Have you ever had a companion animal that made you believe in reincarnation?  Or hope for the truth of it, at least.  I had a rescue cat that I cleverly called Blackcat to differentiate him from my other cat Whitecat, and he was nearly human.  Whitecat is a good cat, don’t get me wrong, but Blackcat was something more.

He came home with me from the factory as a half-grown kitten because he had a broken leg.  He was gorgeous, long black fur on top and white fur on the underbelly and legs, bright yellow lantern eyes and a black smudge nose at the end of his white face blaze.  

As an aside: we have cats at our factory because my husband rescues them from restaurants.  He just hates to see cats in cages at restaurants and when he is able to, he buys them (by the kilo) and brings them back to the factory.  The conversation at the restaurant usually goes something like, “How do you want it dressed?”  “Oh, don’t worry, I know how to do it myself.  Just put him in this box.”  My husband gets strange looks, because he doesn’t really seem like the kind of person who knows how to dress a cat, but he pays in cash so they sell him the cat.  These cats lead a wonderful existence: they eat cat food all day at the factory, and watch mice.  Blackcat and Whitecat were both born at the factory from rescue cats.  

So Blackcat had a broken leg.  It was a bad break, near the joint, and he had pins put in it and two surgeries plus IVs and other medications to fix his leg.  His leg was stiff and he didn’t really use the joint but he could walk OK.  It doomed him to be my housecat forever, though, because he couldn’t fight or climb properly with that leg.  

He was such a character.  He had a way of looking right through you—each glance was worth many words.  He had an extensive listening vocabulary, in both Chinese and English, and was usually quite obedient (or if not, it was certainly because he chose not to be.)  He was alpha cat and cleaned Whitecat’s clock once a month or so, just so everyone understood the pecking order in the house.  He would sit on my lap and Whitecat would creep up along the top of the sofa and extend a foot to come down to my lap too, and Blackcat would just turn his head and look. ‘Nuff said.  Sometimes Whitecat would be on my lap and Blackcat would come over, chase Whitecat away, and then leave.  He didn’t want lap time but didn’t want Whitecat to get any either.

So we had a great 18 months or so like this.  Then Blackcat quit eating.  I took him to the vet.  They did x-rays, fed him stomach medicines, gave IV antibiotics, palpated and poked, all to no avail.  The antibiotics (which were in 2 or 3 day doses) would seem to help a bit, and then he’d relapse.  He got thinner and thinner.  His fur got bad.  He’d be hungry and try to eat, wolfing his food down, but then he’d sort of gack and choke, spit and hiss and actually run from the food dish as if it had stung him.  I described this behavior to the vet again and again, and finally (MONTHS of this starving—antibiotic—slight improvement—decline cycle later) he did it in front of the vet.  So the vet started palpating his neck area and found swollen glands.  We did batteries of blood tests looking for cancer and liver problems, and found high white counts, plus the results you’d find in a semi-starved cat.

Meanwhile Blackcat was getting sick and tired of all the vet attention and was getting wilder and harder to control at the clinic.  One day the vet was face-to-face with him and had just palpated his neck glands (which probably was uncomfortable.)  Blackcat spit in his face and the vet saw a flash of red.  He asked if we could anesthetize the cat to look in his mouth.  
The problem was giant canker sores on the inside of his mouth, both sides.  I have never seen anything like that in my life: they were the size of my pinky finger from the tip to the first joint and one was leaking blood.  So, now we knew why the short antibiotic bursts helped and why Blackcat would spit and run from his food dish.  Eating anything was torture with that in his mouth.  

So, he had heavy courses of antibiotics over the next 6 months to try to get rid of those sores.  And it worked, for a while--- the sores went way down and Blackcat was eating and gaining weight, and his old playful character was coming back.  But then the whole thing turned around and he didn’t eat right again, started occasional throwing up, fur was not good, and that time it wasn’t canker sores.  We were right back to having a seriously sick cat and not knowing what to do.

He was painfully thin and would jump into my lap while I sat at the breakfast table, though he knew that was against the rules.  In those last couple of months I let him, cherishing the contact.  He would burrow under my shirt and bury his head against my stomach and just breathe there.  I adjusted my work hours to give him more lap time in the morning—it was something I looked forward to as well.

So most mornings I would sit at the table till my legs were numb, with a cold cup of coffee and this rail-thin, dry-furred miserable little animal curled up against me, and I would cry, and think about the big questions.  Had I done Blackcat a disservice saving him when his leg was broken as a kitten?  He would have died in short order if I’d left him be.  It seemed he’d spent half his life in the damned vet clinic, and for what?

It’s so true that all of our days on this planet are numbered, whether human or feline… everything I did to try to interfere in the big pattern, to change things, to give him a good life, was for nothing.  And then I would get angry: It was as if Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed all had his name on a list, and what could I do.  Blackcat didn’t deserve this.  No one does.

I took him in again finally when he started throwing up and stopped eating and drinking.  The vet saw that his ears were yellowed and started him on liver support (all those antibiotics for the leg, and then for the cankers, had destroyed his liver.)  After a day of that the vet told me it was time, that Blackcat was just suffering and we couldn’t help him any more.  So I said goodbye to him and held his head in my hands.  He buried his nose in my wrist and breathed in my scent, and they ran the drug in.  And he was gone.

I believe in reincarnation, and I hope that Blackcat gets a better roll of the dice next time.  Maybe he’ll make the leap to human next time and get born to a wonderful family, or if not, get to be a healthy and happy cat and live to a ripe old age.  He deserves that.