cancer Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

Grizzy 2011-2023

Our house panther, Grizzy, lays in a languorous black pool in the heat. She loves being warm, so I’ve turned all the air conditioning off in my office, opened the windows, turned on some fans, and I’m letting her soak up the summer heat. It’s 84F outside, and I was raised without air conditioning so I can do it fairly comfortably today. But even if it had been over 90F today I would still have done it. Today the Kit-Kat, one of her many nicknames, can have anything she wants, and I mean anything. Our Dark Empress is a bit spoiled anyway, but today and early tomorrow it’s going to increase exponentially. Why? Because tomorrow we will take her to her veterinarian for one last consult and if he agrees, if we all agree, then she won’t be coming back with us ever again. We are having to make the incredibly difficult decision to end her suffering by ending her life. That sentence sounds so wrong. I started to type, cross the rainbow bridge, but no euphemisms. She has cancer. It came up very suddenly about three weeks ago, maybe a few days less. She’s only twelve, young for a cat for all you dog people out there. She should have had many more happy years to be our pampered house panther, but instead we’ve come to the difficult choice of letting her continue to suffer, or helping her die before the pain gets worse. There, I typed it. Die. We’re going to hold her in our arms tomorrow and allow the vet to kill her, or we keep her with us and see how terrible the rest of the process will be for her. Those are the choices.

I grew up with dogs, so I’ve heard a dog scream in pain, but never a cat until this last weekend. I didn’t know that cats made a sound like that, but just like with the dog the first time I heard it, I knew exactly what it was. She screamed out in pain twice, then she shook like she was having a fit, then she walked around in circles drooling and meowing in a piteous way. I was crying hysterically and thought this is it, she’s going to choose her own time to go. Then it all stopped, and she went back to being Grizzy. She didn’t look like she was in pain, she looked normal, seemed normal again. She asked for more food as if I hadn’t just witnessed her suffering out loud with no hiding. If that had continued we’d have bundled her up and headed to the veterinarian and helped end that suffering, but how do you decide when most of the time she looks normal? Well, almost normal.

There’s a growth on her forehead which has now grown so large that one of her large, emerald green eyes is completely obstructed by it. The growth was the first sign that something was wrong. It appeared on her forehead three weeks ago, a bump in her black fur above those vibrant green eyes. They almost earned her the name, Esmeralda, but she answered to the name, Grizzy, that her foster mom had given her. When a cat answers a name you don’t change it. Grizzy was short for Grizelda, which means, gray battle maiden. The color was wrong because she’s all black except for a perfectly round white spot on her stomach like a full moon over her womb. She was such a witchy cat; my grandmother would have hated her. She wasn’t a big cat fan anyway, but she was superstitious about black cats. Maybe that’s why I’ve wanted one since I was twelve years old, to defeat parental expectations? Grizelda is the name of a Valkyrie, the winged female warriors that help transport the dead from the battlefield to Valhalla and Folkvangr. Everyone seems to know Valhalla where Odin the Allfather hangs out, but it’s the Goddess Freyja who has first pick of the dead, not Odin. She chooses her half of the fallen, then Odin chooses from what she has left. The Valkyrie help transport the dead for both the Goddess and the God. So why would any rescue name a petite black cat after a winged warrior and chooser of the dead? A hawk caught her for dinner, thinking the small cat would be an easy catch, but Grizzy’s motto was always, fuck around and find out, and the hawk found out. Grizzy came out with a scar on one of her hind legs, and the hawk got to live to hunt another day.

She got the scar during her time at a feral cat colony where a volunteer witnessed the fight, so the tale of the battle followed her and helped her get the name. Her foster mom quickly realized that Grizzy was far too friendly to be feral, so once her medical issues were cleared up the rescue started looking for a forever home for her. They brought her up to PetSmart to be in the glassed-in cat adoption area to hopefully catch the eye of some potential adopters.

