You Can Have the Whole Box

Today a man in Spongebob Squarepants scrubs told me my cat has cancer.

It was a very bad day.

The day was already haunted by a story told to me in the morning, a story so ghastly and gothic it smacks of urban legend except I know it was completely true. I was trying to get to the bottom of why someone in an e-mail chain wasn't joking and playing around with the rest of us and they told me they were having a bit of a day. They had found out, online, that a couple they had been working with on a project had died, had killed themselves. This person had just seen them a few weeks ago at a dinner-they had been dropped off at their hotel and walked off hand in hand like all was right with the world. The next day the woman committed suicide and then last week the man had walked into the water off Rockaway Beach and hadn't been seen since. Needless to say, I felt like a total asshole even though, short of being Nostradomus, there's no way I could have known.

Then during my lunchtime reading I found a quote from a letter written by F. Scott Fitzgerald to a friend (the woman's name escapes me now)* whose sons had died-"The golden bowl is cracked but at least in your case it was truly golden. Those boys will never leave you now" and I wished I had seen that before I had written my lame response to the story. It made me hope that maybe those poor people will never be apart now in, as John Hiatt sings, "a little joy/a little peace/ and a whole lot of light".

With that buildup, I headed to the vet. And sure enough after they fought her, yowling, to get x-rays and blood (her body is weak but her attitude strong) I stood there in the x-ray room looking at the ghost tumor riding her kidney with unchecked tears streaming down my face. It was one you didn't have to be a vet to read. The bloodwork, which should come back on Wednesday and will access kidney function, can only offer worse (pallative care) or worst (euthanasia) news. Kidney cancer in cats is almost never beaten and I wouldn't put her through that even if I had nothing but money. Adding to the misery is that Joe is gone to California this week so whatever has to be faced will be, for all intents and purposes, faced alone. And, in a classic example of adding insult to injury, I also have a catsitting job this week.

As I was leaving the vet, Tim, who works the front desk and is very kind in a born again way, told me that he always discusses his day with his girlfriend when he gets home and knew that night they would be talking about and praying for the loud cat with funny name. Then he offered me the Kleenex and said, "You can have the whole box."

Thanks, I'm probably going to need it.



*The woman was Sara Murphy who was the inspiration for the Divers from Tender is the Night. The quote is actually "The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys from you now." Much more graceful than my remembering of it.