, it doesn’t tell a sob story about my life or death.  Instead it reaches out to you after my physical body has become ashes and says simply,

“I’m not gone, I’m still here.  Not visible, but here.”

dada

dada could be a harsh critic of my work

         Dada was my favorite, in the way that a child might be their parents favorite.  Not that they love one child more than the others but due to some experience they shared together which was special or unique they have memories that will cause them to to be closer.  His life ended tragically the day after Easter in 2008.

Not long after finishing our Junior year in college, Jaime and I kicked around the idea of getting a cat.  We called the Bellevue animal shelter and went down “just to take a look.”  The number of kittens was limited but there was one we locked eyes with.  He was completely black and sitting way in the back of his cage so that all you could see were his little yellow eyes.  He was scrawny, clearly the runt of the litter which is what drew Jaime and I to him.

We took him home named him Esteban and watched him grow.  We were the typical doting parents who loved him and worried about him like we were raising the Buddha reincarnate.  Much to Jaime’s joy Esteban loved to cuddle and often I could find Jaime asleep in bed her body curled around a black fuzzy ball.  Sadly just over a year later Jaime and I found ourselves driving to the Eastlake Veterinary Clinic with Esteban wrapped tightly in a blanket for the final time.  

For months Esteban had been having difficulty passing his stool.  You could see it lodged in his rectum as he would slink into his litter box trying to pass it, but nothing would happen.  Eventually the build up would become so great that he would crawl around the apartment crying out in pain.  The vet diagnosed him with mega colon a condition which caused a part of the intestine to become enlarged and the stool gathers until it becomes impassable.  We would take him to the clinic where they would give him an enema and keep him overnight for a fluid treatment.  On one such visit they took X-rays of him and showed them to us.  In the black and white image you could see that he was literally full of shit.

They gave us some medicine which made the stool softer and passable.  Because it was a compound it had to be specially made for us and a thirty day supply cost us $60.  The medicine worked, unfortunately it made his stool so soft that it would literally leak out of him.  We were finding little puddles of gray matter in corners of the apartment.  (Gray because of the special food we had to feed him.)

We had to lower the dosage which unfortunately required us to go back for more enemas at about $300 a visit.  Our last resort was an expensive surgery where they would remove part of his colon, even still we were not guaranteed the procedure would be effective.  There was a slim chance that the whole thing might just clear up on its own.  We decided to keep him on the medicine and hope for the best.

On a cold week that following October we noticed a lack of stool in his litter box and we waited for the impending pain.  Jaime and I had never discussed euthanasia but I think we both had it in the back of our minds.  After about a week without a bowel movement Jaime and I knew we needed to make a decision.  We could not afford another enema nor could we afford the needed surgery.  Silently we decided to spend a quiet weekend at home with him watching TV and trying to forget anything was wrong.  By Monday morning he was howling in pain and we reluctantly wrapped him in his favorite blanket and drove to the Vet where they would put him to sleep.  Neither of us had ever made a decision like that before, part of me still feels that I was a bad owner because I did not try for the surgery.  We bawled throughout the entire process, and held him in our arms while they injected him with a fatal dose of Phenobarbital.  There is a strange moment one that I think of often, where while holding him I tried to understand when he ceased to be Esteban and instead became just an empty dead vessel.  We held his dead body until we realized it was time to move on, there is no harder feeling than watching a technician take away your cats body knowing you will never see him again.  We didn’t have enough money to cover the euthanasia so the Vet graciously allowed us to make payments.

A week later unable to fill the void in our seemingly empty apartment we went back to the Bellevue animal shelter “just to look” and adopted a small black and white kitten we named Addison.  She was the opposite of Esteban in almost every way, bright and bubbly she was mischievous and less likely to cuddle with you than nibble on your hand.  Now we were the parents who’d lost a child and were constantly afraid of something happening to her.  In the first week we had her we lost in the apartment three times and brought Jaime to tears each time.