Grizzy was at least six years old by then, and a lot of people don’t want to adopt an older cat, they want kittens. I’ve never understood that, because those cute little kittens can grow up into cats that may be very different in personality, just as a human baby is different from the adult they grow up to be. If people are willing to adopt older they still want the youngest cat possible so under a year, or no more than two years, or three years tops, well you get the idea. Grizzy was between six and ten years old. A vet would later say six to eight, but when we saw her that day we knew she could have been as old as ten, a senior cat. On top of her age, she was a black cat, and some people still think they’re bad luck.

For me though, none of that mattered, in fact her age was a plus. The moment I saw her through the glass, I knew she was the one. She gave me a glare out of those brilliant green eyes and seemed to think very loudly, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting in this place for a whole week. You knew I was here!” I had. I’d felt this compulsion to go to PetSmart for a week and fought it off. We didn’t need another pet, but of course a cat is always right about such things. We did need another pet, we needed her.

She came with the name Grizelda, Grizzy for short, and I wasn’t a fan of the name. I liked it better once the rescue explained how she earned her name. I mean how could I not love an earned battle name, but there are other Valkyrie names or even female warrior names that I would have preferred, but she answered to it. Not all cats answer to any name, so we kept it. Of course, one nickname wasn’t enough for our Dark Empress. She was Grizzywald, because of a certain movie that came out soon after we got her. Grizzly, Grizzly bear for her deep, raspy torch singer of a meow, and because of her big animal energy. My husband nicknamed her G-Money and it stuck. I added Kit-Kat. Our girlfriend started calling her, The Void, because she was utterly black like a circle of night poured out into pictures. Yes, Friedrich Nietzsche got quoted a lot after that nickname. You know the one, “If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you.”

I thought Grizzy was going to be my cat, my witchy, moon-touched black cat, but she turned out to be my husband’s cat. He’d never had a cat before and didn’t think he was a pet person because he’d never been as enamored of our dogs as the rest of us were, but with Grizzy he suddenly discovered that not only was he a pet person after all, but he was a cat person. She demanded his attention, wooed him, barged into his affections ignoring all the subtle signals that my husband tried to give to let her know he wasn’t her person. But Grizzy knew he was her person and she was his cat. He spoke cat the way I thought I spoke dog. He was a natural at playing with them, reading their body language, in a way that he’d never been able to do with any of the dogs. He loved the pups, but as he blossomed with Grizzy I realized that it wasn’t that he didn’t like animals as much as I did, it was that he was a cat person. He’d never had a cat growing up and he hadn’t really interacted that much with our very first household cat, Éomer aka Meep, who was both his and my first ever cat. I did twenty years of allergy shots to be able to own any cat. I’ll get shots for the rest of my life, and it’s totally worth it. But Meep had been an only kitten, bottle-fed by human foster moms in rescue, so he had missed some of his, how-to-be-a-cat education. Grizzy had been someone’s pampered house pet, gotten lost and fended for herself in a feral colony, then rescued, and she knew everything there was about being a cat. She knew how to be pushy in a charming way, and she hunted my husband’s affections like she was still living outside and had a tasty squirrel in her sights. She was his cat; he just didn’t know it yet.

One night my husband and I were on the couch watching TV, and I heard him utter something romantic and cute. I turned with a smile and found him holding Grizzy. He’d been talking to the cat. I wasn’t even angry, it was adorable. I loved that he’d embraced the fact that he was a cat person and that he was Grizzy’s person. Her love for him freed something inside him so that he realized he understood Meep, and later, that he understood Magnus, our big ginger boy. My husband embraced that he was a natural with cats and it was all due to Grizzy’s persistence. Her second favorite person was our daughter, who now realizes she also is a cat person.

