I keep mentally composing more posts about Benchley’s sad end, but not wanting to seem as if I don’t have this in perspective. That is, I can think of many, many life circumstances I could have endured that would make me want to shake someone who was going on and on about a cat.

This, though, is the perfect place for the Hopkins couplet carefully learned in high school English class: “It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” If you daydreamed about cute classmates through that class instead (and who could blame you with all the twisty poem phrasings to untwist), the poet is telling Margaret that when she’s sad about things dying/ending, what she’s actually sad about is her own eventual unavoidable death.

It’s not that the death of a cat is so extremely terrible on the spectrum of terrible things, it’s more that it can bring to the forefront of the mind all those things further up on the spectrum. So it’s that I’m sad because our cat died, but it’s also that I’m horrified to realize that DEATH IS REAL, IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS, IT WILL HAPPEN TO ALL OF US AND IT MIGHT NOT BE A PEACEFUL OLD-AGE DEATHBED SCENE EITHER BECAUSE TERRIBLE DEATHS HAPPEN ALL THE TIME. I know this already, but it sits on the surface of my mind like oil on the top of water: it’s RIGHT THERE, but it never sinks in.

It’s been large-application horrifying to realize how many death-related thoughts end in “Well, but at this point it’s irrelevant.” My worst fear is that Benchley was injured but not killed by the car, and then died because we didn’t find him in time—maybe after quite a long time of lying there suffering. It’s newly startling to me each time to work through that chain of upsetting thoughts and run right into “But at this point, it’s irrelevant. Either way, it’s over.”

It’s a comfort in some ways (he and others are not suffering NOW, even if he and they suffered THEN), but a horror in other ways: THERE IS NO GOING BACK, EVEN IF A DIFFERENT PATH WOULD HAVE COME OUT DIFFERENTLY. And this happens with so many things: every thought path where things could have gone a different way (if he’d happened to take a longer nap before going out, if the car had seen him in time, if the car had left one minute earlier or later that day, if we’d been on the scene when it happened, if our cat Feather could have communicated to us where he was) or where there is an objection to his death (but he was so young/healthy/strong, but he was so scared of the road and didn’t go near it, but it was so much more likely that he was just trapped somewhere, but I didn’t expect it, but it was just an ACCIDENT)—ALL of them end the same way, with irrelevance. It still did happen the way it did happen; he is still dead.

The way the body lingers awhile seems crazy. When we found Benchley, he looked like himself. There was his fur, still glossy and plush and familiar. There was his ear, still a thin triangle with a fluff of fur inside. There were his whiskers, still sticking straight out. There was his tail, fluffy as usual. It’s hard to accept it: we look at a body, and our eyes/brains are telling us two different things simultaneously: “There he is” and “No, he isn’t.” Instead the body should vanish, or turn instantly to dust like a staked vampire on Buffy. The slower route is horrifying and comforting, showing us that the same materials just cycle around endlessly, that nature is busy all the time taking care of it. But the sudden disintegration would make more sense.

While not wanting to reduce a pet’s existence to “being something that makes a person go ‘hmmm’,” I can see how one of the many good things about having pets (let’s save the many bad things, such as peeing on things and needing expensive medical care, for a less emotionally vulnerable time) is that they provide us with opportunities to get used to…well, to Margaret. Or to an important relative of Margaret’s. As a parent, I’ve been finding it tremendously helpful to have this chance to explain things I hadn’t realized the kids were wondering, or to correct things I hadn’t realized they’d thought. And to give them as gently and lightly as possible their first exposures to a message we all need to understand but that I don’t want to tell them: “This happens to everything. (This will happen to you.)“

I’m afraid we found Benchley’s body, in a large dense shrub in our yard. I’d looked there once already, but he’s only visible from one angle, and his fur is the same color as the brown leaves under there. We looked again this afternoon after seeing our other cat hanging around that area.

