Amber and Sarah

Chris contacts me Saturday, asking if I want to get together that evening. He adds at once that he understands if I have plans or am not feeling up to going out. I am not feeling up to much of anything because my cat only seems sicker since getting his treatment at the oncologist. Seeing friends will do me good because it will remind me I still can.

I take a walk to apprise Chris of the cat via text. He has met Jareth and roughly knows the contours of the cat's face. I send him a picture to show how far Jareth has diverged and how difficult this is for us. Like everyone I've sent a current picture of Jareth, he expresses horror and pity. Nothing should look that way that isn't ringing the bell of Notre Dame.

We meet Chris and Sarah T at the noodle house. There are initial questions about the cat, as there must be. I almost thought to tell Chris not to ask, but it is what is going on in my life right now. Amber was going to talk about it anyway. It upsets her and she finds the details of veterinary medicine (and science in general) fascinating. To me, Jareth is heart wrenching, as he is for Amber, but she also is learning from the experiment of his cancer treatments. Jareth is a project with high stakes.

Their questions are tentative, and our answers light enough to remain conversational. We have lived in this story the infinity of a week and have learned how to tell it without crying. Maybe this is more bargaining, as though death will forget the kitten if we stop invoking it.

We can move away from this cloud over us and discuss media, a safer and far more relaxing ground. I can feel lively picking apart superhero movies and musicals.

In the night

Chris had offered to come over and bring us takeout. I would have liked this, but our apartment has not much been cleaned since the diagnosis. I have kept up on the dishes and recycling, and we have both done laundry, but I have forborne vacuuming for fear of bothering Jareth. Amber is busy with the cat and busier with the end of the semester, so she is in no position for it. Prescription bottles and tubes, dishes of uneaten cat food (exchanged and discarded daily; we aren't savages), and kitty litter cover our living room. I have not had the emotional energy to try to remedy this. I have been critically depressed. I've kept up on my cardio, my eleven thousand daily steps, but that is the only exercise I've managed.

This is not an environment into which I would like to introduce other people, as much as I would like to have people over to make our apartment seem less glum.

We eat and everything is normal. I am enjoying myself. The specter of the kitten is there. I don't forget about him, but I am letting go of the idea that any moment I am not with him is the one where he will choose to die. I am also hovering around the acceptance stage that the result of his treatments will not be a miracle, just a tragedy deferred. I know I won't always be here, or won't be in the stage long, but I am for a few hours this night.

After dinner, Chris asks if we would like to walk. I would because, in a variety of ways, I am not ready to go home. Amber needs to study. But, we are close to my home and I could send her back with my car and happily walk home on this cool evening.

Amber says she has a little time for a walk, needing this social respite as much as I do. We end up in a nearby cemetery, as it is one of the quieter places in the area, at least where we cannot be charged (though night falls while we are in the cemetery, which means our stroll becomes misdemeanor trespassing). Is it morbid to wander a graveyard when the death of a loved one has been the refrain of our domestic life for a week? But I've always liked cemeteries. I find peace in them. They are a space most everyone, no matter how secular, knows to keep sacred and respectful of those within. In another lifetime, I used to run almost exclusively in a nearby cemetery and saw it as my respite.

Sarah comments how she wishes the Victorian habit of picnicking in cemeteries had never gone out of fashion. It seems a waste not to take advantage of maintained, public, and natural places. If it were my grave, I would rather people have picnics atop me than leave me alone with my fellow dead.

The church

We walk the cemetery but go no further, though we could. Ice cream is only another ten minutes. Amber needs to go home to study, write papers, and force feed Jareth to keep his strength up. There are responsibilities we can no longer postpone.

The next afternoon, Amber and I take another walk into town, despite a mist of rain. Usually, Amber leaves me to conduct my walks with no more company than a podcast, but lately has pouted when I go out without her. She doesn't want to have to study, much as she knows she needs to. She doesn't want to have to be alone when she doesn't have to be.

