I’m really struggling with what to write to you this week. Not because there’s nothing going on in my life, but because I keep telling myself that I can’t tell you what’s going on in my life.

I don’t know where this impulse is coming from, even though I’ve been sitting here mulling it over for a while. So maybe I’ll tell you the things, and in doing so hopefully figure out why I’m so resistant.

My beautiful, cranky, wonderful, stubborn 20-year-old cat Midori passed away. Her health had been in decline for a long time, so it wasn’t necessarily a surprise, just… really sad.

I took her in to the vet when she stopped eating, and they said that, due to her failing kidneys and old age, there wasn’t much they could do aside from administering a saline injection and some painkillers. Two days later, she still wasn’t eating or drinking (or moving, really), so I made a painstaking decision and took her back in to the vet to be put to sleep.

It was a really awful experience, but not in the way I’d expected (though it was awful in that way, too). I walked into the pet hospital with Midori bundled into her carrier and Tim at my back for support, and when the receptionist asked, “How can I help you?”, I suddenly had no idea what to say.

You see, I had never done this before, and I felt the inexplicable need to say the “right” thing, the “proper” thing. I thought with a jolt that going through this procedure in the “wrong” way would mean that I hadn’t really loved Midori, or done all I could to give her the best life possible.

Before her adoption, Midori had had a rough life. I adopted her from the Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago (where I lived for a while), and when I met her, Midori was four years old and suffering from dehydration, anorexia, worms, ear mites, fleas, gingivitis, and an upper respiratory infection. She was also underweight, traumatized, and hand-shy from abuse. She spent a lot of time in the ACS clinic, and I spent a lot of time terrified she wasn’t going to make it.

I don’t know why I initially chose her — it might have been her bright-white fur that made her stand out in the shadowy bank of kennels, or maybe I just liked the idea of helping this little animal find healing. But she was my companion for 16 years. You may have even seen or heard her during my livestreams and/or various Write Now podcast episodes, leaping up onto the back of my chair, or yowling for treats in the background.

“How can I help you?” the receptionist asked, and, after fumbling for the words in my (upset, overwhelmed) brain for a while, I said, “I think… I think it’s her… time?”

The receptionist stared at me blankly.

“I… uh, she’s old…?” I continued, hoping that the receptionist would understand why a very distraught-looking person would bring a barely-conscious, unmoving elderly cat into a pet hospital.

But she shook her head. “Huh?”

Exasperated and at this point in actual tears, I glanced around at the other people and their pets in the suddenly too-quiet waiting area and said, simultaneously as loudly and as softly as I dared, “I need to put my cat to sleep.”

I hated saying it, and I hated that she made me say it.

“Right,” she said in a businesslike fashion, and turned to her computer screen. “It’s one hundred and seventy-five dollars for euthanasia and common cremation, or we have other price options if you’d like the pet cremated individually.”

I looked down at Midori’s fluffy white head and pink ears, first horrified that it was going to cost almost two hundred dollars to essentially (if humanely, and necessarily) murder my little animal companion, and then horrified by the visual of her crumbling into ashes.

“Uhhh, common, please,” I stammered, hoping that the other pet owners around me weren’t judging me for being cheap and a killer.

I won’t go into the ordeal itself, but afterward I found myself back at the receptionist’s counter, Tim’s arm around my waist, my nose and eyes puffy and red, tears still streaming down my face.

“That’ll be one hundred and seventy-five dollars,” the receptionist announced. “Would you like to pay with a credit card, cash, or check?”

I remember thinking, right at that moment, that I had expected something very different from what was happening. I had assumed that the receptionist might express her condolences or a sympathetic smile, or at least slide an invoice discreetly across the counter instead of loudly intoning the dollar amount.

“Uhhh… credit,” I said, and dug into my wallet for my card. I handed it to her, wondering if I had landed an unusually callous receptionist, or if she was tired, overworked, sick, angry, depressed, or otherwise suffering. Maybe I should have asked her if she was okay.

Or maybe her behavior was actually matter-of-fact and quite normal, and my perception was skewed because I was grieving. Besides, what is normal, exactly? Where do we get our expectations? From books? Movies? TV shows? Others’ experiences relayed to us? In relaying my own experience to you, am I normalizing it?

I left the animal hospital with an empty cat carrier and the uncertainty of whether to continue crying or to start laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. The experience was neither what I had wanted nor expected, but it had happened nonetheless.

I think I was hesitant to share this story with you because I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it, because I was still picking it apart for meaning, and because honestly, I was afraid of how it would make me look. I have to admit I’m still feeling that hesitation, but I’ve decided to share my story anyway.

Because what else are our stories for?

P.S. Next Monday (August 22), I’m headed to Dallas to speak at Podcast Movement 2022! My talk is called “My Almost TV Show” and it’s about my experience adapting an audio drama for television. Let me know if I’ll see you there so we can high-five. 🙂