I’m worse than Hitler

I’m just finishing – four days to go – a five-week housesit for my workmate who’s visiting family and friends back in Ireland with his missus. They probably would have left their house empty, but for their pet cat Comet.

They really wanted someone living there to feed him, and generally keep him company, play little games with him, tell him how clever he is for doing nothing all day except sleep and demand food and still somehow manage to be sheltered, fed and loved unconditionally.

Three days ago on Friday as I was leaving work, I was talking to two of my workmates. I was joking that currently my sole responsibility in life is to keep Comet alive, and how beautifully simple my life is right now.

Then Michal told a funny story about a guy he knew who’d also been looking after a cat and had accidentally crushed it to death in a ranch slider, like a enormous blunt guillotine lying on its side. At that moment, his line of sight had excluded floor-level and he’d missed seeing a happy cat sleeping peacefully in the sun between the doors. We all had a good laugh at that. I think I was actually laugh-snorting and saying things like ‘oh man that would be the worst thing to ever happen, ha ha ha snort guffaw’.

On Sunday, two days later, Comet was dead.

His body having been sent efficiently from the after-hours vet to the crematorium to be made into a little urn.

On Saturday he had been acting very sick so I took him to the vet, and just in the nick of time too as Comet had a blocked urethra (cock-blocked) and would have died by the next morning if I hadn’t taken him in. I was pretty chuffed with myself. I had saved Comet’s life and fully delivered on my single ‘duty of care’. I actually remember thinking, ‘I suppose this isn’t so different to having kids, they get sick, sometimes needing dramatic trips to the hospital. Yeah, I could do that. I could have kids’.

That there was nothing they could do to save Comet in the end (due to the severity of the blockage), doesn’t make me feel any better. It just makes me think all the more that this is what would probably happen, nay almost certainly happen, to my children should my seed ever find purchase.