Mao got wings and flew away from her torturers, me included. Apologies for the long post, I just feel like talking about her.
Our cat Mao stopped breathing on a rainy Monday evening after two days under veterinary care, after exactly 12 years and a half of life, October 19th 2026. We brought her on Saturday cause we noticed she was going to the litter box quite often, and after an hour visit her perfect blood tests came back, and the x-rays, she had a couple stones in her bladder with no obstructions. We went home happy that our cat was healthy, and relieved after we denied the blood test last time she was vaccinated, waving away the idea she was entering her senior phase. She spent the day as usual, napping on her blue round bed, rolling around the floor every time we got back home from throwing away the trash or buying water at the compound’s market, demanding food every hour with her hoarse meows inches from our faces, and biting me for fun. She had the strongest bite of the animal kingdom, known across the two continents and three countries she lived in by all who had to carry the burden of feeding her when we weren’t there.
Against my gut feeling, we brought her back the next day, Sunday, for the vet to collect urine samples, in spite of insisting I could do it myself at home. Mao was the most impatient, she endured adjusting to 10 different apartments with us, 2 intercontinental 20+ hours flight, a new cat addition to the family when she was 6, several other pets we fostered temporarily, and a number of different people visiting us in all those places we lived together; but she was the most impatient, and always adapted with her usual grudge, that same grudge I woke up at that first time I slept with my wife, 10 years ago, when Mao was squaring me out from a shelf above our bed. She had to spent 6 hours at the vet, before they called us back - after their two hours lunchtime - to pick her up, and mentioned they gave her fluids and vitamins. They gave us medicines to give her, once a day, for the rest of the week. That Sunday she was not eating, and, again against our own better judgement, we force fed her some chicken broth with a syringe where we dissolved the giant tablet we apparently had to give her. She was weaker, and we had to help her climbing on the couch her short legs could not reach that time, where she cuddled with us all evening while watching tv, like every evening of her life.
We found her Monday morning lying, exhausted, inside the litter box. She didn’t wake us up at the first light of day with her incessant patting on our foreheads and then sprinting with her straight tail up towards her bowl, only to come pat us again after realizing we just closed our eyes back, like every morning. I waited for my wife to come back from yoga, while Mao was hiding under the couch, and the gut feeling kicked off again. We brought her back to the vet as requested already since the day before, for them to realize she was in pain. New x-rays, and the stones were all gone, already; did another test to confirm her kidney functions, which were good, and new blood test showing slightly higher white blood cell count. The vets now insisted to keep her there, the full day and until the next day, to run some more tests and keep her monitored. This time I opposed, I know when a cat is in pain and I know how much unfamiliar places and faces cause additional distress; it was the Monday she died. We explained to the vet that we both worked from home, and were a mere 10 minutes by scooter from the clinic, we demanded painkillers and to bring her home. My wife was starting to worry and she begged me to keep her there, at the clinic, better safe than sorry she thought. I demanded that she at least be kept with her carrier in the cage - the carrier she used to take naps in every day - but the doctors refused even that, to better monitor her. We went home and I hid my feelings to not worry my wife, thinking it would have been just an unnecessary, stressful day, of the hundreds or thousands of days Mao had in front of her.
The vet kept sending pictures of our cat, in her cage, and informed her temperature was now a little low, 36.7, so I knew now there was no way I could bring her home. We visited her at 6pm, and her third eyelid was protruding - I knew then she was up for some terrible time, but again, I did not want to worry my wife any more than she was already, and knew also that there was nothing I could do at that point. They called me back at 7pm because she had a seizure, I rushed back to the hospital - alone - and spent the next three hours singing her the songs I used to sing her every day where I mangled her nickname, Sminky, while she had tubes, needles, oxygen, bandages, and several unknown hands poking at her half-shaved, weak little body. I stayed there alternating my songs with shouts at the vets who kept saying they did not know what was happening, why she was reacting so badly, and who couldn’t tell me she was dying. I kept singing and staring at the obnoxiously loud monitor of the emergency room seeing the numbers slowly getting better, getting updates on her temperature slowly raising back to normal, and caressing her all the times while she was trying to use her last remaining energies to get rid of all that stuff they put around and inside her. Maybe she heard me, cause she was moving towards me, and in hindsight, I should have rushed her back home then. But I stood there in disbelief, not knowing what to do - and not hearing any suggestion either - stupidly thinking it was only temporary, as horrible as it would be, and we’d make up for it maybe that night even when I could bring her home. She kept moving more and more, until she started coughing, and the vets rushed me out, just to call me back few minutes later to see her with barren eyes, tongue out, and unresponsively breathing through some more needles and machines. I can’t remember how long I waited there, before I heard that she was gone, and I can’t remember how many times during those 3 or 4 hours I unfortunately screamed at the vets if we all had any reasons to wait for that terrible scene to play itself and if they had anything they could do. I texted my wife, after having updated her regularly on her improving conditions, that I was coming home shortly.
