Anyone who has ever had a pet for a long time eventually has to face this dilemma: When your pet gets sick, how much time and money do you spend on it, how long do you keep it alive, when is it really time - as opposed to when is it convenient - to let go?
And while you're making all those decisions, your pet is looking at you the way people look at God - the omnipotent deity who will make it all well again.
We're facing that dilemma now.
Jean and I have two aging cats, one 15 and one who is 18. We almost lost the 15-year-old (Archie) a couple of months ago when he unexpectedly developed congestive heart failure. But he responded amazingly well to medication: That morning he was hiding in the closet (which he's never done), and that afternoon he was bouncing up and down the stairs. Still is - although we've been warned that he probably has at most a year, so his dilemma has only been postponed - and 16 is not really that old for a cat.
Then Siri, the 18-year-old, developed a swelling in her third eyelid around the left eye. At first we thought it was herpes - which is what it was diagnosed the first time it happened - but this time it did not respond to treatment, and was growing very fast. Within two weeks it had covered almost the entire eye.
So the vet did another biopsy. This time the result came back as spindle cell sarcoma - a very aggressive and invasive tumor, and one almost never seen in cats, especially in the eye. (There's a confusion of material on the internet on this matter, so I'm taking the word of the specialists who are actually on the case.)
At this point, we had really two choices: surgery to remove the eyelid - and the eye - or palliative care. Surgery is not cheap (though nowhere near the cost of human surgery), so that is one ethical hurdle right there. But we had already gone to some lengths for Archie, so it wouldn't be fair to say we'll spend on one cat but not the other, when we can do so, albeit with a gulp or two.
Also - and here is where the God part comes in - when we took these cats in (Jean got Siri as a feral kitten, and I found Archie at the SPCA), we took on the responsibility to care for them as best we could. There are limits, however - cost, convenience, quality of life - and veterinary medicine is not as advanced as human medicine. At some point, the animal's condition crosses the line and you have to say it's time.
Drawing that line gives one a sense of the awesome responsibility of God.
Not the power; power's easy. People drown kittens and throw cats out of moving cars. That's cruel on many levels, perhaps most of all because we have domesticated these animals to trust us, to look to us in a very real sense as their god.
We decided to base our decision on whether the cancer had already spread; it is one that metastasizes rapidly. But the X-rays were clear, and manual exam showed nothing either. No easy decision there. Siri is 18, which is getting up there, but the surgeon said she was generally in good condition and thought she would come through the procedure well. If nothing else - and this is also important - surgery would relieve the discomfort of having an incredibly swollen mass in her face.
We agreed to the procedure. As I write this, she is recovering nicely, and we will pick her up tomorrow. BUT - when the surgeon removed the eye, he found that the bone structure around the orbit had been invaded. He scraped away what he felt he could without compromising the structural integrity, but they are pretty certain the sarcoma has spread. Instead of the year or two we had hoped to buy for her, we are looking at a month or two.
Then will come the true God moment: When does she cross that line? Unlike some people who drag their pets' lives out, sometimes for years, because they cannot bear to let go, we will do what is necessary when the time comes. Jean and I have each had to do so before, with other cats. And sometimes the moment is obvious. But I think this time we are heading for a gray area where her comfort and our discomfort - not to mention the demands on our time and our emotional state - will waltz around each other in a kind of danse macabre.
I suppose this is the moment when, in keeping with my overall deistic theme, I should talk about praying for guidance. The thing is, although I've had an excellent and classic training in the Jewish religion, for many years now I have had little patience with, or use for, organized religion, my own included. I am convinced that, whatever is out there, no religion has got it right. There are too many logical leaps, too many clashes with history and reason, for me to accept that any religion we have so far come up has figured out what is really out there. I would like to think there is Something, possibly even more involved than Einstein's impersonal Being (who nonetheless does not play dice with the universe), but I am not prepared to say what it is.
So I will not pray for an answer. I will, however, offer that Being my profound sympathies for the position it is in, for It has to face my dilemma over and over and over every time a person is born, lives, and dies. Perhaps It has given up in despair, gone away to cry over the burden, and that is why there is evil in the world, why we maim and rape and torture and murder and hurl bombs and poisons at each other - all too often we do so because that other person refuses to see God the same way we do. It is enough to drive a Deity mad.
I don't know. I do know that sometime soon, sooner than we had hoped, Jean and I are going to have to be God, one last time, to a dying cat.