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Last night we arrived home from spending the weekend with my boyfriend’s sister and her fiancé to find out my cat had to be taken to the vet yesterday afternoon with kidney failure.

He is currently on a drip, somewhere white-walled, coming to an end. He has kidney failure. He will either fade away naturally (I tried to write die but it looked too harsh, too abrupt) or we will have to have him put down. There is a chance today won’t be that day, but if it isn’t not today, then tomorrow, or in a few days. His kidneys, my mum said, have shrunk, as has he. Yesterday, she said, he couldn’t even drink water.

Only 3 days previously we had rushed our elderly female cat (she is an impressive 16, while he and our other female cat trail behind at 14) to the vet, of the expected same problem. Our first cat, years ago, 14 in fact, died of kidney failure. She was bleeding, uncomfortable, distressed. We assumed the same thing, the worst.

She is riding the slow, gentle, sleep-ridden route to recovery slowly, apparently with a bad case of cystitis. We relaxed, settled in the knowledge that as she was the most elderly and frail of our three cats, and if she was okay everyone was okay.

My boy is a wanderer. I got him shortly after my previous cat, Old Lady’s brother, decided to abandon me to settle in a barn two miles away. I had open ended visiting rights, but my Sunday afternoon visits, seated on bales of hay, lost their novelty after a while. He is the half-brother of my older cat and near enough the spit of him, a rich, tortoise shell Abyssinian-cross-Siamese-cross-moggy.

My boy will often disappear for days, or weeks, on end, coming home with a belly full of rabbit, or rat, pester the other females and settle to sleep. He is an attention slut, offering continuous, disturbingly loud purrs to any who he coerces into offering him affection. He head-butts his way under my chin, onto my lap, giving so much gratitude in return you find it hard pushed to feel shunned when he offers such a display to the next visitor. He is not my cat, I am one of his many mistresses, waiting, waiting for his return, to abandon my duties and direct my love and affection to him.

I wonder how I would feel if this had happened when I wasn’t living at home. To have not have seen him for such a very long time. As it was he had been away for a week this time, I had missed his vocal demands, for affection, for attention, to be guided towards the food bowl that he was usually inches away from but unable to locate, an apt hunter but not exactly the brightest spark. My parents, wary of age and noticing how much weight he had shed when we had seen him previously, went out to collect him from his usual digs, a barn just up the road.

In half an hour, when my dad phones the vet, we will know. When I publish this post, things may be very different.

I am on the train to London. I don’t want to be here, on this train, full of strangers, two boys in front of me watching a film clearly ruffling the macs and suits and heels of winter, in their pestered silence, inaudible sighs, but silent nonetheless, as is the way of the English.

Had the meeting not been previously postponed so I could attend, I would have cancelled. But as it is here I am, covered in the remains of an explosive untidy crunchy bar, desperate for a coffee, cheeks stiff from tears, on the way to a client meeting to discuss growth, potential and how they can spend more money with us.

Maybe it is for the best, at least I am doing something. But I could, I argue, be doing something which mirrors my current activities in the comfort of my office at home, Newfy at my feet. She is currently on day-release to a local kennels, next to another chocolate, 4 month old male Newfy, who is probably more fun than her tap-tap-tapping mum who occasionally breaks from her mouse-moving to entertain, oh so briefly, her frustrated self, so I suspect it may be difficult to entice her back home this evening.

I am hurting. It is a private hurt, a sadness, a loss. It is often difficult for people to understand someone’s losing of a pet. People feel uncomfortable, awkward. They say things that they mean that you don’t want to hear, or that they don’t mean that you don’t want to hear. It is a pet, after all. It is an animal, a companion, a creature of entertainment, of comfort and distraction.

Or they may regale you with tales of when their cat/dog/guinea pig/snake/chinchilla died, citing common ground, an ‘I’ve been there too’, an easy way around addressing your grief through distraction, a phenomenon that I have never quite understood, or at least not understood why it occurs with pets and distant relatives (Grandparents may also fall into this category, but on a case by case basis). There is an unspoken hierarchy with pets, the allotted grieving time, the unwritten aching volume. My sister’s hamster, the Devil Incarnate, the bloody little bugger, died twice and I can’t remember anyone feeling overly distraught about the whole thing. The first time, my grandparents nearly buried the damn thing but he pulled himself back from the light, ran back down the tunnel, teeth gnashing. I suspect the volume of bloody he had consumed in his short life had given him some sort of vampire-esque reincarnation, to which we were all a little disappointed (I cannot remember if my sister was upset on either of the occasions where he bit the dust, and my apologies to her if on reading this it stirs some previously suppressed and unwanted emotion). Generally speaking, rodents are granted a moderate amount of grieving time. We have had many ducks in our Cornish lives, each one in turn, not being wonderfully bright, being eaten by a fox (or, on one occasion, next door’s dog), or else escaping to prevent being eaten. This high turnover of bird life did not allow a substantial amount of grieving time, certainly not in the latter stages when it seemed quite exciting if, in the morning, they were still there. Dogs, mans best friend, alongside perhaps horses, are probably given the largest amount of time to grieve. My dad’s dog was put down approximately 6 years ago, but he is still there, in a little wooden box, beneath his bed and who was ‘brought out to meet Newfy’ when we first brought her home (my boyfriend has suggested we sprinkle his ashes into Newfy’s food so they could ‘be together’, which wasn’t received wonderfully well by myself). Cats, by their very nature, are different. Independent, stubborn, each allowing you to care for them, to love them, to pat them and cuddle them and love them just enough that they will always break your heart. They get close, close, close, but not close enough that they are yours.

Last night my tears were hysterical when my parents broke the news to me. They fell out of me violently, in bursts, in breaths.

This morning I am tired, exhausted, numb, sad. My dreams were flooded last night, with thoughts, memories of moments that didn’t quite happen, or not quite in that way.

I have a long day ahead. It is 9am now.

Later...

I am now in work, publishing this post, at 13:29.

He is no better, we are waiting.