I’m having trouble processing the death of my sweet 10-month-old cat. Yesterday he broke through the screen of our third-story apartment and fell off the fire escape. The super was taking out the trash and saw it happen. He landed on the sidewalk, meowing quietly and dragging his hind legs behind him. In a panic, our super asked a neighbor who was also outside for help. She ran off, returned a minute later and gave him some “pain medicine.” Three minutes later, now with a small crowd on the sidewalk, our little guy died. The medicine he was given was morphine.
I would be furious with her, but she is caring for a son with a terminal illness, and I can’t imagine her pain. When I asked her via text how much morphine she gave my cat, she said: “Just enough for a rat. I learned this in science class.” I’m hesitant to push this further, because I know that getting a straight answer out of her will be difficult and that nothing is going to bring my sweet furry friend back.
My higher self wants to reflect on loss, joy, impermanence and gratitude. My regular self wants to barge into her apartment and ask her why the hell she didn’t call me before taking matters into her hands. She has a husband who is easier to communicate with. Should I talk to him? Maybe I should talk to her. Perhaps if she was confronted she would see that she is not well and should join a support group for grieving parents. Nothing feels right. I know she’s in pain. Now we are too. Saying something to her makes me feel as if I’m valuing the life of my cat over the life of her son. He was such a perfect little guy and provided so much joy and distraction from the hard things in life. — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
The death of a young animal companion is not a small loss, and the way your cat died is bound to leave you with a kind of moral agitation in addition to grief. You have my sympathies. It was plainly very wrong to give morphine to this cat without knowing the extent of his injuries, without medical training and without the consent of the person who loved and cared for him.
That your cat would otherwise have survived the fall and recovered is not something we can know with certainty. But plenty of cats have survived, and recovered from, longer drops. The appropriate course was to get him to a vet: someone trained to assess and address the situation. At this point, the question is not what could have been done differently but what can be done now.
And this brings us to the issue of acknowledgment. What you’re grappling with isn’t just the event itself; it’s the absence of accountability. Your cat died in the care of someone who acted with misplaced confidence. What lingers is not only the loss but the sense that she hasn’t owned what she did.
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The post My Neighbor Gave My Injured Cat Morphine. Can I Blame Her for His Death? appeared first on New York Times.
