A Note on the Passing of Sheba: Is it normal to feel guilt when a pet dies?
It is a Sunday, a day I normally reserve for writing my novel, but Sheba had to be euthanised on Wednesday and all I can think about is her. She was already eighteen by the time I adopted her, and she was my precious, old cat for a total of twelve days. My grief over her passing is intense – such new, hopeful love so quickly and suddenly destroyed, and then there are the facts of her death to confront. I am right now as much moved by the urge to memorialise her as I am by the urge to impart what I have learned about feline kidney disease: her little kidneys started to fail on the eighth day of our living together.
Two Novembers ago, I lost eighteen-year-olds Phantom and Tiger Lily to the same disease, within a couple of weeks of each other. Phantom, a green-eyed black cat, like Sheba, succumbed to it after having been diagnosed with it 6 years previously and Tiger Lily, a brown-eyed, beautiful, fluffy tortoise shell, had been diagnosed with it a couple of years previously. And so, when hints of it showed in Sheba on the first day she moved into my little cottage, I thought that I would manage things well. Sadly, I did not know nearly enough about the disease’s sometimes extremely fast progress to avoid causing her a great deal of suffering, and, I hate to say it, at one point even dreadful fear.
I picked up Sheba from the cattery two Saturday mornings before she took her final turn. She was very skinny, having lost half a kilo since January, a fact attributed to the emotional impacts of the sudden death of her human mother, being housed in a cattery, hyperthyroidism, a urinary tract infection, and a possible mystery illness. She was also very unkempt, as arthritis in her back legs and probably elsewhere meant that she had not been grooming herself. She had black, matted medium hair, with little chunks shaved off where the cattery had tried to rid her of the worst of her troubles. For the first couple of days of her stay here, I would – when she would let me- tease apart the matting and rid of her of it. On the morning of her third day, I bought her a brush and over the next couple of days, by stealth disguised as loving stroking, I got rid of a small decorator pillow’s worth of old dead fur. I also fed her a lot – two and a half sachets of Royal Canin Kitten Gravy and some Royal Canin Neutered dry biscuits – per day.
Over these days, I noticed that she drank a lot of water, but as her records stated only very, very early signs of renal disease, not enough to warrant the recommendation of a special diet by the vet, I simply noted the fact as something to bring up with Kirsten, the mobile Vet who was due to come by within the next week or so to give her a follow up shot of antibiotics for her UTI. It was on her second Sunday night here, however, that I noticed something amiss. Suddenly, Sheba wasn’t out and about, exploring the courtyard gardens – she’d been an indoor cat her whole life – or walking about the house, inspecting her new premises, or jumping up on the couch, to sit beside me awhile. She slept. All night. And didn’t eat. And seemed to me to be breathing heavily, at least at first.
On the Monday morning, I checked her records and scrolled through conversations had with her carers, and since nothing flared as dangerous, and since she got up for a bit, drank some water, and went outside, before going back to sleep, I figured, she’s eighteen, she’s had an exhausting week of newness and so all is likely well. She slept all day and didn’t eat at thing. But still, I didn’t twig to her condition. In hindsight, it was on the Monday night that I should have taken her to the vet, because the most likely reason, as it turns out, for her having stopped eating, was that kidney failure had so collapsed her immune system that her poor little tongue had ulcerated. When, on the Wednesday afternoon, to which time I’d brought forward Sheba’s follow-up appointment, Kirsten diagnosed that terrible, cruel fact, as the cause of her not eating, and of what ended up becoming very odd behaviour with water – approaching the bowl, not drinking, turning away, reapproaching the bowl, not drinking, and so on – over the last few hours, well, I can’t describe to you how I felt in that moment, other than horribly, viciously, unforgivably stupid. Of course, I felt awful for poor Kirsten having to witness an animal’s agony. And my heart nearly imploded from the huge sense of futility I felt as I held darling Sheba, during her last few minutes on this earth.
As soon as Kirsten took away her body, I collapsed Sheba’s hexagonal crate, washed it, and put it away. It had been intended as a temporary home for her, to keep her feeling safe, to give her territory, what with three other cats in the house, and she having been a solo cat for the whole of her life. Collapsing it had nothing to do with freeing up space, and everything to do with the fact that I found it, upon Sheba’s demise, unbearable to look at. My guilt over Sheba’s tongue, and also, I mention it now, her red-raw little nose, another side-effect of her dehydration, is what made things that way.