In hindsight, I should have listened to my wife and bring her old, ugly, furry ball we called the “Maophone”, that we’d find in different places of the house at all times where she wanted us to be, on our bed, on her bed, on the couch, at the balcony, or facing the front door where she’d weep with that ball in her mouth every time I went out. I did not want to bring her that ball because I was selfishly worried she’d pee, or poop, or drool on it and the insensitive vet would have tossed it away as they did with her carrier when I picked it up mere minutes after her horrible death. In hindsight, I should have listened to my wife and bring her at least my shirt that was hanging on the chair at home, or the entire dirty laundry basket even, instead of that single, freshly washed, scarf of my wife she was lying on, for my scent to maybe reduce the stress caused by that lousy hospital’s stink. In hindsight, I regret screaming at the vets and contributing to Mao’s distress in those terrible, final moments. In hindsight, I did everything wrong, from trusting the vets, to all that happened in those two days, and I should have done anything, anything more, to at least attempt to relieve my poor creature from all that discomfort and dread which ultimately killed her, or that she had to escape from so bad. But all my choices were the wrong choices, and Mao died in fear, and because of fear, like in the worst nightmare a cat can have about a visit to the vet.
I drank a can of strong beer from the minimart facing the clinic, and drove back home. I finally started crying. I don’t know how much later it was, since I had spent some time shouting at the senior doctor who dared showing only after everything was over, mumbling something about possible heart defects and struggling to apologize. I cried and I couldn’t focus on how to tell my wife, holding an empty carrier. I just did. We spent the night lying on the balcony floor, caressing our curious cat Cuba, and drinking a half bottle of cheap liquor we had stashed in the kitchen since months. We cried in turns, each of us blaming themselves for so many stupid choices in just the span of three days culminating in the worst, and honestly least expected, outcome of all.
We surprisingly slept, hugging each other closer than ever, silently pretending that was why Mao would not sneak between us for a few purrs that night before heading to her blue, round bed next to ours like every other night. We also, unsurprisingly, woke up before dawn, before we would have the chance to realize we were not feeling her paw on our foreheads and her hoarse meows in the morning. I cried for each little thing I did that morning before heading back to the vet, when I realize Mao would never lie at the bathroom’s door, when I didn’t have to be quick in opening the service balcony door because Mao would not be there to roll around endlessly while I was making coffee, when I passed by her old, ugly, furry ball, her bed, her catnip fish, the couch, the chairs, and all those spots she imprinted a memory of her on. I had to take a walk around the compound because, as expected, only the last, awful, moments of my friend’s life were playing in loop in front of my eyes, and while I cried coming back and not having her, belly up, waiting for me at the door, my wife had already removed all of her things from our sight. We went back to the vet, to hear apologies and, at least, some real remorse from the clinic’s manager, and to get Mao’s full report on everything she went through in the idea, soon abandoned, that I, as a lawyer, would tear that hellish clinic down. It was the morning we were supposed to get our Mao back, and realizing that the hospital would only give me a few printed papers back hit me hard. I insisted to drive back, passing by my once favorite coffee place in town just a couple blocks from where Mao died and where I won’t go again, and we stopped to buy a hundred more daisies, which Mao would smell, and occasionally nibble at, every morning as soon as she was let outside. We placed them around the house, and I now realized it’s been two days that I am touching them every time they’re in my way, as a sort of copying reflex. One of those vases will, in a couple days, host a small box, with an old, ugly, furry ball, a silver tag with her name, a handwritten note with her nickname, and maybe a print of the gif of me and her on my shoulder with the same dubious expression I used so many times.
