Farewell, Fillow
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s us. Maybe others don’t do this as much.
But Mom and I, we’re always looking for signs. For her it’s more on a religious level. The Holy Spirit, she’s always saying. For me it’s something else. I don’t know what to call it. I’m not a religious person. But I do want to believe in something else. Something unexplainable. I want to believe there is just something we cannot see. I like to leave just a little room for magic.
Recently, though, we’ve both been tormented by looking for other signs. Bad ones. Like her lessening appetite. Or when she had to stop on the stairs.
Or his: what’s with that distant stare? And why has he switched from hiding behind the paintings, to hiding only in that upstairs closet? Does it mean… ?
Fillow the cat has had a mass of some kind for weeks now, a bump on his forehead just above his little nose. We noticed it when I first arrived, when Mom got back from the hospital. There was that bump on his head and his watery eye, as if he was crying or just about to. I took him to the vet. “I don’t like how this feels,” is what she said, feeling the bump, but then she checked the pressure in both eyes with some electronic gadget and said the pressure was normal, “So he doesn’t seem to be in pain, at least not in his eye; if this number was higher it means he’d be feeling a kind of bad headache.” But she leveled with me: it’s probably a tumor, yes. And at his age, I don’t know if you’d want to put him through treatment like chemo, so let’s just try some antibiotics first and see how he responds. It could still be that it’s some infection. So let’s see how he goes with the drops first and bring him back in two weeks.
I was shown how to give him the eye drops. Also how best to shave down his thick mottled hair, to make him feel more comfortable. And I explained the situation at home, and the vet sighed. She said, “You wouldn’t believe how often we see this. How they get what their owners get.”
It wasn’t easy at first, but Fillow and I both fell into it. He’s incredibly trusting. He also came to understand that the drops — or the shaving — these always meant a treat immediately after, so suddenly he would even get a glint in his eye when he saw me unscrewing the cap or coming over with the electric razor. He would just lean back and let me. Sometimes he even gave me a purr.
Truly: a fine fellow.
That’s how he got his name. Because he was a fine feline fellow who always followed her, and who would always feel — so outward he was, always, with his emotions. And so: “Fillow”, pronounced Feel-O.
And Fillow himself was a Sign: Mom was still missing Rocky, so much, back then. She’d had to put our beloved dog to sleep after all those years, those adventures and struggles, because the little guy had gotten a bump on his head too, a tumor in his nasal cavity. He’d gone from being the fastest dog in the west to needing to be carried. That’s when she finally decided it was time.
Then Fillow appeared. Before he ever had a name, he was just this little shaggy kitten there in the car park, suddenly there, suddenly looking at her. While my mom had grieved over Rocky, had taken in some other stray cats in the meantime (it was a neighborhood problem, and she became the savior and solver), through all of this, through the grief and the fosters and some of the others she held onto, she had always dreamed of having “a cuddler.” A cat that wasn’t as distant as the others could be.
And then, there was this one. This one who then followed her everywhere. This one who would literally put his arms around her neck, and hugged her. No exaggeration. I used to see this with my own two eyes, and my jaw would drop.
“You see? The Holy Spirit!” she would say. “I asked God for a cuddler.”
~~~
August 2.
I’m back home from another donation. I hop up the stairs and say hi to Fillow, who’s there at the top of the stairs waiting for me (it seems), who’s displaying both good signs and bad of late depending on the hour, the day. And then I sit by Mom’s bed.
“I almost cried in the parking lot of the Salvation Army.”
“Why?”
“Because. Like, we look for signs… it’s so stupid because we uh…”
I lose my words. Now actually I am crying. It jabs into me finally, and here are there tears.
“What? You saw something bad?”