The most likely is that he was hit by a car, but we had trouble getting close enough to the body to see. I mean, we were able to confirm he was dead, but I think he’s been there since Monday/Tuesday so we didn’t want to…… Anyway.

We’re all sad, of course, but the children are resilient:

Me, weepily/carefully: “*sad news*”
Them: “*sad*…*pause*…Can we get a new cat?”

He was a very nice cat, so I’m sad—but more than that, I feel so grateful to KNOW.

It took awhile for us to realize our cat Benchley was missing: he’s indoor-outdoor (microchipped and collar-tagged), and in nicer weather he’s outdoors a LOT. He was originally a street cat the shelter felt could be domesticated, so we went into it knowing he was more wild than usual—but he’s adapted very nicely to home life. He jumps onto laps, he purrs and snuggles, he likes to be scritched, he likes having a food dish available.

He likes snuggling tum-up.

But now we haven’t seen him in at least two full days, and William says it’s two and a half: I’d been counting from the last time William saw him, which I’d thought he’d said was Tuesday morning, but William says it was Monday night. Benchley often goes out for a long time, but he always comes in to eat.

The first fear with an indoor-outdoor cat is that he’s been hit by a car, but Benchley gave me scars the one time I carried him in the direction of the road. Accepting the possibility of a car-hit is part of the complicated decision involved in choosing to let a cat go outside, but I think the statistical chance in this particular cat’s case is low: he had a childhood on the streets, as it were, and he continues to be extremely careful with roads.

The most likely with this particular cat, I think, is that he was being a Furry McNosyBritches and went into someone’s garage or shed, and has gotten closed in. We had a little problem with our neighbor back when we first got Benchley, because not only would he visit their yard, he would walk confidently right into their house and be difficult to remove. That issue was resolved with the consistent application of spritz bottles, but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t gone somewhere else. He’s also curious and brave and kind of dim, so he’s the sort of cat I can picture ending up in the inner workings of a wall or something.

My biggest fear is that he is somewhere we COULD have found/saved him, but that we won’t think of it until it’s too late. (Well, and after reading Marie’s neighbor story, I’m also worried about that.) I’m remembering when Paul and I first moved in to one of our apartments, and we couldn’t find one of our cats anywhere, and he turned out to be wedged in a corner behind the water heater, completely vertical and upside-down. I would have expected him to yowl or meow or make scrabbling sounds, but he hadn’t at all: when we found him, he was absolutely still and wide-eyed, and didn’t make a sound until I had to pull him out of there by his tail. (I called a vet first to ask for extraction advice, and that was what she recommended. It felt very Odd and Wrong to do it, and/but it totally worked.)

But I’m also remembering when our new kitten was missing, and I was repeatedly and senselessly searching the house and then agitating about it on Twitter, and someone said her new kitten was lost once and they found her in a drawer. And I called the kids, and we went around opening drawers, and THERE WAS THE KITTEN, IN A DRAWER. It was like MAGIC. So I’m hoping if you have a “We thought there was no point looking there, but THERE HE WAS!!” cat story, you’ll share it.

I would also welcome stories of cats turning up a week (or whatever) later.

I hated Elegies for the Brokenhearted immediately, on the very first page. So I can’t really explain why I persisted with it, since I don’t strongly enforce my “give it 30 pages before giving up” policy in such cases, but I DID persist, and soon loved it so much I was skipping computer time to read it, and snapping irritably at children who interrupted me, and thinking about the characters while making dinner.

(image from Amazon.com)

I can’t explain why it worked for me. It has so many things I dislike in a book, starting right away with being written in the second-person singular (“You were such-and-such,” “Your father was so-and-so,” etc.). The second major issue was that it was in the form of letters to people. (Though this is the very thing that helped with the first issue: I hate being told that _I_ did something I DIDN’T do—but clearly she was talking to someone else.) The third major issue was that the narrator was the dreamy drifter type, which I don’t usually find appealing. The fourth major issue was the prose style: two pages in, I said to myself snidely, “A hundred bucks says the word ‘lyrical’ will be used on the cover.” (I won that bet.) The fifth major issue was that it fed right into my mid-life crisis: “WE ALL LIVE MISERABLE POINTLESS SELF-DECEIVING LIVES, AND THEN WE DIEEEEEEEEEEE.”

