"It's not fair," my sister said. "He was a kitten when we were kids, now we're still young and he's dying."

Yeah.

I once read that birds, whose hearts beat so quickly and who live brief lives, have the same number of heart beats in a lifetime as people do. I wonder if my cat has lived the same number of hearbeats as I will. What does it mean that he has lived them in a shorter time? I don't know if time passes at the same rate for him as it does for me now, or if it stretches the way time sometimes stretched when I was a kid. I wonder how he experiences time.

He hated it when my family left on trips, and I always tried to tell him how long we would be gone. He knew, of course, when we were leaving-- he saw the suitcases and excitement and knew what my mother's predictable hysteria meant. Just before we left I would take him to the basement and hold him and tell him how many days we would be gone, tap on his fur the number of days as I counted them aloud. He endured being clutched, although he didn't like it, and I kept up my ritual even when I was old enough to be embarassed by it. It was my way of telling him that we would come back.

This year, when my family went to the beach for a week, I stayed with Blacky. It didn't seem fair to leave him alone now, when I know he will be dead before fall. He needs to be given his IV every day, and that is more elaborate a task than we feel comfortable asking the Kahns to do. And he has also gotten worse about pissing everywhere, especially after being given the IV.

It was hard giving him the IV by myself, since it usually takes two of us, but he was cooperative and I managed it until I got the flu. He will stay still for the needle if I feed him tuna while I inject him, and it doesn't seem to cause him too much pain. If it was any harder to do I probably would have given up and let my family have him euthanized already. As it is I am fighting to wait until the end of the summer. It was a rough winter, and I want him to have one last summer to bake the pain out of his bones.

So I housesat for my parents with the dog, who has terrible arthritis and a daily regimen of pills, and Blacky, and my lover. Usually I am so busy avoiding my parents that I wind up avoiding my cat too, so it was good to spend some time with him. Ricardo guilt-trips me about it. "Cat slut," he called me the other night, "You're cheating on him with other cats. He smells them on you, you know. That's why he likes me better than you now. We stayed up all night bitching about women while you were sick. Watched porno movies with naked women and cats and complained about you."

I defended myself, of course, although I did feel guilty for petting another cat earlier that day. I feel guilty about Blacky all the time, low-level guilt like a slight headache. I came by late last night to check my email and hang out with my cat, who was locked in the basement after pissing upstairs again. I opened the door and called his name and after a few minutes he meowed, in a higher pitch than his usual deep James Earl Jones meow, and I found him in a pile of storage boxers and lifted him down since he seemed uncertain about jumping. He is so small now, fitting so neatly in my arms that it's painful, I remember when he was as huge as Jasper or Goldfish. He was purring hard enough to send vibrations all through me though, and I took him upstairs so he could crawl on my keyboard and stroke me with his chin for awhile before going downstairs to watch TV with Ricardo.

He likes sitting downstairs while someone watches TV, Ricardo and my father are particular favorites since they don't twitch. I'm too jittery and bony to make a good resting place for very long, but sometimes Blacky will come sit by me and allow me to stroke his thin thin body. He'll eat when I'm in the room, too. For years he hated eating in the basement, where nobody wanted to keep him company, and earlier this year my sister moved his food to the spiral staircase in the living room so he can eat while we watch TV. When I come into the room he flows to the spiral case with his still-graceful though slower stride, and I love watching him eat.

Blacky and Coco have worked out a system. Blacky drinks from Coco's water dish, and sometimes eats his food, and Coco barks when Blacky runs out of food. We refill the dish when Coco reminds us, and while Blacky eats he scoops some of his food off the dish onto the floor for Coco to eat. Coco also gets the leftover tuna after Blacky eats his fill while getting the IV. It works out pretty well for both of them.

Although they are friends, it isn't the same way that Blacky was friends with the Spotty, the dog we got at the pound the same day we got Blacky. Spot was killed by a car within the first few years we got him, and Blacky seemed to miss him for quite awhile, acting uneasy, seeming to wonder when Spot would come home. He has always remained somewhat reserved with Coco.