“No, I was just thinking so much about your book. …”
Her book about our beloved dog, I’d just discovered it again and become enchanted by it, and the pages and memories stayed with me throughout my morning drive towards the donation center. I was seeing him and feeling Rocky again next to me, on the passenger’s seat of my car, just as he always sat there, upright and looking forward through the windshield, and even shifting his weight to the left or right to counterbalance whenever a turn was coming up. A turn he knew. Because he knew where we were going, he always knew everything, and he had his tennis ball there, ready.
“… I drop off the clothes into the trailer. And then I’m driving away, in this huge empty parking lot. …”
“Yeah?”
Here I hold up a tennis ball that’s been in my hand. Some simple tennis ball that my eye had landed on after I’d dropped off bags of donations, this green dot I’d spotted within a sea of otherwise empty gray asphalt.
And she begins to cry too.
“Just this, just there. In the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s him,” she says. It’s Rocky.”
“It’s just so weird that on this day, that I’m reading that book and mesmerized and kept thinking about it on my drive there, and…”
“I know. It’s Rocker. Rocker is giving us a sign. God is giving us a sign, too.”
“And now I have to take Fillow to the vet, and … ”
Mom: “Rocky says, ‘But we had some great times, didn’t we!’ That’s what he says. Great times are the most important, not the book. Great times are the most important. Because life should be like this. And you’re the tennis player. You’re the tennis ball too. This is life. This is life. You look for the signs, you will see the signs. I’m telling you. Rocky says, ‘I’m waiting. I’m waiting, and you guys have fun!’”
“I mean, it just reminded me of how he would just drop the ball in front of us always and say, ‘Let’s play.’
She laughs. “Yes. ‘You’re talking too much! Let’s play!’ See, Jas? Like with your tennis. Life is a ball. That’s all it is. And we have to fight to have a ball.”
~
The eye drops were working. The antibiotic injection was working. The steroid, which I gave to him in the exact way I was giving Mom her morphine, through an oral syringe, was working. Fillow came back to life. He returned to looking at us with those big green eyes of his opened so wide, as if in surprise. He wasn’t hiding those eyes or himself as often. And he absolutely seemed to be loving his newly shaved, lion-looking self: now he walked with a strut.
Then one morning — his breathing. It was labored. It was blocked. He had a discharge from his nose, and he was blowing his nose often.
Back to the vet: she explained that the steroid helps with the mass, but can suppress the immune system. So this could be a secondary infection. Like a cold. Let’s try an antibiotic injection, and from this point, just watch him, you have to think about quality.
Think about quality.
That phrase, it rolled around in my head. Rolled around as I watched him like a hawk then, looking for quality, looking for signs:
Hey, he’s hiding again.
But hey, he’s coming out and still eating.
Hey, hiding again.
But hey, when I go get him from the closet and take him to a chair, or to Mom, he begins purring like a freight train in our arms. If he’s purring, he’s happy. Right?
And then in the last few days: clear breathing. And spunk! Now he was actually leaving the closet and coming down the stairs on his own again, and eagerly following me into the kitchen for treats, and eating voraciously actually — even stealing his brother’s tuna sometimes, instead of the other way around; every question, every sign I seemed to be looking for, well it was now in the positive direction. He was even frequently coming up to me as I sat and looking up with those big intense eyes, asking to join. Asking to cuddle. So of course I obliged, pick him up, and he would nestle into me, hug me, and his purring went into my ribs.
We were so happy. All of us. We were purring. All of us.
~
Today.
Today I wake up, I start the coffee, I check on Mom, check on the cats, give everyone their food and clear the old dishes, the old litters. In the bathroom upstairs, I find myself laughing when Fillow plods in and looks at me, curiosity in his eyes as if he’s asking me what I’m doing with the litter in there. He never does this. I just laugh.
He follows me for a bit, then. I think he’s asking for a cuddle, so I take him up into my arms and rock him like a baby, which he also loves, and he gives a good purr, and after a bit of this I leave him with Mom on the bed to go down and finish the coffee for me, the tea for her.
