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I’m Essentially a Coward

Filed Under: Life
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I’ve been putting off this post since about 9 o’clock this morning.

That’s around the time that I called the vet to check on Oscar and around the time that Cara started “calling” Oscar with our home phone.

You know it’s bad when you call to ask when you can pick up your cat and then the secretary connects you directly to the vet. Fucking cat tried to die last night and the vet couldn’t call me because he didn’t have my number available to him because someone didn’t do their job right. So, the cat stays at least another day at the vet. Hopefully, he won’t clog up the catheter again. Hopefully he’ll be able to come home tomorrow. But there’s a chance that Oscar’s urethra is basically torn up from trying to pass the kidney stones. If that’s the case then he’ll require surgery and we can’t do that.

Not only do I feel bad for my cat but I feel like an absolute douche for having to tell the vet [whose job it is to save my cat] that he can’t do his job because we can’t afford it. I’m also feeling huge amounts of guilt for not catching this earlier.

I actually apologized to the vet this morning. I had to explain to him that we DO love our cat. Really. We didn’t drag Oscar’s complaining ass from Florida to Arkansas to Alabama just to off the bastard without a second thought. While I don’t think that the vet is very happy with me, he did concede that if we didn’t love the cat then we wouldn’t have brought him in.

So yeah. I’m going to be REALLY pissed if this cat dies on me. And I know that I sound like a huge dork. He’s a CAT! It’s not like one of my kids is sick. I know this! But he’s like a dog in cat’s clothing. He comes when called. He plays tag with Sophie. He lets the kids crawl all over him. He pees on dirty clothes. He is a giant pain in the ass but he’s my pain in the ass…actually he’s more Cara’s cat.

And that’s probably one of the biggest potential issues.

Cara is two. A smart two, but two nonetheless. She doesn’t “get” death and I don’t think that she’s supposed to be able to “get it” at this age. Also, death is a hard ass thing to try and explain.

Give it a try. Seriously.

In your head, think about how you would explain it to a two year old. If you believe in God then you’d probably say that you go to heaven when you die. OK. So, how do you explain that?

What if you don’t believe in God? Do you try to explain about body decomposition and all of that?!

Do you lie? Do you say that Oscar went to live with the vet?

Do you just ignore it and hope she forgets? Cara has an amazing memory; she won’t forget.

I’ve lost animals in the past and it sucked but I’ve never had to deal with my own grief and the added stress of helping my kid to understand it.

I’m hoping against all hope that Oscar pulls through all of this. Mainly because I want my stupid cat be around so he can annoyingly try to sleep on my laptop and also because I’m a coward who doesn’t think that I have it in me to explain death right now to my two year old.

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