The Happiest Days of Our Lives (12 page)

Hi. ThiS iS FELix. My Mom AND Dad ToLD mE HoW MUCh WWDN ReADerS SupPoRteD ThEM whiLe I wAs SiCK, aND I WaNT to sAY ThANK you. ThEy LovE ME A loT AnD I KnOW THIS Was hard FoR thEM.

During that stay, we found out that his kidney disease had progressed more rapidly than we expected. He was up to about 85% failure, and he was starting to become anemic. He had lost a bunch of weight, and by now he was down to about 11 pounds. Again, we made mental preparations for the worst. Again, Felix surprised us all by bouncing right back to life.

A few weeks ago, Felix started to look and act like he felt icky, so we took him to the vet yet again. This came on the heels of Sketch’s near-death experience, so my nerves were pretty frayed. “I wish I could get frequent flier miles here,” I joked to the receptionist for the hundredth time. She politely pretended that I wasn’t the most annoying pet owner in the world.

We ran some tests on him, and the results confirmed our worst fears: His kidneys were almost completely destroyed, and he had developed such a severe case of anemia that his body wasn’t able to get any nutrition out of his food. He was, quite literally, wasting away.

It was clear that if we didn’t do anything, he was going to die within a few days. We talked it over with our vet, and she told us that our options were to put Felix to sleep or to give him Epogen injections three times a week, sub-q fluids twice a day, liquid vitamins, and an aluminum hydroxyde suspension each morning. It seemed like an awful lot of stuff to do, but Anne and I talked about it, trying to figure out what was best for
Felix.
We would not prolong his life simply because we didn’t want to say goodbye…but if we could help him feel better and have a good quality of life, then we would do whatever we could afford to do. We talked it over with his vet and decided that we’d try this out for two weeks.

“What are the odds of him bouncing back?” I asked his vet.

“If it was any other cat, I’d say very slim,” she said. “But Felix is one of the toughest kitties I’ve ever seen. Honestly, his kidney values are so high, any other kitty would have died by now.”

“Is there anything we should watch for?”

She told us what I had already heard from hundreds of WwdN readers: “Felix will let you know if he’s ready to go or if he wants to stick around and try to feel better.”

That was two weeks ago. For the first week, Felix perked up, but he didn’t bounce back the way he always had before. He stopped being reclusive, but he wasn’t as affectionate as he’d always been. I hoped against hope that he’d miraculously recover like he always did, but it just wasn’t happening. I realized that I was watching him die.

A few nights ago, I sat in my dining room and read my book. I felt something brush up against my leg. I looked down and saw Felix The Bear. He was so skinny his spine stood up on his back like Mr. Burns.

“How are you feeling, The Bear?”

He let out a slow and quiet meow, and walked into the living room. He wavered when he walked, like he was unsteady, or uncomfortable, or both. When he was about fifteen feet away from me, he stopped, crouched down on the floor, and flicked his little stump.

“Felix will let you know if he’s ready to go…”

I got up from the table and walked over to him. I felt a lump rising in my throat as I got down next to him on the floor.

“Are you done?” I asked.

He flicked his stump and looked up at me. His eyes looked a little cloudy; his third eyelid was closed about a third of the way. He opened his mouth to meow at me, but no sound came out.

“Okay, Felix. Okay.” I scratched his little bony head. He purred weakly and tightly shut his eyes.

I knew this moment would come, and I hoped that I’d be prepared to face it, but I wasn’t. Huge sobs shook my body. Giant tears fell off my face and ran down my nose.

Ferris cautiously walked over to me from the kitchen. She stopped about three feet from me, sat down, and cocked her head to one side.

“Felix is dying, Ferris,” I said. “I’m okay. I’m just sad.”

She sighed and laid down on the floor with her head between her paws. She watched me while I sat there and cried.

Later that night, Anne and I had The Talk. We decided that we’d done all that we could to help him, but it just wasn’t enough. He wasn’t really living…he was just staying alive. We talked about the promise we’d made two years ago, to each other, and to Felix, that we wouldn’t keep him alive just because we didn’t want to say goodbye. I called the vet and had The Talk with her. We made an appointment to bring Felix in the next day.

I knew I was doing the right thing, but that didn’t make it any easier. As I wrote this (and it took most of the day to write—I had to stop writing several times, just to get a grip on myself) I realized that Felix hadn’t been The Bear for a long time.

As I wrote, I thought about how much I would miss him. I wrote in my blog, “I will miss seeing him stand up and stretch himself out on the trunk of Anne’s car before he jumps down onto the driveway and greets me when I open my car door. I will miss him jumping up into my car and talking to me while he walks around and explores the passenger compartment. I will miss watching him sit in the grass and torment the squirrel in the tree next door. I will miss watching him stump around in the backyard. But most of all, I will miss being on his rotation. Even when he decided that four in the morning was when he needed to go outside and the best way to accomplish that was to run across our heads until one of us woke up and let him out.”