I don’t know what I am anymore. This blog has taken me days to write, and it seems right that I can finally finish it on the day that I’m finally crying. I cried when we held her in our arms while the vet helped her go painlessly, which was more than the cancer would have given her. I cried as I laid my cheek against the warm, black fur of her side that last day, but today I am weeping like something inside me has finally let go. I have been storing up tactile memories of her for the last week as we realized we weren’t going to have months with her, but only days. I have purposefully memorized the feel of her in my arms, the silk of her fur, even as the cancer began to carve her down so I could feel her hip bones and her tiny seven-pound body growing lighter in my arms every day. I memorized the warmth of her, told my fingers to remember how her fur felt, how her body felt alive, warm, pliable with her still moving and – I have had too many pets over the years where I touched them too much after death, but those were sudden losses with no warning. I didn’t know that I needed to collect the feel of them in my hands, my fingers, my skin. I didn’t know it would be the last time, so I didn’t pay attention, as we don’t most of the time. Even those of us that are touched by death at an early age and know the impermanence of happiness, safety, life, we don’t live every moment with that knowledge front and center. I try, but it’s too hard. It’s too great a reminder of the fragility of everything we hold dear, so we forget to hug each other goodbye before work sometimes. We don’t linger over the kiss of the people we love most in the world, because to linger on ordinary days is to admit that any day could be the last kiss, the last touch. And to dwell too long in that knowledge is unbearable. It would break us to live each day like that, but to live any other way dims our lives. Such hard choices: to sleepwalk through our lives or to embrace the ever-present loss as time marches on and over us, and we cannot get it back.

But … this time I knew, so I carved the feel of her fur into my fingertips. I pressed the feel of her liquid warmth in my arms like flowers that I wanted to keep forever. I gazed into those startling green eyes until I thought I memorized the pattern and texture of them. We have pictures that will help, but they won’t show me how it felt for my hand to stroke over the soft dome of her head and play with the delicate point of her ear. She didn’t like me doing that, but these last days I did it anyway and she tolerated it, maybe she knew that I was trying to make memories that would have to last forever. The feather light touch of her paws as she cuddled on top of my husband and I as we lay on our sides spooned together. She was never heavy, but those last two nights she was birdlike, dreamlike, light as a feather, like she was already fading into a ghost cat come back to comfort us. I lay there in the blackness with my husband curled around me and memorized the feel of this, too. Jon and I both knew that it might be the last night, so we lay still and let her settle, and tried to feel that tiny life tucked up in the curve of our bodies. She was so small, dainty, lovely, but she fought off a hawk and bore the scar of her victory. She was fierce and never backed down, never moved out of the way, but stood her ground and forced the world to move around her.

“Though she be but little, she is fierce,” –William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This is why I write

I stepped into my office today with dawn like a knife slash in the east, the light seeped through like pale orange and yellow blood. The crescent moon hung shining silver in the black branches of the tallest tree, as if night and day hung poised, so that it was both at the same time. It was both beautiful and terrible, somehow. I’ve thought that the last few mornings that I’ve seen my office this early. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why I write this blog. Initially, it was to grow my audience, my brand, to sell more books; but I think most of what I gained in those areas has happened already. The blog probably did most of its original purpose years ago when I was trying to do one daily for a year. So, why do I write this blog? What’s it for? Honestly, I’m no longer certain, but I know one thing that hurts me as a writer in every area, and that is not writing about things. The more secrets I have to keep, the more editing of my life I do, the harder it is to write the blog (which makes a certain sense) but also makes it more difficult to write anything.

My personal life is very separate from my fiction and yet there is some mystical connection that, even after all this time, I don’t understand but I know that it is there, and I know when I do not honor that connection my ability to write suffers. So what haven’t I been saying publicly that’s clogging up the creative pipeline?

Jonathon’s mother, Mary, had cancer this year. She’s gotten a clean bill of health now, but it took chemo to get her there. If you’ve ever seen anyone go through chemo, you know it will take time to heal the effects of the cure. I got her permission to talk about her illness a while back, but it somehow seemed too personal to her to put it here, but if she’s okay with me talking about it, then why has it been something I didn’t want to talk about?

Jonathon buried his Aunt Sweetie just before Thanksgiving, so about two weeks ago. She helped raise him, and when he talks about her it’s more like a second mother than an aunt. She lost her battle with cancer after over twenty years and several remissions. The family is devastated and still reeling as they deal with it. I will miss her, but I don’t have the decades of connection to her that they do. She was not my sister, or my childhood hero, so my loss is seen through the patina of theirs, and my major worry is for those left behind and how they are dealing with it. Aunt Sweetie was ready to go, and her faith gave her peace, so there should be no tears, and yet there are.