Given how relieving last night was, I introduce the topic we cannot escape. "If Jareth really loves us, he would stop having cancer." This is not the first joke we have made about Jareth since the diagnosis, but it is close. (Days before, when Jareth decided the unplugged microwave would be his sanctuary for the night, Amber commented, "Look, he's all ready for his radiation treatments.")

"Right?" Amber says.

"We should sit him down and tell him, 'Listen, boy-o! Having lymphoma isn't cool. If your friends tell you to have terminal lymphoma, they aren't your real friends.'"

"He's not terminal," Amber replies.

I knit my brow. "How is his lymphoma not terminal? This is the first I am hearing of this."

"He could go into full remission and then die from something else." This isn't a joke.

"Wow, Pangloss, you really put that into perspective. The best of all possible worlds, indeed! A meteorite could shoot through space, slam through our roof, and bean him on the head! Then it wouldn't be terminal lymphoma anymore."

She explains that it is an average of six months until the cat dies, so it could be much longer and many deaths at the low end drag the number down. I do not point out that this means that our cat is statistically more likely to be among the many early deaths. I did not know Amber was this hopeful. She thinks the kitten's youth means he is more likely to fight to remission, though feline leukemia has compromised his immune system. My hope is dwindling given how aggressive his cancer has been so far. It has transformed him into a different animal within seven days.

We pass by a street cat we have known for years, whom I named Merky early into our acquaintanceship, as she is often found behind the restaurant Mercato. She is a matted, brown and white longhair who is keen to greet us so we will pet her. I have called to her in bitter winter and she has sometimes shown up, crawling out from under a car. She knows me even when I am bundled up, my face hidden behind a Neoprene mask. Before Jareth came into our lives, Amber and I had begun talking about adopting her. Then we decided it was too tumultuous adding a third cat into the mix, and we were skeptical that she was healthy given how long she had been on the street. We didn't want to be responsible for getting her healthy, or for having our ownership abbreviated if she had anything fatal.

Then we found out that Jareth was FeLV+ and we couldn't have Merky, except as our cats' cousin whom they will never visit. (Though Merky is ownerless, she is not uncared for. Someone made her a small home out of a blue plastic container under a staircase. One neighbor had out food and water dishes that seemed to be Merky's. She has a few shelters within a hundred feet of one another. I don't know that she has other people who stop to pet her, but she is keen enough that she might.)

Years later and the street cat is still going strong. Our coddled kitten, raised from a few months old, looks like hell and may be dying before us.

Our walk is not purely for recreation and clearing our heads for forty-five minutes of our obligations to a waning cat. Amber directs us to the health food store, there to scrutinize the beeswax candles. I had been here days before. Amber tasked me with finding nutritional yeast and organic sardines, if such a thing exists, to feed to the kitten. We had tried tuna and whatever mélange of seafood comes from a pouch, but why not sardines? At this point, anything that got him to eat was a blessing. As for the yeast, some expert or other claimed it helped cats with their intestinal floral or by tasting appealing.

The candles were for the kitten, but they were not meant to nourish his body. Amber had witchcraft in mind.

"Which one do you think is best?" She waves a few under my nose, though they smell primarily of wax.

"Are any lavender?"

She points to a stout one.

"That one, since Jareth has long smelled like that."

"It's the calming collar that smells like that," she points out, not adding that he hasn’t worn a collar since his diagnosis, "not him."

"It's as good as anointing."

She buys a few purple tapers and shorter candles and we walk home.

Amber conducts the ritual late at night, not out of any spiritual import, but because it is when she finishes studying molecular biology.

I wake in the morning and smell incense. When I kiss her before leaving for work, I tell her the house reeks of magic.

She shrugs, because it needed doing. We have prostrated ourselves before medical science, tithing a week's salary and promising them nine more for the hope. Why not get a second opinion from the gods? Given how he gets worse daily, the material world is letting Jareth down.

Soon in Xenology: Social Justice Wiccans. Jareth.

last watched: American Gods
reading: Candy Girl
listening: Damien Rice