Timothy, Who Is Not A Possum

My four month old kitten died suddenly last Saturday. His name was Timothy. An unusual name for a cat, but my daughter wanted him to have an unapologetic human name - like Carl. Or Paul. Or Lewis. I suggested Timothy, because I’ve always had an affection for the music in that name – there’s something about the way the soft th plays with the tongue, followed with the gentle phonetics of a long E. It’s a comforting sound for me – like the muffled ratta-tat-tat of wooden sewing needles. Or the quiet whoosh of wind lifting the newly sprung leaves of a springtime tree.

            I was flabbergasted by how much I grieved Timothy’s premature death. Little to no warning other than a two day period in which he became increasingly symptomatic. Thursday morning, he was turning cartwheels – leaping in full athletic glory from floor to chair, chair to countertop, countertop back to chair. When I went out to the raised deck to do my yoga series, I brought him with me so that he could start getting used to the outdoors. He slinked between the rails and mewed at the ground below. He lifted his nose to study the birds that flitted in the tree tops. After threading his way through my precariously planted yoga poses, he finally flopped down in a patch of sunshine and stretched his belly so that it was fully exposed to the warming sun. He pawed at the air with outstretched claws. It was February 11th - a chill, winter day in the central coast of California. I imagine that the sun felt good to him. It certainly did to me.

            That was the last time I saw Timothy behaving as a playful, healthy kitten. That evening he became somewhat lethargic and only nibbled at his food. Oh, I thought, all that fresh air must have overstimulated him. Friday he slept a lot, ate even less and didn’t seem to use the litter much. Hmmm….a tummy ache, perhaps? Maybe I shouldn’t have given him that sandwich meat. By Saturday morning, he limped away from his uneaten bowl of morning cream and then slunk beneath a blanket, where he curled up to sleep…again. He was taking quick, short breaths by then. I could see his belly fur shrinking and expanding at the bottom of his rib cage. Time to go to the vet. It was 9:30am.

What followed was a two-hour, wildfire sequence of events that swung between altering diagnoses’ and two veterinary facilities, and ultimately culminated in the horrible determination to euthanize. Timothy was suffering from congestive heart failure. Likely a birth defect – a shitty hand to be dealt right out of the gate. He likely wouldn’t make it more than six to twelve months at most, and his quality of life would be poor. Constant visits to the vet, a strict medicine regimen with liquid or capsule pills twice per day. In all likelihood, he’d grow to resent the forced pills and the person who administered them (me). If I were to let him outdoors, he’d come home with less and less frequency. Euthanasia, I was told, was an option worthy of consideration; perhaps the kinder course to take.

By 12:00pm, at high noon, I sat on a hard metal bench in an examining room holding Timothy in a baby blanket. While the vet and I were discussing options, he had been left in some back room inside an oxygen tank where he had also been given a sedative, so by the time my decision had been made and Timothy was brought to me, his breathing had slowed considerably. He was quiet and calm, but still sickly. His tail gently lifted and fell. He seemed captivated by the wall in front of him and stared at it with eyes wide open. He purred, but just slightly.

“I’m so sorry,” the vet said, “I know you weren’t expecting this.” And then he pushed down on the syringe. I stroked the top of Timothy’s head, rubbed his ears and tickled the soft fur beneath his chin. A few moments passed, just seconds really. And then, without any kind of sudden movement or spasmodic gasping or seizure-like leg stiffening, he simply lay his head in the crux of my elbow. His eyelids fell to half-mast and his little pink tongue, now patchy white, slipped between his teeth. Dead already. It was so quick. It was utterly without ceremony. It was entirely surreal. I cried and cried – slobbered really. And then, because I was in a public place, because there was nothing left to do than get on with it, I wiped away my tears and asked if I could take him home for burial.

Fifteen minutes later, I walked out the double front doors of the animal hospital with Timothy carefully wrapped, burrito-like, inside the same blanket in which he had died. I gently stowed my little package in the back seat of the car, drove home and started digging.

***

What strikes me about Timothy’s death, other than the empty well of sadness he left behind, is the strange juxtaposition to the possum death I had witnessed only weeks before. This past winter here in California has been a very wet one. Record amounts of rain that made headlines nation-wide. As a result, the creek in the backyard swelled with run-off. Frogs suddenly erupted in a discordant chorus of nighttime croaking and ducks came in pairs to paddle about, quacking as they swam in circles. The ground, formerly as hard and compact as cement, was now sodden and soft, offering up without protest what it had once held in a covetous vice grip.