Nevertheless, I loved it. LOVED IT. It took me more than a dozen pages to hit my stride with it, and with each new section (there are five sections, each addressed to a different person) it took a few pages again. The narrator is addressing each of five people in her life who have died; after the first one, I started putting my hand over the birth/death dates at the beginning of each section, because I didn’t want the clue of how old the person had been at death.

Normally I struggle with short stories because I get upset when they’re over (I like series best: MORE than a whole book, not LESS). This is sort of like short stories because it’s five separate “You”s she’s writing to, but it’s actually a novel: in the background of each person she’s writing to, she’s writing about how her own life went, and the stories start to tie together. I love stuff like that, where you gradually piece together a bunch of things. I was tempted to start again at the beginning, so that I could fit those earlier parts into the parts I’d patched together since then.

Our library system also has Hello, I Must Be Going by the same author, so I’ve put in a request for it. (That’s a test, for me, of a good book: do I immediately seek out other books by the same author? And in this case I’d barely closed the book before I was at my computer.) If I like that one too, I’ll probably order a copy of her third book (A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw) and donate it.

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Speaking of donating, I have some ad revenue to spend, and I like the idea of using it to make you read something I liked. So I’ll buy a paperback copy of this book for one person who wants to try it. I always feel awkward about leaving a comment on a post when I wanted to comment on the content but I DON’T want to enter the giveaway, so let’s do it like this: I’ll choose one random winner from all comments that MENTION wanting to win a copy. I’ll pick someone on Friday the 23rd, probably in the morning sometime.

[Edit 03-23-2012: Winner is StephLove!]

I need to just hide all of Paul’s sister’s Facebook posts. Pretty much every single thing she says gets me riled up—and then she makes it worse by interlacing such posts with posts about how no one has any common sense and she’s surrounded by stupid irrational people who can’t think. Obviously I just need to hide her. Obviously. But I have that unpleasant ADDICTED feeling, like I almost WANT to get riled up because it justifies my dislike of her—even though every time I DO read a post, I wish I wasn’t spending so much time mentally arguing with it afterward. I don’t know, as I write that out it just sounds really dumb, and really obvious what the correct path is. Obviously I should hide her. I’m going to do it right now. Right now. Right after this. I just want to check one more time to see if she has some new inflammatory thing to say about politics and/or religion and/or other people’s mental powers relative to her own. …Okay, I hid her. Thanks for talking me through that.

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I would now find it very refreshing to see some engagement/wedding photos that were just two people facing the camera and smiling. (I don’t mean I don’t ALSO want the other kinds, which are also good. But fancy stops looking fancy when everything is fancy.)

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Rob has those tiny rubber bands on his braces now. I had forgotten from my own experience how those end up EV.ER.Y.WHERE.

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I just finished The Cazalet Chronicles, a series of four books by Elizabeth Jane Howard. And because I go nuts when I want to read a series and can’t figure out which one is FIRST, please just tell me which one is FIRST, OMG WHY IS THERE NOTHING SAYING WHICH ONE IS FIRST???, I will tell you which one is first: The Light Years (careful: there are a bunch of other books with the same name). I don’t know what is up with the high price—$25 for a PAPERBACK?? I’d buy one of the used copies for $4 (1 cent plus $3.99 shipping, but I feel more sane if I think of it as $4 with free shipping). Or, I would get it from the library, which is what I did in fact do. The next three are, in order: Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off.