Today we will be going to another funeral for a friend’s father, who died suddenly, but his health had been poor for most of the time I’d known the family, so it seems both sudden and inevitable. Our friend is forty, which seems young for burying your father.

The attacks in Paris, the attacks in California, people killed, and for what? To terrify people? To terrify the world? Because that’s what terrorism is, it is literally an attempt to frighten us all, to make us insecure and unsure of our safety. It is a war that kills a few people at a time in the hopes of demoralizing the rest of us. Don’t let them win. Live your lives, be happy, and keep moving, because to do anything else gives them a victory. They haven’t won anything, don’t act as if they have. I’ll admit it’s unnerving, but be hopeful, keep faith that good triumphs in the end. Dark times come, but they do not stay, history teaches us that.

There have been a lot of tragedies this year, both personally and in the larger world. There’s more, there’s always more, but somehow the theme of death and loss seems a thread this year that I can’t shake. But Jonathon’s mother is going to be alright, and that is a miracle of modern medicine. There is good among the bad, wins and not just losses, but sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on the positive when so much negative keeps happening. I know I’m not the only one feeling a bit overwhelmed right now.

Why do I write this blog? Why do I write at all? In part, it’s to reach out to other people and say, “It’s going to be all right.” It’s a way of saying, none of us are alone. We’re in this together. I write fiction to help me make sense of the world and to share a good story, so that as you read my books you can forget the news headlines for a few hours. You can get lost in a good book, where the heroes usually triumph, the villains are punished, and the world is saved. Yes, fiction should make you think, but it should be first and foremost an escape from the mundane world. It should let you slip into a world more fantastic, and more openly magical than our own. That’s why I write my stories and novels. The blog is part explaining how I make that magic happen, and a glimpse into my own reality, so that the magic and the reality of my world brushes up against your own.

I am a storyteller. It is an ancient art. We used to sit in caves, huddled around the fire, listening to noises in the dark, afraid of what they might be, and someone would say, “Let me tell you a story,” and everyone would gather closer to the fire where they felt warm and safe, and they would forget the noises in the dark, listening to adventures. Now, I sit in my office and write words on a screen, that I’ll share with you soon. I’ll finish writing the blog, and continue to work on the latest novel, because you need a good story, and I need to be able to say, “Come, sit by the fire where you’ll be safe and warm, and let me share an adventure with you.”

A Dog always Breaks your Heart, at least once

I’m sitting in the sunshine on our patio listening to our water garden sing down the stones, with our pug, Sasquatch in my lap. He’s been my office dog since he was twelve weeks old. He’s fourteen years old now, and will be fifteen this summer. He’s the oldest dog I’ve ever owned from puppy to now. We had a rescue, Jimmy, that we got at age ten, and he made it seven more years, but we never saw him when his paws were soft, and he was all uncertain of the world. Jimmy was decidedly himself when we rescued him on his last day from a kill shelter. Sasquatch was all puppy uncertainty as we let him sniff his mother good-bye and took him with us in the car. Sas helping us on game night.
He is an old dog now, our oldendogger. I can’t imagine waking up without him in the house, but I know it’s coming. Even now his heart beats frantically against my hand, the rhythm of it is unsteady and unfamiliar. I know his heart beat almost as much as I know my husband’s, and this is not it. We took him with us to lunch and sat outside at a table with him. The four of us took turns holding him so the others could eat. Yes, he got scraps and probably got more chicken than he normally does at a meal, but that’s okay, roast chicken and a little bit of chips won’t hurt him. He’s always been a good dog, easy going, letting us use his paws to do the YMCA song by the Village People when he was a puppy. Yes, I’m that kind of dog person. If you don’t do silly things with your dogs then we are not the same kind of dog people and you may want to skip the rest of this essay, because much sentimentality may ensue.
I wrote the above on a day when we thought Sasquatch would pass on his own, in his own time, but it turned out to be an upper respiratory infection and antibiotics helped him get better. Every day after that has been a gift, but today is the last day. Today will be Sas’s last day. He’s stopped eating, even his favorite treats cannot tempt him. Any of you that have ever owned a pug know that a pug that will not eat is a very sick pug indeed. Pugs will eat until their stomachs explode, no joke, but Sas is only taking water, lots of water. He continues to lose weight, and for the first time ever he has a wasp waist, stylish if you’re a Weirimer, but pugs are meant to be square, not round, not fat, but blocky and solid. When I pick him up now he is too light, I can feel his bones and tendons under my hands, against my arms. He is wasting away and we cannot save him.