Blacky would be safer if he wore a collar, but we never managed to make that stick. Blacky hated collars, especially the stiff white flea collars my mom always bought him, and I helped him get them off. I thought they were undignified, I didn't like the way they interupted his sleek black body. He didn't look much like a panther with one of those flea collars on.

I've always regretted naming him Blacky, wanted to change his name to Bagheera as a kid. I was greatly impressed by the Jungle Book and figured my cat was as fine as that black panther. The animal shelter we got him from wouldn't let him buy us without giving a name, and Blacky was the first one to come to mind. Later I wanted to change it but figured it wouldn't be fair to change his name when he had already gotten used to being Blacky. I didn't want to confuse him.

He was as good a hunter as Bagheera, though, if you allow for his smaller size. When he was younger he terrorized the birds that our neighbor fed. He regularly left corpses outside the front door, occasionally outside my bedroom, where I found them and got mad and shouted at him although at that time I wasn't a vegetarian either. Once he set a live bird loose in our kitchen, on a Sunday morning that my sister and I were creeping around trying not to wake my parents so that we'd miss the Arabic class they had enrolled us in. In the excitement of capturing the bird I believe we missed the class.

I hate to see the crows that began gathering a few years ago in my parents' yard; they remind me that Blacky is no longer a powerful hunter. So does the weeping cherry in the front yard with claw marks deep in its bark. My mom planted that tree a few years ago, when Blacky was still doing well, and he took to sharpening his claws on it until it was a bare little twig. Since he has gotten sick that tree is flourishing, and I am sick of the sight of it.

In his youth Blacky also murdered the birds and fish and once an iguana that my brother kept bringing into the house. My parents didn't want to get another dog or cat, so there has been a constant stream of smaller lives for Blacky to feed upon. It's only in the last few years that my brother has given up on having a pet.

When I went to college my brother claimed Blacky, started taking care of him and sleeping with him at night. I would come back home for the holidays and get into fights when I insisted on taking Blacky into my own room at night. Now I wish that I had just let Ramsey have Blacky, since they live together full-time, but at the time I was stubborn. By the time I had changed my mind my brother had already surrendured the cat to me, and now they don't spend much time together. Although Blacky isn't as close as he used to be to me, I don't think he has gotten very close to anybody else in my family either. Just like he never got as close to Coco after Spotty died.

My cat has grown very tender, very fragile seeming and very friendly. He likes to sit under the coffee table while my family watches TV, and gingerly kneads the lap of anyone who sits still for very long. It is painful to stroke him, to feel every bone under the loose skin, but he will purr, although not as loudly as he used to. When he is sitting with us he seems content.

There are times that he stops suddenly, whatever he is doing, and looks around in confusion and dismay. Seain says that Blacky has the same look in his eye that Seain's grandmother used to have when she had Alzheimer's. He certainly looks angry and frightened. When I see this look I go to him and stroke him, and he meows at me and seems to be comforted.

"Seain," I asked, when I was thinking about euthanasia, "What do you think we should do about Blacky? My dad was yelling at me again that we need to have him put to sleep. I hate that phrase. Have him killed."

"Have him euthanized, that's the word your looking for. Well, you have to spend time with him. Look into his eyes. See how he's doing, what he wants you to do. He looks awfully unhappy sometimes."

"That's right, he does. But then other times he seems happy just to be near us. I don't know how to measure it. I mean, I know we have to... to have him euthanized at some point. He would have died by now if it wasn't for the IV, so it's up to us to decide when he dies. Like unplugging him from life support, you know?"

We both paused for a moment, and I knew we were thinking about his father, who had managed to fulfill almost all of the requirements to be unplugged before he died.

"With my cat, my mom took him in to the vet the day she realized he couldn't eat anymore. It made sense, although I would've liked to have known ahead of time. Later she told me she didn't see why she could put her cat out of its misery and not do the same for her husband."

"Yeah. I know."

"Really your whole family has to decide when. But he is your cat."

"God, I don't know. He's miserable sometimes, but other times he seems okay. Even happy. I just want him to have one last summer, but I don't know if it's for him or me."

"I don't know. You have to decide what seems right to you."

I'm waiting until the end of the summer. It will give me a little more time to spend with him before I have to drag him into the car that he hates and drive him to the vet and sit with him while she gives him the injection and he dies.