Goodbye, Cutesie

Cutesie was our cat. We got him for our daughter Elizabeth when she was four, and she gave him that, well, cutesie name. Maybe a play on the word’s definition? (I decided it was short for Cutesmeier.)

After Elizabeth left for college he was really my wife’s cat and she loved him dearly. He didn’t exactly reciprocate, but did like to be near us, and in the last years started snuggling up to my wife while we watched TV, letting her stroke him. One shouldn’t make assumptions about the mind of a cat. He lacked a “theory of mind,” an understanding that we are conscious beings (like him); rather, we were objects, a part of his environment. But he was certainly conscious, with thoughts and feelings.

We buried him yesterday, a proper funeral. He’d been showing his age a bit but was quite fine until the weekend. Then it happened fast; kidney failure. When the vet brought him out the final time, he was still a living sentient being, engaged with the world. Then the needle, and he wasn’t.

Kind of makes you think. Especially happening on my 67^th birthday; ever harder to sustain the idea that I’m not an old man, with my own needle looming.* (Though my wife is great at making me feel like the young man I actually never was when young.)

I recalled the rhyme on an old German token, “Heut rot, morgen todt.” Loosely translated: Here today, gone tomorrow. I ponder what it was like for Cutesie to be alive, then not. Watching him being covered with dirt hits one in the gut. I’ve written recently about death**; this intensified the feelings there expressed.

We recently attended a talk about “Final Exit Network,” which helps folks take control of their demise. The speaker stressed that we often treat pets more humanely, to avoid suffering, than people, and I remembered this when seeing how peacefully and painlessly Cutesie went. His transition was virtually imperceptible.

That also seemed relevant to the furore over botched executions. I suspect we’ve gone so overboard in trying to ensure humaneness that we’re tripping over our own feet in that regard. Can’t we manage to do for people what we do for cats?

* Today brought my law school’s glitzy magazine. Once full of news of my professors, now it’s only an occasional obituary (except for Norman Dorsen, reassuringly still active). Even reports on my classmates’ accomplishments have faded out.

** See this also. And that law school magazine has an interesting essay by Samuel Scheffler, arguing that humanity’s continuity after one’s death is psychologically far more important than we realize in giving life meaning.