Senile Dementia

Posted on January 9, 2003 in Cats

The wind blew away our cat flag. Lynn didn’t notice and I’ve been holing up inside the house for days, never even peeking out the front to see what is happening. It’s like another piece of Ambrose has been taken from me.

Tracy sat down next to my ear while I was sleeping and began to howl for no apparent reason. Her “spells” seem to be getting worse: she will trot in the room, claw her way onto the bed, and not recognize where she is. “Where am I?” she howls.

Just now, she jumped into my lap and sat on my hands. I sent her away. She knows that Lynn and I completely lose it if she covers the keyboard, so she plops herself on our wrists. If I need my hands, I remove her to the chair next to me. It can take several tries before she will stop trying to crawl all over me. Then she either passes out or she ambles off to another room, looking for the other human in the house. She ventures into two rooms in her search: the office and the bedroom. If the one she enters is empty, the agonized wail of loneliness sounds all over the apartment.

We’re losing her. How much longer this will take isn’t certain. A friend suggested that I might consider putting her to sleep, but she’s otherwise in decent health and fending for herself. She finds and uses the litterbox. With a little coaxing, she can be drawn to the kitchen for her Cat-Sip. Then she slips back to the back of the condo to flop on the bed, the computer chair, or the lap/prone torso of whoever she finds in either one. It doesn’t seem to us that she will need help when the time to die comes. I expect her to pass normally from the world. The needle should not be necessary.

Just in case she passes on while we are in Mexico, I’m giving our neighbor the number of the cremation service we used for Ambrose.