The next morning, when I sat in my empty-of-Sheba living room, I opened the drawer of the coffee table to pull something out. My heart leapt to my throat. In the drawer was Sheba’s pink brush, all clean of her hair, and waiting for the next attempt at grooming her into perfection. I’ve washed it since. I can’t bring myself to discard it. There are other such heart-hitting moments over the next few days, the first two of which were spent in a total, numb-minded fog. It was black that fog, and it shrank my world a while. It was impossible to work while it was over me: any mental task that required more than two steps was utterly beyond me. When it lifted, at 5 pm on the Friday afternoon, my peripheral vision returned along with my sense of clarity.
Because I’ve only had Sheba with me for twelve days, people seem to think that I should not take it that hard, her death. But of all the deaths that I’ve experienced, I’ve come to know the ones to have come on top of nursing animals through illness as the very worst. Sheba’s has hit me like a bullet train: that tongue, that nose, the pain she must have endured! I wince now, cringe, as I record it in writing. With Sheba’s, much as with my darling boy, Silverstar’s, death, it is the guilt that truly packs the punch. And it leaves you winded, that punch. It hunkers you over and stops you short. How do you get past it? How do you forgive yourself for the suffering you, in your sad ignorance, have caused your beloved pet in your care for them?
I’ve grown over time to understand that the guilt we feel upon the difficult death of our pets is ultimately undeserved, for it springs from that part of us that, when we love, wants us to be all-seeing and all-powerful gods: we want to protect our darlings from absolutely anything and everything that could in any way harm or hurt them. But we’re not all-powerful, and we’re certainly not all-seeing. All-loving we might be, if we are absolute saints, but the first two, no, they are entirely out of our reach. And so, when we are suffering from the kind of guilt that I am suffering, the guilt born of the fact that, as much as I love my cats, I am not a veterinarian, and nor any other kind of expert, we must accept that we can only do, and have done, our very best for our beloved creatures. And, even if we haven’t done our very, very, very best, then we must learn from our mistakes, and move on, hopefully to care for another sweet animal needing a home.
I know that I did my very best for Sheba. She was constantly watched, touched, and tended. And when the end came, it was with bliss, a blessing that comes with the anaesthetic and sedatives used in euthanasia, and while she was feeling that bliss, she was being held. And it was a blessing too that she came to me instead of losing life all alone in a cattery cage. She had also the garden, about which she was so intrigued, and she was carefully developing a friendship with my two-year old, Serenity. On Sheba’s last day on this earth, they stretched their necks out toward each other and sniffed the air between them for the first time. Not since a kitten had Sheba shared a friendly, inquisitive moment with another cat! Looked at through a positive prism, my love for her, along with all that came with it, was a blessing to her in her final days. As we all well know, there is no need for forgiveness where blessings are concerned. And thus, there is no need either for any guilt, none at all, neither on my part, and I have no doubt, not on yours either.
Post Script: Sheba was euthanised on Wednesday, 18 June, 2025. I started this blog on the Sunday immediately following, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it then. I had no positive lesson to pass on at the time, and it read for a while like a mere and ugly confessional.
On the Saturday afternoon before Sheba took her turn, it was sunny and warm, and with all the lounge room windows and doors wide open to the glorious day, I had the urge to play my stereo – a new CD, C & C Music Factory, had arrived the day before. But Sheba was in the living room, in her crate, and so I couldn’t. There was a fleeting moment of resentment toward her.
It was that moment of resentment, along with the news of her poor, poor ulcerated tongue, that most caused my guilt. Because of that moment of resentment, I had to make a pact with myself: I shall not play music until I’ve finished Sheba’s blog.
Today is 6 August, 2025, and I’ve just finished putting the finishing touches on the work I did on it yesterday. It took that long for the weight of guilt to finally lift enough to allow me to return to it. This weekend, perhaps, I will play a CD, but it won’t be the new C & C Music Factory CD that I will play. Rather, it will be Miles Davis, I’m thinking, most likely Kind of Blue.