The Impossibility of Saying Goodbye To The Dying (and Shrine Focus, and Soul Searching)

On Friday evening, I got home from a short road trip to New York and Liz needed to talk about Canobeans, her 20-year old cat. Canobeans had pretty much stopped eating, was getting dehydrated, and was having trouble with using the litter box. We made the decision to schedule with Lap of Love to have her euthanized because her health was accelerating downhill.

Saturday wasn't a blur for me but it still went much too quickly. The Vet from Lap of Love was scheduled for 1pm. I doted on Canobeans with nearly every free moment before 1pm taking breaks here and there. I brushed her. I talked to her. I fed her water. I told her how much we loved her and what a gift she was to us.

I didn't say goodbye. It's just too hard and too sad. I'd fall to pieces. Maybe that would have been appropriate.

What Do You Do In the Final Moments?

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Rest well, Canobeans.

What the heck can you do you make final moments in life feel like they are enough? I'm not sure that it can be achieved.

In the final moments, when you are trying your best to say and show the depth of your love and loss, nearly everything you do is symbolic. Everything you do feels totally futile. Your gestures can never make up for the fact that there will never again on this earth be what we had together. It's like trying to pay a sort of life-debt that can never be repaid.

But you do it anyway. You stop assessing and stay in the moment. You laugh when you can. You remember to breathe when your body forgets to do it for you.

While Canobeans was still alive, I focused on doing things she enjoyed so that she could know that we loved her.

Now that she is gone, it helps for me to do small gestures to express my gratitude for how much richer my life was because I had this other being to care for and to enjoy.

A Shrine as A Focus

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A Shrine

Liz and I setup this shrine. It started with just flowers... an impulse buy at the store. And we put them in a vase in the bedroom, where Canobeans spent the last year. I added candles, and a cat toy. Liz put her paw print mold next to everything. And then we picked some photos to print and stuck them in frames. And we arranged it all on a very small table.

We light candles when they go out. They are wonderful to look at, day or night. A small fire that requires some care to keep it burning from time to time. This is good catharsis for us. Candle light is a wonderful focus for just sitting and being. For just accepting that what is, is.

A struggle that is particular to me in grieving is that the feeling of the person/cat I just lost slips away from me. It's not that I want to hold on and never let go. But I don't want to just "get on with my life" either. I want to keep a space for pondering and remembering. This is a good time for soul-searching and thinking about life. I am not looking to rush it along.

The ritual of keeping the candles going and pausing at this little shrine helps me to remember. It gives me a bit of space in my very-busy head. I think it's because I would have to do all of this remembering in my head if we didn't have the shrine but now that we have set it up it makes it easier for us because we don't have to keep it all in our heads and hearts. We can look upon our love and loss from the outside rather than only gazing inward.

In The Aftermath, Soul Searching Questions Abound

Getting space in my head is crucial right now also because another struggle I face are the manifold questions that arise in the aftermath of putting a pet to rest. Soul-searching questions are inevitable. Try as I might to trust our decisions, I find that I revisit the questions again and again and I have to justify that what I did was the right choice. All of the reasons are there, but getting to an alignment between feeling and reason isn't something I can force. It takes time. I have to trust that too.

I find myself thinking about everything that matters just before death and the things that matter in the aftermath. All that matters is that there was love. And all love is unique and beautiful and fleeting. Sometimes love is just brushing hair or fur. Sometimes love is cleaning poop off of something that shouldn't have poop on it. For certain, love is missing something/someone you are used to interacting with daily.

I find myself pondering eternity. The great unponderable. A sensation of being human is that our existence feels continuous and eternal: All I know is that I have always been and it feels like I shall always be. It is alien to imagine that I will not exist some day. I don't believe in an afterlife but sometimes it's a "pretty little lie". Either way there is good news: Either I am wrong and will continue on, or I am right that I will no longer exist and I probably won't know it anyway.

If I'm wrong I hope I get to see Canobeans and all of my loved ones again some day.

On Cats, Coffee, Threats, and Leadership

The Chatty Cat Might Go And Hide

I'm still doing my volunteering gig with 4Paws Rescue Team. I picked up cats, Peanut and Raphael, from Campbell Animal Hospital to Manassas Petco yesterday. Doctor Olivia Kim always comes out to greet me when I come for a cat transport. Her commitment to the cats is awesome.