Our puggy boy.
We knew something was wrong, but finally got tests back a few weeks ago that is was cancer. If he’d been a younger dog we would have risked the surgery to remove his spleen and take a bigger sample of his liver, but the chances of him surviving the anthestia was very low, so we chose to treat the symptoms, but not actively treat the cancer. He’d already been losing some control of his bowels, but there are doggy diapers, not sure how he felt about his curly pug tail sticking out of the ridiculous things, but he took it like he takes most things, patiently, good naturedly, trusting that his humans know what they’re doing. I hope we do. I know we try to be worthy of the level of trust he places in us.
His back legs have been giving him trouble for awhile, but now they are going out from under him. He doesn’t so much lay down as collapse. He woke my husband, Jon, and I up about every hour from 1:00 AM this morning. Jon got up twice, and so did I. The first time I came back to bed I put Sasquatch up on the bed, which I knew was a bad idea, but I wanted him to sleep in the bed one more time, he loves it so. By the time I could no longer sleep about 5:30 he was deeply asleep on the corner of the bed. We had two of our younger dogs with us, too. Mordor and Keiko, both Japanese chins, good naturedly went out every time we took Sas out, but this time they were solidly asleep, too, so I left them with Jon and went downstairs to start tea, breakfast, the day.
Unless the veterinarian tells us some miracle later today, I know this will be Sas’s last day, because I called and made the appointment when I got up with him about 4:00 or 5:00 this morning. His vet isn’t on duty today, but she won’t be in until Friday, and it’s Thursday, we can’t make him suffer for another day just for a different doctor to help us, it wouldn’t be fair to him.
Jon texted me about thirty minutes later that Sas had thrown up. He’s been doing that for a few days now. By the time I came upstairs with new paper towels he’d also lost control of his bowels on the bed. Why wasn’t he in a doggy diaper? Because I knew this was his last time to sleep on the bed with us and somehow I just wanted him to be as comfortable as possible, and the diapers are for our benefit, not his, so I didn’t put it on him. I started cleaning up the blanket and Sas, Jon took Keiko and Mordor downstairs, and then came back up to help strip the bed. The bed clothes are in the washer now. Sas is asleep at my feet in my office with me, which is one of his favoritest places in the world. He’s always loved coming to work and has spent many a dawn and late night at my side while I wrote. I’ve already carried him to his favorite dog bed in the family room, and put him in his favorite bed here, but he’s chosen to lay on the floor which he almost never does. I even put a dog bed under my desk so he could use it, but he chose the floor at my feet. Keiko is in the bed, because chins are just as comfort loving as pugs. Mordor stayed in the kitchen with Jon which is unusual, because both the chins love to come to the office. Heck, the two big dogs are learning to love it, too, and there are days when I have all five dogs curled around me as I write. The two big dogs are with Genevieve and Spike in another bedroom. We all discussed it, and there’s no need for all of us to have this kind of disrupted night, but more than that we still don’t have a bed big enough for four adults and five dogs, and last night was about Sasquatch. He needed his corner of the bed, and just the little dogs, because sometimes the new bigger dogs are just too physical for him now.

