Growing up in rural Western Pennsylvania, I was introduced to the mercy killing of animals at a young age. I remember the first time my father took a sick cat out into the backfield with the feline in one hand and a rifle in the other. One shot rang out amongst the open landscape, and my father solemnly made his way back to the house. He said nothing, shook his head and went into the house. He hated doing it, but it is a humane duty to uphold. To let a pet suffer with illness or disablement is seen as cruel compared to a quick and merciful end. My father maintained this virtue dutifully and passed that nature onto me.
A few years later, I charged myself with the same accountability with a chipmunk the outside cats had their way with but didn’t finish killing. Whether hungry, bored, or interrupted, they left it to suffer in its mangled form. I remember seeing the creature’s eyes dart quickly as it lay there in agony, unable to move on its own. I knew then what I had to do. I didn’t want to, but I was taught to uphold the same morals my father had upheld years earlier. I found a pronged garden cultivator on the porch, picked up the mangled rodent, and brought it over to the wood line to commit my merciful deed. I jammed one of the prongs through its eye with a quick and forceful thrust; doing it slowly would be torture, and the little fellow already had enough of that from the natural world.
I was born into a more eccentric family, with artisans forced to commit to labor to survive. Due to health concerns, my father was forced to retire from truck driving early; in 1995, they couldn’t monitor strokes, and it was considered dangerous to let him get behind the wheel of a semi-truck again. So, he bought an antique car, a 1949 Ford Custom Club Coupe, to kill the boredom as sitting idle bothered him immensely. He hated being unable to travel since it was something he had done for most of his life.
He had parts for this car that he would constantly change, sometimes because he wanted to try something new, other times just for the fun and adventure of doing it. He would swap engines, and transmissions, change out the manifold, and choose between a set of two-barrel carburetors or a single four-barrel assembly. He even had a back window wiper that he found at a swap meet. He was heartbroken when his health got to a point where he could no longer work on it effectively and had to sell it.
While on one of his part-finding missions, he found a kitten abandoned in a junkyard. He brought her home to further my mother’s increasing collection of house cats as she is an animal lover and natural caretaker. The kitten was so tiny that we had to bottle feed her and even ween her into hard food. We called her Munchie, a little grey kitten that would grow up as one of my family's most memorialized pets. She was a survivor from day one and to a point where she refused to give up. We had many nicknames for her, “The gargoyle,” because she would sit at high points and vigilantly cat nap. “The stealer of souls.” Because despite her advanced age and increasingly decrepit form, she would climb up on us while we were sleeping and seem to be better the next day. She was like a cat from a Stephen King story as she seemed to break the natural order of things.
Despite all this, though, she saved my life at one point. I had come to visit while living in Greensburg, PA, with my now ex-wife, who was pregnant with our first son. I had been having fevers off and on and flu-like symptoms that would last a day or two and go away for a week or so. While we were visiting, one of these oscillating events occurred. There Munchie sat, guarding me, at a time she would normally run from me if I tried to pet her. Munchie hated my ex-wife and kept away from me by association. Knowing something was wrong, this prompted my mother to take my temperature and rush me to the hospital with a fever of 103.9 Fahrenheit. After a series of tests, they deduced that my appendix was on the verge of eruption despite not having the symptom of doubling over pain. One emergency surgery later and a week or two of recuperation, I was back to normal, minus the faulty organ. It was Munchie who likely saved me from certain doom or, at the very least, a near-death experience.
As the years went on, my father slowly wilted away. Before his car was gone, he had trouble remembering how to take it apart and put it back together. His love of tinkering turned cruelly against him. He could remember things in a long-term fashion, but his short-term memory was fading rapidly. It wasn’t uncommon for him to mistake me for my older brother, even though the last time my father would see him was coming up rapidly.
My father asked my brother for help selling parts he had accumulated over the previous decade. My brother got in touch with other car guys where he lived, asked around, and even sold a few things for the old man. That was until my father had a disagreement with him over a price. “I told you I wanted $125 for it, not $150,” my father barked into the phone. With the concept of money eluding my father, my brother realized something was wrong; that was the last time they spoke for the rest of my father’s life. Like my sister had done years earlier, he made haste at the first sign of trouble, much like a deer in the wild. I was the only one left to serve dutifully. I was only twenty-four when I was appointed my father’s power of attorney.
