Caryll Houselander on the death of her cat
Notoriously eccentric — among other things she covered her face in white power —the English Catholic writer Caryll Houselander had many friends, and a vast number of followers, but wanted to live a solitary life, her major companion being her cat Jones. She writes a friend when he’s dying and has to be put down. The letter appears in Maisie Ward’s Caryll Houselander: That Divine Eccentric.
I am just breaking inwardly; my cowardly nature can’t stand it — I feel that we ought not to wait till he is obviously suffering, yet I just failed to be able to insist or argue, and now am in a state of terrible indecision. When he does get another attack, she said she will come and put him to sleep here. This is my own request; I could not bear to carry him out of his home and see him go off among strangers, afraid and feeling abandoned — to die.
And yet now, having made this arrangement for her to come here, I feel unable to face seeing it, and holding him while he dies. The fearful uncertainty about when it is to happen adds torment to it; you see it’s like living in a condemned cell with him.
If only it could have been done right away — . But God forgive me for going on like this, when so many poor human beings have had to stand and watch their own little children dragged into lethal chambers and gassed. I was thinking of them last night and offered up what I am suffering over my cat, for them!
But today I am shattered, can hardly concentrate, and my nerve really gone. However, I am praying, and will lay the burden on God — who is always ready to take the burdens of us poor sinners.
I am trying to make penances and ask for them to be accepted, instead of him having to suffer. It seems so much more just for a human who has had years of joy from his innocent little life, to suffer, than for him to do so, because men sin.
The darling old fellow is sitting on my table purring now.
She could not bear having Jones put to sleep at her flat and let a friend take him to the vet. Afterwards she wrote the first friend:
His death was a terrible grief. I was nursing him day and night. The decision was the hardest I have ever taken. He was nearly twenty years old, and we have always been together since he was orphaned at a week old! I fed him on drops of milk at the end of a paintbrush then, and so kept him alive. It is like having torn out part of myself.
But I feel we owe it to animals for the intense joy their innocent little lives give to us, to spare them useless suffering, to be willing to pay the price in our own grief — so the darling old chap is no more.
Next: Daniel Berrigan on political resistance.