Sas helping me write in better days.
Pugs are very stoic dogs, they don’t show pain much, so we have no way to be certain how much pain Sas is in, but he’s started staring into space in that way that some animals have when something hurts as if the pain is something they can see off in the distance, or maybe they see the end of the pain, I don’t know. This morning we carried him downstairs every time, because the stairs are beyond him now. For his last morning in the office with me I carried him up the stairs which I hadn’t had to do since he was a very little puppy and couldn’t quite manage them safely on his own. Now, as our oldendogger, he can’t manage them safely again.
Our daughter, Trinity, is home from college, so she’ll get a chance to say, good-bye. She got to dog sit Sasquatch this long weekend past while the four of us went on a retreat. It gave her some serious quality time with Sas. The other four dogs went to the puppy spa, but we wanted Sas to be at home with familiar things and people.
I’ll sit on the couch with him later today in his favorite spot which is a combination of mom’s lap and the corner of the couch near the arm. He’s on his third couch for this lifetime and he always chooses the same spot no matter if it’s the original green couch, or the red couch, or the new gray one. They all have arms and a spot where he can tuck himself in, so he does, with, or without a lap to snuggle into, though Trin informed me that he found her lap a suitable substitute, so maybe it’s not mom’s lap, but just whoever sits in his spot. Maybe to Sasquatch it’s never been him sharing my spot on the couch, but him sharing his spot with me, or whichever of his people was sitting in his spot.
Tomorrow his spot on the couch will be empty, his favorite dog beds filled by the other dogs, no eager pug face waiting for treats, cuddles, pets, and to curl up beside me. We will be a pugless household, for me that will be a first in almost thirty years. I don’t know how I will bear it.

New meds helped Sasquatch to recover himself for a few weeks after I wrote this blog. He never had another night where he threw up, or lost control of himself. He started eating again, though only soft food, and only certain foods. He liked cooked green peas mixed with his meat, not sure why, but we fed it to him, because that’s what you do. But now, we are back to him refusing all food, even cooked peas and chicken. For the first time he’s not even drinking water, so that’s it. We might find another round of miracle meds to help him limp on a few more days, but to what purpose? There comes a point with a beloved pet where you have to ask yourself, am I doing this for them, or for me?

One of the last pictures I took of our boy.
I’ll carry Sas over to the office one last time, because he can’t get over here by himself anymore. It’s not just stairs now, but even walking across the floor is hard for him. We’ll all say good-bye today, and this evening we’ll take him into the vet and it will done. I’m trying to be very unemotional about it all, but what I wrote earlier is very true. We will be a pugless household by tomorrow and even with four healthy, wonderful dogs remaining to give doggy kisses, beg for belly rubs, play with their favorite toys, fill the dogs beds, go for walks, its not the same. For all of you that have found “your breed”, you know what I mean. YOUR BREED, should always be in capital letters, because it is a profound bond not just to a particular dog, but to all the dogs everywhere that look like your dog. Genevieve and Spike are members of the Church of Dog, but they are new to our denomination of Pugdom. They brought two wonderful mutts into our lives, but neither of them has found “their” breed for certain. Jon, Trinity, and I have been pug owners for a lifetime, literally in Trinity’s case, and tomorrow we will not be. Japanese chins are a close second for us, but we always saw us with chins and pugs, never without our snoring, snuffling, wrinkly faced, rolling-gaited, curly-tailed, pugs. It somehow makes losing Sas feel even more awful, because there is not another pug to come home to, once we say, good-bye to our fuzzy pug boy.
The End: All five of us went with Sasquatch on the last trip to the vet. When the time came, I held him in my arms, made sure my skin was close to his nose so he would have my scent, and know for certain that I was there. He went very quickly, so fast the vet was surprised. She double checked his vitals, but he was gone, so ready to go that he didn’t even wait for all the anesthetic to be administered. She used it all, just in case, but Sas wasn’t there. He was already somewhere else, where nothing hurt, and he could be reborn to a time when he was younger, healthy, happy, his cast iron stomach back and puggish appetite back so he could be the shape a pug is meant to be which is barrel shaped. Multum in parvo, much in little, a big dog in a small package, true of every pug I’ve ever known and certainly true of our Sasquatch.