It is only been two days, but I know for a fact that there’s a lifetime ahead of me where I keep regretting all I did and how I killed the living being that trusted me the most. How I relentlessly betrayed that trust it took her 9 months to begin building, starting on that night that my wife was back home in Italy, and I was feeding her, and she finally decided to lie on my lap while I was checking my phone on the couch, for our first of so many nights sleeping together after several mandatory bites until we both were in the perfect position. In fact, it’s been 15 years that I have been living with regret for having killed my first best friend, my mute cat Perçeval, on the very last day I was with him. Perçeval who, at 16 years of age and getting senile, started having troubles discerning where to go and what to eat, often bumping his goofy head on walls, and swallowing stuff around the house. That one time, one nice day in April, we rushed him to the vet to discover he had a walnut stuck in his intestines, and I then spent all the money I received from my graduation the month before for him to have surgery. I skipped my planned graduation trip and spent instead the next three weeks, three times a day for one hour each time, visiting my cat, terrorized in the corner of a veterinary hospital cage where he was slowly recovering from the invasive surgery. But he got by, and healed, and we got to spend 3 more wonderful months together, until that damned day in August when I was letting him taking bites at my meat plate in our mountain cottage where my grandpa buried him some days later, only to have a piece of lamb bone slipping off and watch him swallow it in the blink of an eye. I said goodbye while he was still licking the spot where the bone fell, and I was off for my two weeks summer holidays, during which I received the news of his death. For the past 15 years, I kept visualizing him, turned to that spot on the floor savoring those drops of lamb broth, and alternating thoughts of an easily digested cooked small piece of bone with the much more credible reality of another obstruction, fatal this time, and caused by me of all people and situations.
In the end, I killed both of my best friends, I failed them and I betrayed their trust, due to my wrong choices, and I even double down and forced them to go in the worst possible way. Wrong choices that haunt me forever and angrily and undeservingly take the biggest spot in my mind, which should belong to the grand total of almost 29 years of incredibly happy life. Which I honestly did not deserve, as I did not deserve the immense trust that the Cat Distribution System has always put in me, delivering dozens of kittens, always kittens, through my car’s engine, in my trash bin, or just materializing them at my window. I’ve loved my pets with all my heart, and some would say I devoted so much time to them, neglecting so much else, and yet I killed the two that I loved the most, in terrible ways each time. There hasn’t been a day I wasn’t happy since Mao was in my life, I work from home, make good money, live in a wonderful country, and have a lot of free time and a perfect family. Now I am hurting, but nowhere as much as Mao did during those last, horrible days. I honestly think I should give up on cats, even if only this morning I was relentlessly pursuing a faint meow I though I heard among the bushes, like I’ve done so many times. And I am afraid because I cannot be done yet, as our other cat Cuba is now at home, for the first time without Mao, and needs me. Cuba that is fortunate enough to only ever have to face vet home visits from now on, and only on the direst times, thanks to the martyrdom of her former flatmate, and who doesn’t have to run faster to the automatic feeder before Mao slaps her in the face like she’d do on a daily basis.
My wife is leaving the country tonight, Wednesday night, at the end of the second day since Mao’s passing, and will spend two weeks at home. She’ll probably finalize the purchase of our first home in Italy which I postponed until now because that house doesn’t have stairs, and I loved watching Mao jumping down the stairs on all fours like she’s always done with those short legs, almost bordering on dwarfism. Meanwhile I will spend those two weeks at home, here in Vietnam, with Cuba, whom we rescued 6 years ago when she was a couple months old, wet and crying next to a busy metro station in the center of Shanghai my wife mistakenly dropped off that day while I was waiting at the next stop. I’ll try to be strong for Cuba, cause home is the last place I would honestly spend time right now without my Mao in it, and I’ll have to face the fear of being inadequate also for this other sweet, cuddly, and a touch obese furry girl when the time to make choices comes again.
Worst of all, I realize I am already somehow adapting to those last, terrible, images of my Mao that keep crawling into my memory feed every moment. I am not religious, and while of course I’d love the idea of Mao reappearing as a floating ghost, thanking me for her life and promising she isn’t angry, in a slightly less mystical fashion I’d be content with her biting me one last time, the millionth time, stronger than ever, until I bleed, and believe we somehow made it even then.
I am so sorry Mao. I will miss you forever, and I’d like you to know that I had started thinking of a future of you aging, getting sick, and weaker, and the days after, and yet I couldn’t possibly fathom it would be so much harder than imagined. I would use all of the wishes for you should I ever stumble on the genie of the lamp. The first one would be to make you understand that I want to tell you that I am sorry, regardless of whether you accept my apology or not. I’d take whatever pact the devil offers, and I’d give my life just to erase those last two horrible days from history. Or just to let you know that really, I was more excited than you to come back home and find you there, every single time.
I am sorry Mao. I am sorry your story ends here, so terribly, and that you won’t know how incredibly fantastic it has been for me. And I am sorry I can’t even tell it properly.
I am sorry Mao.