Grief

"Green connotes hope."

That's what my best friend, Galen, told me a back in 1986. He was having his father's chiropractic office repainted before he took over the practice. Apparently he hadn't liked the color, but his father had convinced him it was a good idea.

We had met 6 years earlier when he was going to Palmer Chiropractic College in Davenport, Iowa, and I was working at a natural food store nearby. In 1983 he moved back to Portland, Oregon to take over the family business. A few weeks after he had wryly informed me about the healing powers of green he died in a senseless accident.

Today I had to say farewell to another best friend, my special cat, Butchy. I have several cats; some old-timers like Butch, some younger and healthy, some fosters. Butch was special because he loved me the most. We had an extra special bond.

Butch came to us at our old house in about 1999. One night he appeared on the front porch, apparantly having heard we fed transients. Gray with white tuxedo markings, he was thin as a rail. His huge tomcat cheeks bulged out so far they squeezed his gooey eyes almost closed. It was love at first sight for me!

"Look at this sweet cat", I called to George, my husband, who came to inspect. "She's starving and there's something wrong with her eyes," I reported. I didn't realize at the time that big jowls was a classic sign of fighting-tom-with-lots-of-unneutered-testosterone syndrome. Butch seemed not unfriendly, but skittish and extremely hungry. I fed him a lot so he would return. A couple nights later I picked him up and brought him inside.

Once we found out Butch was a male we decided he looked very butch, hence his name. He also had a very flat nose which made him the only cat I'd ever seen to actually look like Dr. Seuss's Cat In The Hat. We soon called him Butchy Bear, because he was cuddly and affectionate like a teddy bear!

After his first trip to the vet we called him the $600 cat. That was for the neuter, a dental, which included extractions of broken teeth (from fighting), shots and antibiotics for cuts and bites on his ears and face. He got flea medicine and ear mite medicine and a combo test for diseases it was a miracle he didn't have. It would be almost another year of eye drops and eye flushes before the vet (not my current vet) figured out that he had a condition called entropian, where the eyelids curl in toward the eyeball and the eyelashes irritate the eye causing pain, damage and chronic discharge.

The entropian had been exascerbated by the tomcat jowls. This required a somewhat expensive surgery and ghoulish stitches above and below each eye, but the change in Butch's demeanor was immediate. After a year of quietly napping and squinting his way around the house, Butch came home from his surgery bouncing! He played with all the toys he hadn't seemed to notice before and gleefully smacked around all the other cats before settling back into his favorite bed to take a nap.

Butch seemed very grateful for all the help and picked me as his favorite. George understood and accepted this. Butch always wanted to sit on my lap. But actually, he wanted to sit higher than my lap. He wanted to sit on my chest! I accomodated him as much as I could by assuming uncomfortable and even painful positions as I watched tv or worked on the computer so that he could get right up under my chin!

He liked to sleep on my chest at night too, so I learned to sleep on my back. If another cat managed to get higher up on my torso than he, he would complain and then pout, jumping down on the floor with his back to me and his head down, sulking, until I called, "Butchy Bear, come back! Come on Bear, you can sit on top!" Then he would slowly turn his head for a moment and jump back up to reclaim his position.

Butch didn't often run outside, but if he did and I had trouble getting him back in, I learned that all I had to do was lie down on the ground and call him! Eventually he would come to me and lie on my chest. Every time.

He liked to be scritched on his neck below his chin. When we did this he would tip his head way back in blissful abandon and sway his head from side to side like Stevie Wonder. We always meant to park a doll piano in front of him and film him doing this, but we never got around to it.

He hated being picked up.

About a year ago the small spot on my Bear's tongue that my first vet had dismissed as a scar from a virus became known for what it really was, a sarcoma. Although he didn't seem to have any pain and maintained his healthy appetite to the end, eventually he had no tongue and couldn't swallow at all, and it was time to make that unthinkable decision to bid my best friend farewell.

Most of us know what it's like to go through this. We don't like to dwell on our experiences of putting our beloved animals down. We usually don't like to read others' experiences of it either. But sometimes it helps to write about it to understand it, or find a way to structure it so that it makes some sense.

Kahlil Gibran says about Joy and Sorrow in his book, The Prophet, "When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight,"

Butchy Bear Cassidy was one of my greatest achievements and joys. I will miss him for a long time and love him always. And I will always be grateful for the opportunity he gave me to give him a happy life and for his unwavering affection.

When I picked out a baby blanket to take with me to the vet to wrap him in, I considered my color options. That's when the "green phrase" occured to me. "Green connotes hope", I mused. Yes, I think it does - the right green anyway.

But I realized hope wasn't what I wanted now. The hope had been realized. Through all the challenges and trials and learning experiences, Butchy's life had been a success! Had I known he had cancer in time, I might have saved him from that, too, but for nine years we had lived a close, happy life together.

I decided that what I wanted was comfort. Comfort is not necessarily hope. It is a soft, protective cloud you wrap around yourself to heal. I chose a beautiful blue blanket, the color of my Galen's eyes, to wrap my Bear in.

Goodbye, my sweet Bear, my sweet Love. You have been my delight!