Raphael was the more vocal one in the carrier. So when I made the choice for which cat would go on top, I chose Peanut since he was the quieter. Raphael suprised me by hiding under the cat bed and being as quiet as a stone after I put them in place. Good intentions with incomplete information don't necessarily make good decisions.

I'm sure Raph will warm to the space some but I can't fault him for hiding since it's a retail space with a lot of loud noises that are not agreeable to cats.

Not Letting Threats Distract You From the Main Objective

I also got to play some hands of Hearthstone with Elliot for the first time last night and he gave me some good critiques and advice on general strategy. I'm still running a beginner deck build but it seems well-constructed for late-game damage dealing.

There was one hand I almost won but he made some very threatening moves and I lost sight of the objective when I had a lethal winning move within my grasp. I focused on taking out minions rather than attacking his hero.

The Lesson: Threats can shift your focus from something more important to something less important. It's worth checking in with your main objectives to ensure you are making them your primary consideration.

Still Experimenting with Pour-over Coffee Brewing

I don't think I have the pour-over thing down yet. The coffee is a bit lacking in body and a fair bit more earthy than when I use the AeroPress. I should probably read up on how best to use the Tannors/Hario V60 style ceramic brewer. Note also, I am starting with Melitta #2 flat bottom filters which do not properly fit the V60.

Stumptown has a guide for V60 brew: https://www.stumptowncoffee.com/brew-guides/v60

I think I will try the 15 second bloom and slow pour over 3 minutes.

It's a bit of a pain learning a new brew process. Better than drinking coffee with some amount of diluted plastic in it, I suspect. The AeroPress seems to hold up well to heat but I have made a rule not put heated food/drink into plastic because the chance of the plastic losing integrity is higher than I would like.

Thoughts on Leadership and Time Efficiency

One of the last things I did at work yesterday was to submit a travel approval for scenario training the management wants us all to do. Maybe it's something that will change everything for us. And maybe it is a #boondoggle. I am expecting the latter.

Initially, I found myself reacting like a rebellious teenager. "I'm not wasting my fracking time on that! Maybe I'll just conveniently forget to go.". But I'd rather not miss out on a chance to hang with the team face to face. I LOVE my team.

Also, I find myself struggling with internal conflict on this matter. My desire to be a good leader is conflicting with my desire not to waste my time. As a leader, I own that every thing I do is an example I set for others on my team.

This has been an issue in the recent past, where I have set an example that created an issue for my management when others emulate me. Some junior ICs on my team thought they could flex their hours without delivering overwhelmingly good results and that is simply not the case. You need to be able to solve dire problems and ensure there is zero concern about the quality or timeliness of your work. Over-deliver! That is how you earn flexibility of work schedule. But exercising schedule flexibility often comes with a perceptual cost.

I went ahead and submitted the travel approval. Doing so gives me maximum #Optionality. I will commit to giving the training 1-2 hours, in the same way I will give a book a couple of chapters to grab me. If I want to keep reading then I keep reading. Often times I get the punchline well before the book is finished. Too much filler.

I will give this training a fair chance... And if they fail to hold my interest, I will extract and just go do work if it doesn't seem like it's worth the time investment. There are too many other important things to do to waste two full days sticking around just for the sake of making a gesture.

Also, I think I will try to book the flight on an Airline other than United because I've had it with their ridiculously tiny seats. I am not cattle.

How to Train Your Dragon

(aka Clicker Training Your Cat To Let You Trim His/Her Nails)

Dear Heather,

I’m glad to hear that you would like to find a way to deal with the ever-growing claws for this cat that has become a part of your life. I’m sorry, but not surprised, to hear that the cat isn’t easy to handle. I had a similar experience with my domesticated but still very crazy Bengal cat, The Buddy, of whom you have no-doubt seen dozens of photos. If you haven’t, you can find them on the Internet.

The Buddy is the least domesticated cat I have ever known. He has exotic behavior to go with his exotic looks. Though I haven’t been able to get him to stop breaking into all of the cabinets in the house, he and I have developed an understanding about nail trimming. Because he is really food motivated, I was able to do it using clicker training.

I didn’t get a chance to ask you whether your cat is a girl or a boy but in the notes below I will assume he is a boy like The Buddy.

First Fundamentals: Motivation and Feeding Hygiene

Before you start clicker training, you will need a good clicker. I found that the ones on Amazon by Karen Pryor Clicker Training (affiliate link) had a clear sharp sound.

