Quiet time

These days, our cat Curzon is on my mind quite a lot. That’s just the way it is, and the way it’ll probably remain for awhile. Not talking about it is like ignoring the big elephant in the room.

This morning I posted an update to my post (at the end of the post) about him being sick. That update mentioned all the optimistic bits, and ignored the parts that were less so. But I can’t ignore them.

Last night, Curzon hung around inside the house and at one point even slept in my lap while I was at my computer (Jake was outside at the time). This was unusual, and it crossed both our minds that he was hanging around to say goodbye. But then this morning he seemed much better, as I wrote in my update.

This afternoon he came into the house and went into the master bedroom to sleep. He did that sometimes last winter, and today was a cool, windy, rainy day, so there’s nothing unusual about that. And yet…

Despite eating, drinking and grooming, there still seemed something not right, almost like there was a sadness in him. A little before five, I saw he was under the bed, so I went into the bedroom and lay on the bed. A couple minutes later he jumped up and curled up against me and went to sleep.

I lay there, felt his warmth, the softness of his fur—and the breathing that was much faster than normal. I counted his breaths, several different times, all with the same result: Too fast. I looked out the window and watched the trees swaying in the wind, the dance of their leaves and branches silhouetted against the white-grey sky. Sea gulls floated in the wind, rising, falling, seemingly moving single feathers to change direction. It was a nice, quiet time.

And I lay there, even though there were many things I could be doing and probably a few I should have been doing. I felt Curzon laying against me and I couldn’t help but think that I may not have many more opportunities to do that. Right then, it seemed like the most important place to be, the most important thing to be doing.

We’re not giving up on him. We’re going to continue with his medicine and hope with all our might that it works, no matter how much we might be afraid it won’t. And I’ll continue to grab some quiet time with him when I can. Right now, we both seem to need that.