I haven’t seen Downton Abbey yet (I like to wait until a series is over, so I can watch it straight through and don’t have to wait for the next season), but these books sound exactly like everything I hear about Downton Abbey. World War II era family drama with many, many sub-stories. Anything described as “_____-era” makes me feel automatically weary and bored, but most of the issues are non-time-period-related: jobs, affairs, the various ways marriages work or don’t work, various kinds of romantic relationships and their outcomes, unexpected pregnancies and their outcomes, sibling relationships in childhood and adulthood, getting something you want and then being happy or unhappy with it, etc. And once I was into it, I really DID find the time-period-related things interesting: the shortages, the rationing/coupons, the various issues involved in having some of the guys in your life off fighting in a war. And it takes place in England, so that makes for a change if you’re more accustomed to the United States point of view.

One annoyance was that the author was very fond of starting a new section using pronouns and no names, so that it would take awhile to figure out who was who and what was going on. I hate that. I’d skip ahead each time until I found THE G-D NAMES, and then I’d go back and re-start the section knowing who we were talking about.

There were also a few places where the prose got super tangled and strange for a couple of paragraphs. Unfortunately one of those places is the very first page of the first book. PLOW THROUGH IT. There were also some little cheesy parts here and there, but I found I had a tolerance for it, so perhaps you will find the same thing.

I found it very challenging to keep straight which kids were siblings and which were cousins. I also have trouble when there is, for example, a Rupert and a Richard and a Roland. There’s a family tree in the front of each book, but I hate family trees in books because they often include terrible spoilers: “OMG, John is going to marry Ellen?? Harriet is going to have another baby?? AND WHAT IS THIS DEATH DATE FOR ARNOLD!?!?” So. I think if I were reading it again, I might make myself a little chart as I went along, and then I could use it as a bookmark.

I liked the series A LOT, and was very sorry to have it be over. There was a little part at the end that was like the author saying SHE was sorry too, and that made me weepy in a happy way.

My 13-year-old son made a crude “That’s what he said” joke. And expected me to find it funny. I need a gagging/cringing/WTF/scowling emoticon.

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We got the best update possible about the cat: she was adopted less than 24 hours after we brought her to the shelter, by an older lady who lives alone and wanted a pleasant feline companion. It’s such a perfect outcome, it made me a little suspicious: it has that “sent to a farm where he can run and play” sound.

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I dreamed last night that I got a tattoo on my THROAT. It was a heart, and below it the words “all i need”—all in lowercase like that. At first I was so happy with it, and I was telling family and friends that I knew it seemed like nothing I’d ever planned, and also wildly impractical for someone who doesn’t like turtlenecks or scarves, but that I loved it and was so glad I’d gotten it.

But soon it was like my brain woke up a bit and started engaging with the dream more, and I was thinking, “…Wait. But removing capitals is not my style! And even WITH capitals, what would that phrase…SIGNIFY? And why the heart? Does it tie in to the phrase, or is it separate? And oh man, I’m just going to have to pay for laser removal, aren’t I? And now I have that Jack Wagner song going through my head.” So then I started saying to friends/family, “I know, I know, I don’t know what I was thinking, clearly a mistake, I’m getting it removed.” I was relieved to wake up and find I didn’t have to pony up the dough for that procedure.

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The comments on the anemia post (small increases are good; it can take awhile; some people just sort of struggle their whole lives to keep their iron up even as high as Edward’s low) have really helped me feel better about Edward’s anemia situation, especially since we just paid another $250 for blood tests that showed us once again a tiny improvement that to me seems insignificant (and worrisome in its insignificance, considering our efforts). The $25/month Floradix didn’t work the miracles I was hoping for; now we’re trying the $5-for-100 28mg ferrous gluconate tablets.

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William complained to me that his art teacher keeps describing everything as “yummy.” I told him he could definitely find sympathy on the internet for that.