Clicker training begins with associating utter positivity with the sound of the click. This means you need to identify and select something that is a strong positive experience for your cat. The Buddy likes shrimp and ham so I used shrimp for our training, cut into pea sized chunks. The reward doesn’t have to be huge.

It may be the case that your cat seems like he doesn’t like treats. If the cat always has food available to him at any time of day, I would encourage you to consider working on feeding hygiene before trying to train. Revise your cat’s feeding schedule to a couple times a day. Cats that never feel hunger are, in my opinion, less trainable and more prone to health issues associated with weight. Also, depending on how much in the way of treats you are giving your cat, you may need to dial back the amount of food he gets for breakfast or dinner.

If you can’t find a way to motivate with food, you can certainly try to associate your clicks with praise and cuddles or time with his favorite toy (assuming he can’t use it without you).

Hooking Up The Clicker

Having made a choice for what motivator to use with your cat, we can talk about the next step: Associating the clicker with positivity. Here are two guidelines that have served me well.

1 - The Clicker is ONLY for Positive Reinforcement

You can’t use the clicker to get your cat to stop doing something but you can use the clicker to get your cat to start doing something. Definitely don’t try to use any stern corrective action against your cat while you’re in training mode. The goal here is to use the clicker as the overwhelming YES!

2 - Keep Your Sessions Short

Train only for a few minutes at a time and then let it rest. This is habit formation we are dealing with, creating new neural grooves in the cat’s brain-body, and you want to do it consistently and over an extended period of time. This will also serve to keep the motivator as a novel experience rather than one that is common and boring.

Now: Start Slow

With those guidelines out of the way, I present to you the first lesson.

For a week: Once or twice a day, have a 5 minute long training session that consists only of clicking and then giving the cat an awesome treat and some praise: click, treat, praise, rest, repeat.

What we are doing here is priming the cat to understand that the click means a treat.

Next: Shaping Toward Behaviors

Now that your clicker is hooked up, you can separate the click from the treat. The Click now serves the job of marking the EXACT point in time when your cat was doing the behavior that you are rewarding and acts as a promise that your cat will be rewarded. This time-independence is the main benefit of training with a clicker vs. just giving a treat which is imprecise on why exactly the cat is being rewarded.

For any particular behavior you want to have your cat do (or tolerate, in the case of nail trimming), you will have to experiment and design a stair-stepped path toward the behavior demanding more crude behavior during the initial phase and more complex behavior in the latter stages.

Getting Your Cat To Accept Nail Trimming

Here is a pattern that I used for nail trimming. Each of these steps was something I would repeat, without moving to the next step for a few days.

The goal with clicker training is to get him to tolerate my handling him without fussing. For each step, I would do the action and click/treat/repeat.

1. Pull the cat into my office chair into my lap with his belly and legs upward.
2. (Step 1) + briefly handling a paw and exposing his claws
3. (Steps 1-2) + grabbing the nail trimmers
4. (Steps 1-3) + put the nail trimmers up to one of his claws without cutting
5. (Steps 1-3) + cut a single nail
6. (Steps 1-3) + cut two nails.

Remember to keep the sessions short. 5-10 minutes at most.

I had to learn to be patient and adaptable: If The Buddy got too feisty (aka he was biting me), I would stop and try again some other time.

Also, I ended up having to keep the shrimp in the refrigerator because he was utterly unfocused if I had his cup of shrimp someplace he could see and smell it.

Getting Your Cat to Come When Called

This was a pattern I used to get my cat to come when called. Handy when I want to make sure he’s not trapped someplace before I close a door.

1. Choose a Cue!: I chose: knocking sharply twice on wood (knock! knock!)
2. Cue! and click/treat if he looks your way
3. … if he starts in your direction
4. … if he walks part of the way to you
5. … if he walks all the way to you
6. … if he runs in your direction
7. … if he runs all the way to you

Again, each stage here is something I stick with for a few days. The progression adds up to the desired behavior.

Your Patience and Imagination Are Your Limit

The true believers of clicker training say that you can shape just about any behavior. I stopped with behaviors that make having him in my life managable rather than going full on into complex tricks. That was the extent of my interest.

If you have read to this point, congratulations. This article is over 1000 words long! I hope you will consider just trying to work with clipping your cat’s nails. It may seem impossible now, but think of how much more of an achievement it is to slay (or train) dragons than it is to take another way out with all the drawbacks it may come with.