Once the skies cleared, I ventured outside to celebrate the relief from drought and to marvel at the change. As I stood there puffing wispy clouds of hot breath, I spotted from the corner of my eye an unmoving patch of furry white. I crept closer for a better look. To my astonishment, it was an otherwise healthy looking possum lying dead on its side, its matted fur soaking wet. It’s nose was impossibly pink, as was its exposed gum and the little pads on its feet. This was a fresh death, and with no apparent reason. Drowned in its subterranean den, perhaps, though that didn’t explain how it had made it out into the open.

I shuddered. Unlike most people (and I’m being sarcastic, here), I have a particular aversion to knowing that there are dead things around me and much prefer ignorance on the matter. I considered picking up the carcass with a shovel and flinging it into the creek. But then I remembered the strident frogs and the gleeful ducks and decided that I couldn’t so callously pollute their good fortune. But I certainly wasn’t going to bury the possum – that was much too intimate, if not macabre. Nor could I resign to tossing it in the yard waste or trash bins as a dead possum is neither yard waste nor trash and, besides, it might be a week before the garbage trucks came trundling along. So, after hemming and hawing, I simply left it there. Nature’s very efficient waste service, in the form of careening turkey vultures, microscopic bacteria, worms and insects, would make quick work of it.

Well, somewhat quick work of it. It took about a month for the thing to decompose. Sure enough, the turkey vultures arrived and began pecking at it, hunching in turns in the upper branches of the nearby trees to supervise and digest. They must have gotten into some sort of competitive squabble over the thing because I noticed, about two weeks later, that it had been dragged about ten yards from the spot where it had originally fallen. Now it was ingloriously draped, in a half-eaten state, over a tangled raspberry bush just steps from the creek. I shuddered some more and quickly averted my eyes.

An additional two weeks passed and I couldn’t stand it anymore. Nature’s miraculously efficient waste service was apparently on strike because this dead possum was still hanging around (though now it looked infinitely more like a shriveled leather canteen that happened to have sharp teeth and claws than it did anything remotely resembling something that had once been soft and fluffy). In a fit of disgust, I grabbed a stick, thrust it into the briar in which this thing was all entangled and then…paused. What was my plan? I looked at the creek. It had shrunk by then to a quarter its original size, the puddle ducks were nowhere to be seen and the frogs, noisy as they had been, had grown much quieter. To hell with it, I thought, and flung the tangled mess from me with a quick lunge forward. Tangled raspberry bushes and decomposed possum went spinning through the air and landed on the creek’s surface. Like a beaver raft, they floated for a minute and then gently descended into the shallow depths without further ceremony. I sighed and turned away, entirely relieved.  Thank god, I thought, I finally have the yard back.

*** 

But I don’t have the yard back; at least, I don’t have it back to myself. Now I share it with at least two other dead creatures, and likely a whole host of them besides. Two otherwise healthy animals - one beloved and one abhorred - both prematurely dead. Both gone without ceremony, both sharing the same ground in which they will, in time, return to dust.

And what of it? Is there any meaning to any of this? Probably not. Much to my chagrin, dead things are all around us, all the time. We tread over them with frequency and regularity. We pour them into our gasoline tanks and burn them in our factories. They are re-purposed as truck tires, cell phones and desktop key pads. We eat from them in the form of plastic spoons and forks, and then carefully seal our leftovers in sterile plastic tubs and wrappings made from dead things. It’s a violent and fearsome cycle and I resent it with at least as much force as I dread it. For the very same will happen to me, as it will to all the living things that I either love or abhor.

It seems to me that the very experience of living is full of irrational bias. The universe’s treatment of animate things, from plants to animals to humans, is grossly unfair precisely because it is riddled with random acts of extreme favoritism and cold indifference. But death is the great equalizer. Death cares little if we were once cute or ugly, gentle or mean. It cares only for re-purposing. It’s a mighty machine, forcing all things to yield to the inevitability of transmogrification. And repurposing is, as much as I hate to admit it, better than no purposing at all. If I think upon it long enough, I can see its inherent beauty, even when I also witness it stealing those animated things that bring my irrational life a sense of purpose and joy, something to love and therefore a reason to live.  

It's callous of me that I care so little for the possum’s life. It’s biased of me that I care so deeply for Timothy’s. The irony, or the gift, in these two recent, seemingly disconnected deaths, is that now I have a physical place to come and be reminded of such incredible, senseless and beautiful disparity. A sometimes creek that alternates between wet and dry and a freshly dug grave beneath a shade-giving oak. A grave that is now crowned with a ring of stones and a flowering, yellow poppy – yellow for Timothy, who was somewhere between apricot and buff, taupe or orange.

I could never quite put my finger on it.