I will tell you what kind of talk sends me immediately to the kind of squirmy rage that makes me want to flail futilely at someone’s face: “Wait, it would be FIVE o’clock, but now it’s SIX o’clock, so it’ll be EASIER….wait, no, HARDER to…wait, no. Okay, it WOULD be five o’clock, but we CHANGED…”

I’m not saying I don’t start these very Daylight Savings Time discussions myself: I’m powerless not to, which makes me want to flail at my own face. And then I have to listen to Paul doing them and ALSO correcting me that “actually, it’s saving, not savingS,” which he’s super-lucky hasn’t gotten him killed. PLUS, the kids get involved, so there’s the added bonus of having these discussions with people who are not understanding the concept at all.

Anyway, this has got to change. (CHANGE. See what I did there?) I’m not going through this again. Well, no, I’m going through it ONE MORE TIME, but this time I’m WRITING IT DOWN. Every time we do that stupid hour-math in the next couple of days and come to an accurate conclusion, I’m writing it down. Next year I will be able to copy this to a word-processing document, increase the font size, print it out, and hang it next to the clock. (Paul tells me I could also make a Google docs document so that ANYONE can print it out. I will work on this, so perhaps when we are looking for this post next year we will find a link to something printable.) (Ha ha, like I’ll actually follow through with that.) (I ACTUALLY FOLLOWED THROUGH WITH THAT: Google Docs printout.)

It will be HARDER to wake up in the morning: you will feel startled and deprived when the alarm goes off, or if you don’t have to use the alarm you might wake up startled by how late the clock says it is. If the kids normally wake at 6:00, you may be pleasantly surprised to find them getting up at 7:00. (Maybe. In my experience, children only seem to make the negative adjustments.) Then you’ll walk around all day saying, “I don’t know WHY I’m so tired when I slept an hour later!” If you have a teenager, he or she may emerge an hour after you would usually expect.

It will be HARDER to go to bed at night: you will feel sleepy later than usual. If you have a small child, you’ll be dealing with an hour of perkiness and calling you in, as their little internal clock tells them it’s not sleeping time and you tell them it is.

It will be EASIER to wait for meals: you will feel hungry later than usual. The children will not be hungry at lunchtime, and then an hour later you will be saying, “OMG stop whining for food, you JUST HAD lunch. This is why I told you to finish your sandwich.” Then you will sneak into the kitchen and have a little nibble because OMG HUNGRY.

It gets light LATER in the morning. This is dreary for waking up, especially since we have been since December gradually getting used to having more light in the mornings, and we will sit sipping our coffee resentfully in the dark.

It gets dark LATER in the evening. This is nice for the evening commute, and for making letting the kids play outside right up until dinnertime.

People who forget to change their clocks will arrive places an hour LATE. If you are having a party on the Sunday of a time change, you should make plans for late arrivers, just in case, and you should put a reminder of the time change on the invitations. If you have an appointment, you may miss it. If you have church, you may arrive just in time for the post-service coffee and doughnuts.

If you want to prepare the children for the change ahead of time, don’t bother. Or if you must, you can spend the days before the change waking them up earlier and putting them to bed earlier. And I recommend changing the clocks late afternoon on Saturday, so that the lost hour comes from the kids’ pre-bedtime time, rather than their post-bedtime time.

See also: Fall Back (Standard Time)

Let’s say you would like to refer to a book from Amazon, and you would also like to use-and-properly-credit-of-course the photo. But crap, it has that “Click to Look Inside!” arrow on it. It’s not a big deal, but…you don’t want it on there, especially since then it looks like the person reading your post could click on the photo to look inside the book, when actually they can’t. But even if you take the image to photo-altering software, it’s tricky to get the arrow ALL the way off without chopping some of the photo.

This is why you should have married a computer guy. Maybe you didn’t, but I did, and he told ME so I can tell YOU how to get rid of the arrow.