Just after nine in the morning on March 30, 2005, we said goodbye to Felix The Bear. He left peacefully and quietly, surrounded by his staff who loved him.

In the days and weeks that followed his death, I kept looking for The Bear in the usual places (not because I thought he was still alive, but out of habit) and when he wasn’t there, the tears often came.

About a week after we said goodbye, his vet called.

“Mr. Wheaton?”

“That’s me,” I said. I don’t think I will ever get used to being called Mister anything.

“Felix’s ashes are here, and you can pick them up whenever you’d like.”

A sob rose out of my chest and caught in my throat. At that moment, I discovered that I had created a totally illogical construct in my mind where I somehow hoped that when we took him to the vet, we would trade the sick, sad, dying Felix for the healthy, tough, stumpy little Bear we used to know.

“Mr. Wheaton? Are you there?”

Felix really is gone. He really isn’t coming back
, I thought.

I drew a breath to steady my voice. “Can I come and pick him up right now?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Okay, I’ll be right there.”

Fifteen minutes later, I stood in the vet’s office as one of the techs gently set a small cedar box on the counter.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Wheaton,” she said.

I tried to speak, but all I could do was nod my head as I picked it up. When I got into my car, it all came back to me: the years of giving him fluids and medicine, the ups and downs as his kidney disease progressed and he fought back, the last few weeks of watching him slowly waste away, hoping against hope for a miracle we knew wouldn’t come…and his last night with us, which he spent mostly on Ryan’s bed with his little head tucked into his right arm.

“I miss you so much, Felix,” I said. My eyes filled with tears as I set the box on the passenger seat. I put on my seat belt and started my car. I pulled out of the driveway as Jeff Tweedy sang,

Far, far away

From those city lights

That might be shining on you tonight

Far, far away from you

On the dark side of the moon

I long to hold you in my arms and sway

Kiss and ride on the CTA

I need to see you tonight

And those bright lights

Oh, I know it’s right

Deep in my heart

I’ll know it’s right

I made it about two blocks before I pulled over, put my head in my hands, and completely fell apart.

I still miss Felix. He was a stumpy little guy.

green grass and high tides forever (and ever and

      
This was written after
The Happiest Days of Our Lives
was published, but it fits so perfectly with the rest of the book, I included it in this edition.

I
spent a lot of Ryan’s first summer home from college bugging him to play the Endless Setlist with me on Rock Band. The Endless Setlist is usually the last thing you unlock in career mode: a concert featuring all 58 songs that come with the game. It takes about six hours to play straight through.

Naturally, being Rock Gods, Ryan and I tackled it on expert. He played guitar and I played bass. We were awesome. We maxed out at five stars on pretty much every one of the first 20 or so songs, including three extra-difficult gold stars. I got the authentic strummer achievement for only using upstrums, and 99% on about half of them. (Those of you who haven’t played Rock Band and don’t know what the hell I’m talking about can rest assured that we kicked 16 different kinds of ass.)

We were seriously having a good time, striking the rock pose, putting our backs together while we jammed through epic songs, and generally bonding through the power of rock.

And then, with five songs left to go, we got to “Green Grass and High Tides.” It’s a fantastic rock song by the Outlaws. It’s also one of the hardest songs in the game
and
the longest, lasting around 10 minutes. You don’t so much play this song as survive it. If a song could kick you in the junk, this would be it.

So, after having already played for five hours (and not exactly conserving our energy), we started to play this rock epic, knowing it would be the greatest challenge we’d faced yet.

Our first time through, we failed at 84%. It was entirely my fault: I held my guitar too high and deployed our emergency overdrive when we didn’t need it.

“Sorry about that,” I said as we lost 360,000 fans. “I blame my guitar.” Ryan looked at me.

“Okay, I blame myself.”

Ryan laughed and said it was no big deal. He was confident we’d get it on the next try, and when we started the song, I could see why. He was in the zone, nailing 97% of the first solo. I wanted to holler about how awesome he was, but I felt like it would have been the same as talking to a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter, so I stayed quiet and did my best not to screw things up.

Alas, I screwed things up. We failed the song at 96%. We lost another 360,000 fans, almost wiping out the million we picked up during the Southern Rock Marathon the week before. Compared to the five hours we’d spent playing, that 18 minutes wasn’t that long, but it sure felt demoralizing—especially because it was entirely my fault we’d failed
twice
. There’s this bass phrase that’s repeated over…and over…and over…and if you’re just a tiny bit off (like I was) you’re screwed (like I was), and…well, you get the point (like I did).

I dropped my hands to my side and let the guitar hang around my neck. My arms were tired, my legs hurt, and my vision was getting blurry.

“I think I’ve identified the weak link in our band, and it’s me,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”