“Something’s not right with him, Jas,” I hear Mom say when I’m then back upstairs with the tea. “I think it might be time.”
What? No. I don’t understand. Don’t agree.
But then later, I see it too. Actually I hear it first, and then I see it. I hear a strange meow from some strange place, and I go to find it, and find him wedged behind a fold-up chair in an awkward position, in this place he simply never goes. I go to him there, I remove the chair he’s behind, and when he gets up, he wobbles. He stumbles. He cannot walk straight.
Oh no.
I try everything. Some cuddling to calm him. Some tuna, some water to salve him. Some love.
None of it works now. Nothing I do finds his purr.
He only looks off, and looks to be struggling. His breathing is also odd; labored puffs. He rests awhile in my arms, and then I put him on his paws again to see, and again he stumbles.
~
The Surge of Energy.
This happens with hospice patients. Often. It’s in the books. A person nearing death, who’s maybe even been comatose, will suddenly come alive, will be not only lucid but have an appetite, an energy, a laugh. Family members are often stunned. They call other family members. They say: Mom is getting better! They say, Hey, you can talk to her! You want to talk to her?
And then, just as suddenly, as swiftly, that light can go away. The end then arrives. And it stuns: Because what about…
That Surge of Energy can last a few minutes, or days.
I don’t know if Fillow’s last few days here was this same surge, but it certainly seems so. The cat I took back to the vet this afternoon was a shell of what he’d only just been. A moment ago.
~
“You’re OK, you’re OK,” I’m telling him. He’s on his side now, on a soft blanket spread across a long table, and his head is in my hand. He’s just looking at me, and I’m down here on the table with him, our eyes level, looking back. I see the reflection of my bald head there in his left eye, the same eye that had been crying weeks ago, when all this began. Now the eye is watery again, but it’s looking, and isn’t blinking. It’s just holding onto me as I hold onto him. Holding as the first sedative kicks in, and then after awhile, after we’re all there just petting him, the vet then finds the vein in his leg again and delivers the next needle.
You’re OK, You’re OK.
I’m not even sure who I’m saying this to anymore, but his eye just stays on me. Never looks away. No change. Nothing. No flick of that eye, or last gasp. Nothing. There is only the doctor then moving her stethoscope over his body and saying quietly, “He’s gone.” Only then do I realize he’s gone. His eye, still on me. My reflection, still there.
~
We spoke of signs again when I returned home, when we cried together. I suggested we should maybe at some point go out to the patio if she had the energy for it, as the best advice anyone ever gave me when it came to grief — and it’s the advice I always pass on — is just to go outside. Something about the elements — the sun, the sky, the wind — something about this just seems to help more than being inside. And she said yes, yes she remembers when she took Rocky to the vet, when she had to let him go, how she cried so hard in the car thereafter and knew she needed to be outside. That she couldn’t go home. So she drove to a little park beside a church where she always used to take him, throw him balls. It was a quiet place. Maybe she could breathe there.
And when she arrived there, so did a falcon. It dropped down out of the sky just as she was parking her car. It landed just in front of her, landed and looked at her, held her gaze even. Then flew away.
~
Signs.
There were some other bad ones tonight. Mom never made it outside. Didn’t feel up to it.
Worse things happened. Things I don’t want to write down.
A nurse came in the night at my behest, my panic. And she’s stable now. She’s resting.
And Fillow’s still here. I’m still writing him into the present tense as well as the past. Because he’s here in his absence. He’s here where I see a clump of his hair. His bowl. Here in his hiding places. Here in the holes in so many of my tee-shirts where his claws would burrow and hold on, so much so that I always had to pry or peel him off me as I’d laugh, and he would purr, and we’d be just stuck this way. This is, this was — Fillow. He stuck to us. Stuck especially to my mom. Worshipped her. Cuddled her. Followed her. In sickness and in health.
“Filek,” she was saying today, both before and after I took him away. “Fillow, I’ll see you soon.”