Here is how things look at the beginning. There’s the book you want a picture of, but it has the arrow on it, like so:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

Hover over the image and right-click the mouse button (if you have that kind of mouse) (if you don’t, these instructions will be useless) (unless you know what the equivalent of right-clicking your mouse would be) to bring up the little menu, and select “View Image”—being careful not to click on the search-inside-this-book menu that pops up when you hover over the image of the book:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

This will take you to a big white refreshingly-empty page with just the picture of the book, complete with its Click to Look Inside! arrow. In the URL field, highlight everything between the FIRST comma and the LAST comma:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)
(you can click the image to see it larger)

Hit “enter” to make that section disappear and simultaneously activate the new URL. Look: arrowless book picture!

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

Right-click this new image and select “Save Image As…” (or your computer’s equivalent) as usual.

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

There! Done!

(photo from Amazon.com)

Now that we are done with the child-bearing part of life, I’ve been mulling what I’ll do next. I have some time before I need to make a decision, but mulling is one of my hobbies.

Based on the employment opportunities in our town, a front-runner possibility is to get a 6-week nursing assistant degree and work in the nursing home. This might be a poor fit for many, many reasons (shift issues, crying-at-the-drop-of-a-hat issues, maybe-I’d-just-hate-it issues)—but if so, the investment of time and energy involved in trying it wouldn’t be too disheartening; and if it does work out, there’s room for getting more training and making a career of it.

Another possibility is to get a job in the school system, so I’d be on the same schedule as the kids until they’re all old enough to be at home by themselves.

I am sparing you a list of all the other possibilities, as there are legion, none of which are MORE interesting than those two.

All this mulling has made me interested to know other people’s plans. Some of you may be planning to go back to school. Some of you are already working but may be planning to change hours/shifts or change companies or change jobs entirely when there’s less little-kid stuff in your lives. Some of you are at home and are planning to go back to established careers. Some of you are at home and already know what you’re planning to do next. Some of you are probably like me, mulling the possibilities. Tell me what you’re planning/mulling! Or tell what you DID do, if you’ve gone through this already!

I see I left the cat topic hanging. This will be part update, part “Here’s what it’s like to return a cat to a shelter, in case you have such a thing in your own future,” and part “work-arounds for neuroses.”

I kept trying to just call the shelter and initiate the process, but my throat would lock up when I picked up the phone. Finally I emailed, even though that wasn’t one of the options, and in my opening paragraph I was semi-frank about the situation (so that they wouldn’t email back “Sure! Just give us a call to set up an appointment!”): I wrote that I kept trying to call but choked up every time and had trouble organizing my thoughts because of being so self-conscious about the crying, so I hoped it would be okay to at least start the process on email. Recently I’ve been thinking there are times when I have to just find a way AROUND the phone, even if it’s a bulky/awkward way or seems weird/inefficient to other people; even if it DOES seem weird to them, it probably doesn’t linger in their minds for long.

Anyway, email WAS fine, and I’d gone into probably far too much detail about the situation in the email so she didn’t need to ask any further questions before agreeing that it sounded like returning the cat was the best thing to do. She gave me an appointment: I was lucky they had room so I could have an appointment just a couple of days later (it’s a no-kill shelter, so sometimes there’s a waiting list or even a long waiting list). She also had me print some forms to fill out about the cat’s behavior, habits, litter/food, personality, etc. I filled out the forms right away, and I was glad because then over the next couple of days I kept thinking of things I wanted to add/modify.

She also asked me to bring in a copy of the medical history from the vet, which meant another call. I really agitated about that one (how to open that conversation? how to keep from choking up?), until I thought of the way to say/ask: I called and said that the cat would be going to another home, and so we’d like to send her records with her. That solved two things: (1) my reluctance to say “going back to the shelter” and (2) the difficulty of needing to inform the vet that they no longer needed to send appointment reminders. I think they could have rushed the forms if I’d needed them right away, but again I was glad I didn’t wait until the last second: it was a Wednesday, and I said I needed them by Friday afternoon, and she said I could pick them up Thursday morning.

