Sooty, The Littlest Kitten

TW: sick pet, pet death, pet loss, pet grief, medical environments, medical equipment, etc. 

Several weeks ago now, I got home late, high on the adrenaline of an incredibly fun and productive day in the studio to find the youngest in my family of cats, Sooty, collapsed in the garden, lethargic and clearly in pain. Despite having just driven for two hours, my Mum and I bundled her up in the cat blanket and got back in the car, headed for the out of hours vet. We arrived at about ten o’clock and she was whisked away, having only gotten more distressed during the drive. I wasn’t in denial – it was clear that something was wrong – but I was trying not to jump to the worst case scenario, at least until we had more information. I didn’t want to torture myself unnecessarily, especially since we didn’t know how long it would be before someone came back to give us an update. My hope, which I felt wasn’t desperately unrealistic, was that she’d eaten something bad for her or something like that and that dehydration from lying in the sun for who knows how long had worsened her condition; I hoped that, perhaps, if that dehydration could be resolved relatively easily, then whatever the bigger problem was wouldn’t be quite as serious as it appeared. Looking back, I don’t know if that was reasonable or unreasonable but I was just trying to get through each minute of waiting for an update.

Unfortunately the news was as bad as it could possibly be. The vet determined that Sooty had eaten something highly toxic – whether it was something naturally occurring, something left out accidentally, or something put down deliberately we’ll never know – and she’d gone into kidney failure, with her heart failing as a result. There was a very, very expensive treatment that we were advised against because it was so unlikely to make any real difference – I think it would’ve only treated one of her failing systems and I don’t even know what we would’ve had to do about the other if we had gone down that route – and so, all of a sudden, we were saying goodbye to our little bean. An hour beforehand, I’d been having the most amazing day I’d had in a really long time and suddenly the world had turned completely upside down. She wasn’t even seven years old.

They took us into see her and although it shouldn’t have been surprising, she looked even worse. It seemed like the oxygen flow was the only thing keeping her going. It was beyond awful. They wrapped her up in her blanket and took us into another room where we could just hold her and talk to her while they administered the medication to put her to sleep. With my childhood cat, Snubby, and my beloved soul-cat, Lucy, who had to be put to sleep last summer, I could swear I felt them leave: there was something intangible there and then it was gone. But it wasn’t like that with Sooty. She was so weak and floppy and maybe already letting go; maybe that’s why it didn’t feel like she was there and then she was gone, even if that feeling was just in my head.

We sat there for a while, just holding her, but eventually we had to leave. Time had sort of ceased to exist so I have no idea how long we were there or what time we got home and collapsed into bed. Every time I’ve had to say goodbye to a pet and then leave them, it’s been one of the most heart wrenching experiences of my life; it always feels like abandoning them, even though I know that that isn’t the case. I’m so grateful for our vet and I so appreciate how much they care about us as much as our animals. They’re so kind and gentle and patient and they send personalised cards with forget-me-nots to planet after we’ve lost a pet. We found out as we were leaving that they were expecting, I think, four simultaneous emergencies, but they hadn’t made us feel rushed or in the way at all. I wouldn’t have even suspected if someone hadn’t mentioned it in passing as we were walking out to the car.

Coming home was horrible and the loss of Sooty seemed to reverberate around the house, hitting me with the shock over and over again; it was like my brain couldn’t process what had happened because it had been so sudden and unexpected. I missed Sooty desperately – I still do. And I was so worried about our three other cats, especially Tiger. Mouse and Sweep are a bonded pair and can usually be found completely intertwined and so Tiger and Sooty had been good buddies, even if they didn’t feel the need to try and climb into each other’s bodies the way Mouse and Sweep do. Without Sooty, I was so worried that Tiger would be left on her own, always on the outside of the Mouse-and-Sweep-bubble. For the first few days though, they didn’t seem to register Sooty’s absence, which upset me to a probably unreasonable degree but then they started searching for her and that upset me as well. It’s been a miserable, miserable time but at least the cat dynamic has started to shift: the three of them have started to hang out together and I’ll often find them with their heads together, like their plotting a heist, which I can;t help smiling at it. I’m glad that my fears on that front don’t seem to have come true.

I still feel Sooty’s absence very keenly; she was a sociable and chatty little soul and the house feels very quiet without her (although Tiger has been doing her best to fill the quiet – she’s also a very chatty cat). Life has kept going, as painful as it is. I couldn’t write about all of this straight away. There were things that I couldn’t cancel that I had to shoulder through and then, before I even got the chance to stop and breathe, I got hit with the worst depressive episode and pain flare since 2022 (which genuinely scared me). I managed to climb out of that just in time to get myself through the busiest fortnight of my year so far and it’s only in the last couple of days that I feel like I’m starting to process it all, rather than dissociate from it.

I never know how to end a post like this because there’s no positive to be drawn from an experience like this. I miss her every day. I feel her absence. I feel the shock of her absence every day. It’s going to raw for a while until it isn’t and I never know which is worse. As the saying goes, grief is the price we pay for love and all that. I loved Sooty so much and I always will: she was one of the kittens that I raised from birth. She was my littlest bean and she will always have a special place in my heart.