Bad luck

This is not about the internet.

The only problem with making my pets such a core, public part of my life is that I can’t not say something. I was going to do a repost today, perhaps with a note at the top explaining why. But I don’t know how to explain to you what I can’t even explain to myself: That on Thursday, I dropped my sweet three-year-old cat Ruby off at the vet for a routine dental cleaning, and she did not come home.

The post I was originally working on for today was about digital OCD. One of my main obsessive thoughts is that my pets are sick. OCD brain tells you that having these thoughts is somehow protecting yourself, so I thought all day on Thursday about the ways that Ruby’s very common procedure could go wrong.

To have the irrational thing you’re scared of actually happen is completely destabilizing. It shatters your entire sense of reality. To have it happen multiple times, even more so. It cannot be explained, or rationalized, or understood. It’s just—in the words of the vet, my therapist, and my family—bad luck.

I have had supremely bad luck with my pets. I love them more than anything in the world, and they keep being taken from me in premature and shocking ways. That’s why this specific OCD narrative formed: I worry I am toxic to my pets, that it is irresponsible of me to be a pet owner, and that I have subjected my husband and also Ruby’s brother, Partner, to grief and heartbreak they would not have had to endure if I had simply stayed away.

I try not to listen to the voice in my head that says it would be safer for everyone if I walled myself off inside a tomb somewhere in the forest. Each time I suffer a loss, I try to level up my care for the next pet. After Paula, I took Birdie to the vet every six months. After Birdie, I adopted two kittens and gave them the expensive food and the just-in-case evaluations and treatments. I am now holding Partner close. We will be switching to an out-of-state vet that comes highly recommended. He will never go under anesthesia without an anesthesiologist.

I have to believe the story can be different, but for every single one of these cases, what I did or didn’t do ultimately had no bearing on what happened. Each incident either came out of nowhere or was quietly creeping up in the background in a way that could not have been stopped even if we had known about it.

Ruby was so full of life. She screamed at the top of her lungs for food. When you touched her, she’d chirp, and roll to offer you her belly. She loved to stretch out in the sun, following it as it passed through the windows on one side of the apartment to the other. She was a menace in the mornings, taking advantage of any exposed skin to bite in hopes of getting you out of bed. She nibbled toes, attacked ankles, would drag socks from room to room, and once unwound all the toilet paper. Her personality is too big to exist in the past tense. Her death does not make any sense.

But the brain needs a reason. It feels incomprehensible that the reason could be anything other than me. But I’m trying to find a new way of looking at myself other than as the common denominator—to instead believe that perhaps these pets, always pre-destined to have shorter lives, found the person to give them the very best ones. They’ve certainly given that to me.