That Christmas we began watching a cat for a friend who was having a difficult time.  Riley was a big cat who had a heart of gold, one of the sweetest you would ever meet.  He arrived at our apartment covered in flees and filled with worms.  I remember giving him a bath and watching as blood swirled down the drain.  He had a patch of fur right above his tail that he’d scratched bald and bloody.

Within a month the flees and worms were gone and the bald patch was covered in hair.  He became as much of the family as Addison and they spend most of their days cuddling together in the sun by the window.  Riley’s owner rarely came to visit him and two weeks before  our move to Los Angeles we debated what to do with him.  We wanted to take him with, not only because we’d become attached to him but also Addison was attached to him.

In an effort to save our friendship with Riley’s owner we tried to be as diplomatic as possible.  We told her that we would be leaving in two weeks and that we would be more than happy to keep Riley.  She took deep offense to our offer to took Riley back, I hoped not to become flea ridden and full of worms again.  I still truly believe that we should have kept Riley and dealt with the consequences later.

When we arrived in LA Addison began wandering the apartment at night holding a toy in her mouth and howling.  It was clear that she missed Riley and we did as well, it felt like he had died and all three of us were trying to get over the loss of him.  On our second week in the apartment Addison slipped out the door unnoticed, it took us two hours before we realized she was missing.  We started looking for her and when we concluded that she must have gone outside Jaime began to loose it going from door to door in the building crying big wet tears of loss.  After an hour of scouring the building and thinking that she was gone for good, Jaime found her tucked up inside an old broken Coke machine.  Afterwards we started talking about getting another cat to keep Addison company, deciding to wait till after Christmas.

On a mid December Sunday Jaime and I were driving up to Target, on our way we passed the Burbank animal shelter which was advertising a “Kitty fair.”  We vowed not to stop, but on our way back we agreed to stop by and “Just look.”

The room with the fair was held in a room separate from the cages, the kittens were kept in little pens.  People were taking turns holding them deciding if they were a good fit.  At first it seemed we would in fact just look but Jaime spied this small black and white cat with long disheveled hair.  Jaime held him for a while until she handed him to me while she talked to the staff about adoption procedures.  As I held him he proceeded to fall asleep in my arms purring like a tiny motor.  I remember thinking that this is what it must feel like for parents holding their newborn child.  Here was this kitten who didn’t even know me trusting me completely.  By the time Jaime came back there was no doubt we were adopting him.

We couldn’t take him home that night because he hadn’t been spayed yet, they told us we could pick him up the following Tuesday after the operation.  On the drive home we discussed names, concluding that he was a serious cat and thus needed a serious name.  Something distinguished, perhaps something after a distinguished writer.  I threw in Spalding, Kafka, and Mingus.  Jaime threw in Faulkner, Plath, and Hemingway.  None seemed to work until (and I don’t remember how) we settled on Dada.  Named for the 20th Century art movement, we chose it mainly because the Dada movement was started by serious artists who took themselves seriously but seemed to produce humorous results.

The night we brought him home we were unsure how Addison would react.  She’d never been around a kitten before and we hoped that she wouldn’t try to eat him.  Neither Jaime or I are ones to slowly introduce animals into a new environment so we just plopped Dada down in the middle of the living room/kitchen/dining room.  There was much admiring from a distance by Addison but when she started to get closer Dada began purring.  So loud we could hear him from across the room.

By the end of the week he and Addison were best friends.  Dada loved to cuddle with everyone all the time.  He was like a little dog who would follow you from room to room just wanting to be near you and know what you were doing, then cuddle up with you.  What I remember best about him was his love for the computer, he would spend hours just watching me type.  Occasionally batting at the cursor as it flew across the screen, and when he got tired he would lay down next to it and drift off to sleep.

Last Sunday while organizing paperwork in our filing cabinet deciding what should be recycled and what needed to be kept, Jaime came across Dada’s paperwork from the Burbank animal shelter.  I looked it over trying to remember what it was like to be that age, what it was like to live in that apartment in California, what it was like to have Dada.  I tried to remember what Dada was like, what he used to do, but all I could remember was sitting at my computer having a spectator basking in the bluish glow of the laptop.  We took the papers, then filed them away with the other animals paperwork.