Munchie was growing old as well. Her teeth became infected; her fur became disheveled and tattered as if she had crawled out from her grave each morning to mew for soft food, as she could no longer eat the hard food. She still sat up high, taking her cat naps on the back of the couch, like a guardian vigilantly trying not to fall asleep during her night watch.
As time went on, she seemed to stay alive through sheer willpower. We used to joke that she was stealing our breath at night to survive, as she remained brave through every cruel reality nature threw at her. By the end, she was near blind, smelled of death, and could barely climb into the litter box. The other cats forced their way up the pecking order, and though she fought bravely to keep her top spot, she couldn’t defend herself as well in her old age. That’s when it was decided that it was time for her to go, though we didn’t have any tools for a quick and painless death other than the pain pills my father left behind when he was put in the dementia unit.
One morning I decided to crush up half of a heavy-duty pain killer into her soft food, isolating her from the other cats to save them and comfort her. Unfortunately, this didn’t do what it was intended to do; in fact, it had little to no effect on her. I waited a day or two, but nothing happened, so I upped the dose to a whole pill, hoping it would put her to sleep and drift away without any more pain. That didn’t go as planned either, as it acted like a Brompton Cocktail; she was livelier for the next day or two. To the point, she got outside and beat up one of the garage cats before coming back in to rest.
At this juncture, I was afraid to take her to a vet, afraid they may intend to put her down, but come to find she wouldn’t go quietly into the good night. The last thing I wished to do was to further her pain. Then a few days later, she crawled under one of the living room end tables and went out on her terms. It was still cold, and the ground was frozen as I buried her, though I made sure to put an extra rock on her grave, just in case.
My father wasn’t so lucky. As his memory failed, he became increasingly paranoid about my mother. Some days he thought she was cheating; other days, he thought she was siphoning his money; on the worst days, it was both. He hated that she worked midnight; in some ways, he seemed to think she was using her shift to spend his money on other men or whatever insane fantasy he was having. So, he divorced her, moved out, and tried to make his way back to where he grew up in Connecticut, to no avail. He had an accident in New Jersey and somehow ended up in the Harlem district of New York City, where he was found passed out and taken to Manhattan General Hospital. He checked himself out and jumped on the first bus back to Pittsburgh. He got confused when they stopped to eat and accidentally boarded a bus back to New York. After searching the Greyhound Terminal in Pittsburgh for him, thinking he may have gotten lost, we received a phone call from the New York Greyhound station that we would have to come back later that night to get him. When he arrived, he was wide-eyed and confused, and his pants were soiled, but luckily he recognized us.
After driving to Rahway, New Jersey, to retrieve his recently repaired truck, I convinced him to move into an assisted living. A couple of months later, he had two sequential strokes that left him unable to walk under his own power. He was left wheelchair-bound, losing cognitive function more rapidly. That’s when it was time to carry out my duty of condemning him to a dementia unit for the rest of his life. The best I could do for him was give him a Do Not Resuscitate order, which he communicated when he was still sound of mind. At this point, he barely knew my name; he always confused me with my older brother. He also had forgotten that he and my mother were divorced. This broke her heart whenever she asked if he knew who she was, and he would say, “of course, you’re my wife.” My mother was the only one he remembered. Not who the president was, the day it was, the date, or the most relevant information we take for granted daily. Until he had a fourth stroke and died shortly after I put him into hospice, he tried to say something that day amid his death rattle, but he could no longer speak anything that made sense. The same man that taught me virtue and duty was the same man I had to use that knowledge for later in life; sometimes, nature is as ironic as it is cruel.
Jeremiah Alexander is a writer based in Western Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Grim and Gilded Online Magazine Issue #5 and TOBECO Literary Arts Journal 2020-2021. He received a bachelor's degree in creative writing from Slippery Rock University. When he isn't writing, he enjoys traveling and music. He can be found on Twitter @jalexander6686.