Growing Up—and Older—With Our Pets

I went to Dallas recently to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. My parents always seemed older to me, perhaps because they adopted my sister and me when they were already in their middle to late 30s—not an unusual age now, but somewhat in 1963, when I was born. Yet the prospect of her turning 80 nonetheless saddened, even surprised me. No one, of course, relishes the sight of his once-vital parents aging, if for no other reason than it's a reminder that we are inexorably slouching toward the same fate. And, of course, the Alzheimer's disease that ravages her mind may more easily explain my sadness. My mother has shown serious signs of the disease for more than a decade, but for whatever reason—her powerful will to preserve her diminishing intellect, the cocktail of antidementia drugs she's taken for several years—she has always remained herself, if a bit less so, until the past year.

Perhaps her decline has been quickened by the stress of watching my 82-year-old father, her husband of 59 years, and himself now victim of a form of dementia. For my sister and me, the essence of our parents, their personalities—the very core of who they were—are gone. Or almost so.

As she has retreated within her confused and disordered mind, my mother has come to live almost exclusively in the present. By that I mean the very immediate present. Anyone who knows someone intimately with this awful disease will immediately recognize what I am describing. On her birthday she received multiple cards of good wishes from church friends and a bouquet of balloons from her younger sister. Each arrival elicited the same question—"Is this my birthday?"—expressed in the same tone of surprise.

Still, she mostly retained her own deeper past, the past of her childhood spent with her beloved father as he and her mother worked for the telephone company in north Texas. She could recall the times she accompanied him on his rounds, inspecting oil and gas wells in south Texas near the Gulf Coast, where they had later moved to build a better life. Only a few months ago she recounted in precise, vivid detail how my father's best friend bicycled many miles to visit her at her college to ascertain just how serious she was about my father, whom she had recently met at a church dance. His friend evidently feared that she was only trifling with him and would break his heart. I asked whether, after such a long trip, he had at least spent the night before the long bike trip back to Austin, where he and my father attended another college. "Well, of course not," she exclaimed, scandalized anew at the prospect of spending the night with a man not her husband, or even her future husband.

When she isn't so tired, or the pain from her severe arthritis has subsided a bit and she is able to concentrate, she can still summon some of those memories. On this last visit, as I struggled to find a way into conversation, I began talking about one of the many cats our family had over the years. It was a tiny cat, dark as midnight, that we had rescued in the backyard of the house in a tiny west Texas town where we lived in the early 1970s. My mother immediately brightened as she recounted the many variations on the cat's name. We called her B.C., a name bestowed for some reason even I no longer exactly recall, but invariably she was "Baby Cat" or "Black Cat" or "Bad Cat," depending on her behavior that day.

My family always had at least one cat and usually more. For several years we had a sweet if not particularly bright beagle named Penny (can anyone ever really explain the names we give our pets?) whose presence at first annoyed, then delighted the resident cats. They discovered she was endlessly easy to torment. Each time we moved—which was frequently, because my father, a Methodist minister, was called to a different church every few years—we would load the animals into makeshift cages or boxes with holes punched in them, put them in the back seat and haul them across the state to the new town.

It is a pattern I have continued in my adult life, although when I move it tends to be across the country and my cats accompany me on the plane. A few years ago as I was writing about the expensive and increasingly extreme medical procedures I sought to save Sam, my Siamese-Burmese cat (also known as Boo Boo Kitty), I wondered just when our pets had become such key fixtures in our lives, and not just our lives but in our homes. I think the answer lies in the peculiarities of the baby boomer generation, of which I am a member, if just barely. My parents certainly loved all of their pet animals and felt profound sadness when one would die. I can remember my father weeping as he buried Penny at the end of her long life. In fact, he wept when he buried each of our pets, which he continued to do long past the time when the passing of a pet was a tool to teach my sister and me a lesson in the cycles of life and death.

But for the generation born after World War II, during the years of America's remarkable transformation into a country of seemingly endless resources and promise, how we view our pets and thus how we treat them is something quite different from the conception of our parents. Our generation is a rootless, transient one, far more apt to move vast distances than our parents might have been, including my own. My family moved often but within a fairly prescribed geographic region. I, like many friends my age, have moved vast distances multiple times to places where I knew few people well and certainly had no relatives. And with no family of my own, my pets became surrogate children, of a sort. I'm not one to lavish ridiculous gifts on then (OK, a few) or to freshly prepare their dinners each evening, although I did consider it a few months ago when contaminated pet food led to the deaths of many cats and dogs. But there is little else I won't do for them.

Boo Boo Kitty had been with me for about 10 years and multiple relocations when he became seriously ill. I pursued aggressive treatment for him, including sending him to a sophisticated specialty hospital for therapies once considered exotic for animals (a benefit of the explosion in treatment options now available to humans). My parents, even if they could have afforded this type of care, would have been content to do what they could with their local vet, and then seen to it that the animal was compassionately euthanized. In the end, of course, even the most advanced treatments could not save Boo Boo Kitty, and finally it was time to let him escape his pain and misery.

It's easy to view all this as evidence of a narcissistic generation with too much money on its hands and easy access to veterinarians and specialists armed with the latest (and most expensive) treatments. Did I make a mistake in doing everything I could to keep Boo Boo alive, even when the prognosis was grim? I don't think so, but of course maybe I'm in denial. Throughout it all I tried to keep in mind not just how much I wanted him to live but also whether it was the right decision for him. That, it seems to me, is the critical question every pet owner must answer when deciding how far to pursue medical care for his or her animal. I would not have pursued aggressive care if it meant extended, serious pain for him, and when it finally did, I knew that it was time to stop.

I wish I could say that my mother, now entering the dark night of her disease, recalled much more about B.C., Penny or the many other pets our family once had, some remembered, most now forgotten to her. Still, as we talked about the small black cat we rescued more than three decades ago, we managed to claim some brief moment, some small island, of shared memory.