The Offline Mind

When I was ten months pregnant my cat began to die. He was less than a year old, so you can imagine our surprise when he stopped eating, stopped seeking affection, and his nose went from baby button pink to a cold grey. We observed him as he would drink from his water bowl with uncharacteristic thirst and then slink back into some unfriendly part of our old home, not the bright and warm bedrooms he used to frequent. He was a ghost, like an old general in full uniform clanking about the attic with a tin can around his ankle, moaning in time with the wind. I would later learn from Google that he was hiding himself away so as not to attract predators to the rest of the pack (us).

This cat was brought home when I was six months pregnant. One month later my mother died. I lay in bed every day for the second half of my pregnancy, with my cat. I got out of bed for my cat. Escorting me to the bathroom, sleeping on my pillow, getting up with me in the night when the baby was kicking, and crying for me to come down to the kitchen at 6am each day: that was my cat.

As I watched him wither each day, while on leave and with nothing but time on my hands, the heavy burden of new life swishing around in my midsection, with an unknown traveller drawing her sharp black line down the front of my belly, like she was staking out her territory, a new world, a new frontier–I coudn’t help but feel myself closer to death as well. In quiet my fear grew. I felt myself inexplicably tied to his fate. Somehow, if he died, I would die. I would pray to and plead with him in secret, with his sad eyes turned upward and glazed over I could sense he was already a thousand dreams away. He looked at me with an expression like a deck of cards falling slowly to the ground.

I couldn’t stop crying that week, juicy tears, hormonal tsunami tears, and my partner could sense the desperation of both our situations, so took my cat to the vet, despite my earlier declaring I would never be “one of those people” who spends their life savings to save the life of an animal. But we were linked now, he and I, both dancing a furious tango with death, he with his intussusception (a condition in which part of the intestine slides into an adjacent part of the intestine, we would soon learn) and I with my third baby at almost forty years of age. Although I was sure (“sure”) I would deliver between 37 and 38 weeks, there turned out to be always something to wait for. First his return and recovery. Then the new dishwasher to be installed. Then the children to return to school from Christmas Break. I was waiting and waiting, my body holding her breath until she very nearly popped at 43 weeks pregnant. By that time my cat had lost half his body weight and gained it back again, had returned home from a week’s stay at the Emergency Clinic with a zipper scar down his belly, and had even begun to grow new fur over his scar. He had returned to the land of the living.

Finally, the baby came. When I was in labour on all fours, propped up on pillows to face the bedroom wall, away from the inquiring and concerned faces of my midwives and my partner, I had only a sightline of the door. Coming in and out, checking on things, there was my cat. I thanked God for many things in that state, as my daughter Naima tore her way into the world through my body. I thanked God for many things, a list that unravelled directly from my soul and ended with my healthy friend the cat.