On Friday afternoon I left Henry with my mom. I wasn’t sure if it might help to have a child along for company/distraction, or if it would be better not to have to deal with it. I think it would have gone okay either way, as long as I’d prepared him that I was likely to cry. But as it was, it was just me and the cat.

The shelter has a special entrance for drop-offs, and I got confused and went to the wrong one. Which was completely fine: someone just walked me through some interesting back hallways until I was at the right place. Then she asked if I’d already talked to someone, and I said who I’d talked to, and she paged that person—which was very nice, because then I didn’t have to tell the story over again and she already knew what the scoop was.

When she arrived, she looked over the paperwork I’d filled out and asked a couple of questions, and then looked over the vet paperwork and asked when the last flea/tick treatment had been (I was glad I’d thought to check so I could answer, but I don’t think it would have been a huge deal to have to call her later that afternoon with the information).

I had to sign a form giving up responsibility/rights to the cat. The fee for relinquishing the cat was $45, and there was a little sign suggesting that increasing this amount would help them with their costs. We periodically give donations to this shelter anyway, and the little sign helped with my anxiety that donating more would look like Guilt Money, so I went with $100. (Particularly easy since the last time I’d looked into this, many years ago when a stray found us, the fee for relinquishing was just over $100—so that’s what I’d been expecting.)

The shelter worker was very positive and kind and matter-of-fact (non-disapproving) throughout: she said they had had a surprisingly active adoption month in January, but that the kittens wouldn’t be cropping up until spring, so their cat area was quite depleted and she thought a nice cat like this one might get snapped right up. In fact she said she was eager to get her “out on the floor” (the cat could go right out because she was up to date on vaccinations and so forth; otherwise they can spend a month or more in quarantine), because the weekends were busy times for people coming to look at animals. She also said it was nice how the cat was purring and chin-rubbing inside the box, obviously unbothered by all the shelter smells and sounds.

She asked if I needed some time to say good-bye to the cat, and that’s when I crumpled/choked (while shaking my head no: I made sure to do the final snuggle at home, based on good advice from the comments section on that first post). It was the right time for the tears, though: I hadn’t wanted to be sobbing and speechless throughout, but if you imagine this event as taking place in a movie, we would EXPECT the actress to show some emotion at that point, so I wasn’t too embarrassed, and in fact I hoped it helped accurately communicate that this wasn’t some casual thing to us.

I’d brought her in the same cardboard carrier they gave us when we adopted her, so that was handy too: I could just leave the whole thing behind, and didn’t have to remove her in order to get my carrier back.

The shelter worker let me dab my eyes for a minute, and then she said, “Okay, well then I’ll get her settled in…” and I knew the official part was over and I could go. I had to walk weepily past several shelter employees outside, but again I wasn’t much embarrassed: I’m sure they understand it when the person is leaving through the “Animal Intake” door.

When I got home, I checked the shelter’s website, and they already had the cat’s profile up. I posted the picture/link on my local Facebook account, hoping a friend or acquaintance would adopt her. The next morning, someone commented that the link didn’t work—and I checked and the cat was already gone! I checked several times over the next few days, wondering if maybe they just took the profile down to edit it (they’d put back up the same one she had when we adopted her), but it stayed down.

So it looks like she only spent one night at the shelter, maybe not even one night! I like imagining her in her new house now, luxuriating in how there is no one leaping out to scare her, no one bothering her, no one policing the litter box, maybe several people who like to sit still and pet cats. Assuming she really DID go to a good new home (I have lingering anxiety about her going to another house where things aren’t good for her, but that’s out of my control so I try to suppress), this really was the right decision. It was a very hard and stressful decision, and the day I had to drop her off was pretty grim, and there were several episodes of last-second panicking, and there was some crying in the car on the way home—but after it was done (and especially after she was re-adopted so quickly), I felt much better, and also felt gladness for her that she wouldn’t be suffering at our house anymore, and gladness for our other cats that they could settle down (they’ve been way happier), and relief that the decision and resulting actions were done with.