the sound of one bowl’s emptiness
by Reg Darling
In 1992, my wife, Terry and I bought a seal point Siamese kitten from a litter born to an acquaintance’s cat. Our son, Oren, named her “Spook” after a friend’s Siamese kitten who had been his constant companion on a week-long visit a few years earlier. She was loving, feisty, temperamental, and fearless. Around a year later, we bought Buddy from people whose love of Siamese cats was partly financed by the sale of an occasional litter. He was a lilac Siamese and only six weeks old. Spook did not approve of the interloper and made Buddy live behind the kitchen stove for three days. Though, at first, we feared she might actually kill him if we weren’t present to stop her, they quickly became inseparable after she allowed him to emerge from behind the stove without human protection. Though Buddy became dominant as he matured, Spook never allowed him to take his status for granted. Buddy was extraordinary—intelligent, affectionate, quirky, playful, athletic, but a little clumsy, and incessantly curious. He seemed to have a genuine sense of humor.
In his dietary habits, Buddy was self-regulating, but Spook was definitely not, and we had to monitor her diet to keep her weight under control. She considered this to be acutely unjust. Spook had a distinctive, lamenting cry that she used exclusively to announce, “My bowl is empty!”
As time passed, the two cats became wholly bonded to each other as well as wholly integrated into our lives—truly members of the family. Spook adored Oren and years later was visibly grief-stricken when he left for college.
At age eighteen, Spook was noticeably slowing down, while Buddy, fourteen months younger, was afflicted with kidney failure. Spook seemed to know that he was ill and became uncharacteristically deferential. As autumn faded toward winter, Buddy’s quality of life began unraveling toward terrible suffering. We arranged for the veterinarian to come to our home, rather than subject him to the confused fright of a car ride. Though we kept Spook in another room while the veterinarian administered the fatal injection, we let her see Buddy before they took him away to be cremated. The doctor agreed that this was the proper thing to do, the kindest way, and Spook had a right to know.
After seventeen years of constant companionship and Buddy’s soft, subtle charisma, his sudden absence left a vast emptiness in our home. Spook was obviously depressed. We gave her extra attention and kept her bowl filled. Terry and I were stunned with grief.
As the veterinarian was leaving, she gave me the fur she had shaved from the Buddy’s leg to prepare the injection site. I put the fur into a little deerskin pouch that holds a small Buddha in the calling-the-Earth-to-witness pose. That tiny pouch fits into a larger one that holds objects of personal, spiritual resonance that I find comforting in difficult, challenging, and/or uncertain times. Because it summoned me to witness, I often placed the Buddha on the desk before me when I wrote.
A week after Buddy’s death, I was having difficulty with writing and nearly everything else. Sitting in the living room with my notebook and pencil, I got out my medicine pouch, removed the smaller pouch, and as I removed the Buddha, Spook came over. She sniffed at the now fur-lined pouch, let out a low, muffled cry, went to her usual spot on the back of the couch where she and Buddy had spent a portion of each day curled up together, and curled up alone. Later that day, she roamed the house repeating her empty food bowl cry. Her bowl was full and topped with her favorite treats.
Since Terry and I had both resolved to keep her food bowl filled constantly, we each thought the other had been replenishing it. Spook had gone three days without eating before we realized she wasn’t eating at all. Cats, especially elderly cats, can’t do that. We tried to entice her with treats, meat, and yogurt—to no avail. Our veterinarian gave us liquid nourishment that we squirted down her throat with a syringe, which was traumatic for us all, and most of the time, she threw up within a few minutes. Worst of all, it transformed us from comforters into tormentors.
We had hoped that if we could force some kind of basic level of nutrition and keep her hydrated, perhaps she would find her way to wanting to live again. But between sessions of wandering the house crying, “My bowl is empty, my bowl is empty!” she retreated into silent brooding on the back of the couch. She welcomed affection but didn’t seek it. Spook had decided not to live. We took her to the veterinarian, who put her on intravenous hydration and nourishment, and her bloodwork improved a little, at first. But he also told us that her pancreas was, in essence, digesting itself. Spook was in agony. He recommended keeping her on intravenous hydration overnight, with the addition of medication for her pain. We agreed, despite our reluctance to leave her there.
When we returned in the morning, the yellow tint of jaundice made it obvious that it was time for Spook’s suffering to end. Terry held her as the doctor injected lethal chemistry, and she quickly went limp.
We were, of course, awash in grief exacerbated by wondering if we could and should have done better—a standard array of self-doubts. But Spook was eighteen-and-a-half years old; she had enjoyed a long, good life. Did she not have a right to give up? I doubt such questions have whole answers; we acted from love and did what we could.
What lingers in memory for me, beyond the scarification of grief, is “My bowl is empty! My bowl is empty!” Was that not poetry? Was that not art?
Photo of Reg Darling
BIO: Reg Darling lives in Bennington, Vermont. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which is I Would Prefer Not To: Life and livelihood in the Confluence of Bureaucracy, Healthcare, and Politics. His essays have been published in Awakened Voices, The Chaos Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, River Teeth Journal, Rivet Journal, Timberline Review, Whitefish Review, and others.