Jenn McKee

Word Count 1604

That January afternoon, my two daughters and I tumbled into the house, fumbling with backpacks and a violin case and winter coats, when we spotted Pumpkins, our orange-and-white cat of nearly a decade, lying on a step, then pulling himself toward us using only his front legs.

The sound of his full weight hitting each stair chilled me.

I scooped him up and set him on the hardwood floor, watching as he stayed completely still. “Get the treats,” I told my 13 year old. But when she shook the bag – a noise that had always set him running – he didn’t budge. After a few minutes of stillness, though, Pumpkins decided to climb to his favorite window spot on our blue armchair. He scrabbled his way up, back legs limp behind him. My daughters screamed. I willed myself to stay calm.

But I also asked myself, “Why do I, a person who freezes in a crisis, keep finding myself smack in the middle of a crisis?”

Just three months earlier, I’d gone to check on my 78 year old father and found him lying dead in his apartment. Being in charge of yet another sudden calamity, in our own home, felt absurd.

I called my husband, who said he’d leave work soon, and that he’d take Pumpkins to an animal hospital, but as I heard Pumpkins cry and mewl in discomfort, I knew I had to just buck up and take him myself.

It also was dawning on me, however, that no vet could likely fix whatever was wrong, so I told my daughters that they should say goodbye to Pumpkins, “just in case.” They curled around him on the chair, petting his ears and his chin, tears falling on his fur. They hugged him and told him he was a good cat, and that they loved him. I was struggling with my own grief, but also felt utterly dismantled by theirs.

At the animal hospital, staffers immediately swept Pumpkins away, and minutes later, a vet explained that Pumpkins had a blood clot, likely from heart disease, that was restricting blood flow to his back legs. We needed to let him go.

This is a hard moment for any pet owner, of course. But the moment was likely exacerbated for me because it followed so closely on the heels of my father’s death.

Dad had always been difficult to get close to and love, but things went “next level” in 2009, when he found himself widowed at 66. A product of his rural Indiana upbringing and his era – when men were discouraged from having or communicating emotions – Dad had opted to stay, after my mom’s death from cancer, in the large North Carolina house where my parents had resided since 2000. My two sisters and I lived in Michigan, and he only called now and then, not wanting to “bother” us unless he had something significant to tell us.

We later learned that after a few years of living alone, Dad briefly dated a local woman, twenty years his junior, who wanted to move to Los Angeles with her aspiring actress daughter. She asked my father to pay the high rent for their apartment. Later, he took out a reverse mortgage to buy the two women a motor home. And for a short time, he’d paid rent for an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, when the women decided that maybe New York was where this young lady would make it big.

My sisters and I had no idea that all this was happening. So when my dad started making noises about needing help to pay his local taxes, we started what would become a deep dive into his finances.

My dad – this man who’d told us all our lives that we had to find our own way, financially, and that we should not come to him for money help – was in the hole to the tune of nearly half a million dollars. This felt like the most baffling kind of betrayal. This former auto industry engineer, who’d keep exacting records of his mileage on family road trips, and clipped coupons for fast food, merely shrugged when I held up one past-due credit card bill and told me, “That one’s only got eleven thousand on it, I think.”

My sisters and I were gobsmacked. (For the first time in my life, I sought out therapy.) What had happened to the father who was emotionally distant but hyper-rational, wary of scams?

My younger sister and I helped my father file for bankruptcy, and we moved him to an apartment two miles from my home in Michigan. We tried hard to integrate him into our lives. He was often reluctant, grousing about watching his granddaughters’ softball games instead of being at home to watch more TV.

But he was our father, so we did all this for him and more.

He’d grown addicted to his connection with this woman, so he kept reaching out to her, though we were, by this point, monitoring his texts and email. More than once, I had to look him in the eye and say, “When the chips are down, Dad, you learn who cares about you. The chips are down for you right now, and she’s not here. We are. She’s still trying to get you to pay for things. We’re here, trying desperately to dig you out of this hole.”

He’d nod and say, “Oh, I know, I understand,” but in a way that told me that my words weren’t actually landing.

One weekend in the fall, about seven months after we’d moved him, I grew worried when he did not respond to my calls and emails. I drove to his apartment and knocked, my heart racing, my hands shaking. No answer. I put my copy of his key into the lock, already crying as I let myself in. “Dad?!”

I saw strange, brownish-red lines on the beige carpeting in front of his couch first. Then I saw his body on the floor, his back to me. And I knew. I couldn’t bring myself to check for breathing, but on some level, I knew there was no need.

I ran from the apartment, stood at the building’s entrance, hunched over, crying and hyperventilating. I called my husband first, because I had to say what I’d seen out loud in order for my brain to absorb it.

I called 911, fumbling with my phone to locate my dad’s street address. I followed the dispatcher’s instructions to go back into the apartment. “Can you check to see if he’s breathing?” “No,” I said, crying harder. “I don’t think I can.” “Can you tell me if his skin feels cold?” I put my hand on my father’s shoulder. Like marble.

I went outside to wave down the EMTs driving through the complex. They rushed into my dad’s apartment, giving me a strange flicker of hope that maybe I’d been wrong. But then they sauntered back out, all urgency gone. A man with a clipboard asked me when I’d last seen my dad (about four days earlier), if he’d been sick (yes, but he’d seemed to be on the upswing), if he’d been vaccinated for Covid (yes). My husband and younger sister arrived to wait with me in the hallway for the funeral home crew to remove my dad’s body from his apartment. When they finally came, the undertaker pronounced my father not fit for viewing.

I shuddered, thinking about my father being ill and alone when he died, and wondering why he didn’t reach out to us. We’d helped him as much as we could, but in the end, I’d failed to give him a dignified death. I wasn’t there for him.

All of this was in my mind’s rearview as I sat in the animal hospital waiting room, calling my daughters to tell them Pumpkins wouldn’t be coming home, staring at a wall-mounted magazine rack.

The family joke had long been that I was Pumpkins’ favorite. When I settled into my favorite working/reading spot, he’d snuggle up on the chaise, right behind my head; and every night, like clockwork, he’d settle against my right shin, coiled and purring. Though I’d long suffered the middle child syndrome of always feeling overlooked, Pumpkins saw me. I was his person. And he’d wanted and valued my love in a way my dad never did.

When my husband arrived at the animal hospital waiting room, they brought in Pumpkins, sedated and wrapped in a small rug. They gave us a few minutes alone with him, and told us to flip a nearby switch when we were ready.

“Do you want to stay with him when we give him the injection?” the vet tech asked.

Yes. Of course we would muster the courage to stay.

As the woman pressed on the syringe, Joe cradled our cat like a newborn. From behind, I scratched Pumpkins’ ears and kissed the top of his head and thanked him for being our cat. I told him he was a handsome boy. I thanked him for not just making me his person, but for accepting and appreciating my love – something I never take for granted.

I could barely get the words out through my sobbing. This was the unbridled grief of a double loss being released.

But it was also an acknowledgment that my sweet cat had miraculously managed to give me one last gift: the chance to help someone who meant something to me die peacefully, surrounded by warmth and love.

Pumpkins had given me a second chance to get this right.

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Jenn is a Michigan-based former arts reporter/critic whose writing has appeared in Shondaland, Good Housekeeping, The Writer, American Theatre, Scary Mommy, Hour Detroit and more. She earned an MFA in fiction writing from Penn State University, before realizing her true love was nonfiction; and she met her husband while playing trombone in the Michigan Marching Band.