There Is a Crack In Everything: Euthanasia and the Human-Animal Bond

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in…

Leonard Cohen (1992), Anthem: The Future

(Figure 1. Watercolor of my favorite photo of Névé and his startling blue eyes.)

As a daughter of Western culture, mortified and at times dismembered by the human ecological catastrophe we call the Anthropocene, my passion for the other-than-human finds solace in the depth psychological traditions of psyche, soul, and the imaginal realm through the bridge these traditions form to indigenous conceptions of an interactive, conscious, animate biosphere. The Jungian Society of Scholarly Studies (JSSS) provides a forum where contributors regularly explore the depth psychological dimensions of the environmental crisis, the Anthropocene, and the ensouled world identified in classical antiquity as the anima mundi. Ironically, despite their apparent value and more intimate relationship with humans, depth psychological understandings of domestic species through the human-animal bond—Western culture’s name for the prevalent, tenacious, and eternally evolving interspecies affiliation between domestic animals and humans—seems to retain a sense of terra incognita.

This essay encounters the human-animal bond through my fraught relationship with a male cat named Névé, who blew through the door of our lives in 2004 and who’s troubled exit a decade later broke our hearts. As a veterinary surgeon, I know that certain wounds cannot heal without debridement—removing dead necrotic tissue to promote a new healthy, pink, granulation bed—and when I laid down my surgical instruments it didn’t take long to turn instead to psychic excavation. Despite its potential, I am also afraid of opening the wound between Névé, myself, and my partner Steve and probing around a possible proposal for this summer’s annual JSSS conference.

Steve named Névé after the firm high mountain snow that—in a kind of perpetual snow chatter that engages with one’s weight and motion—squeaks when you walk. Névé, borrowed from Latin and French, describes the almost solid snow found at the head of a glacier. My clearest memory of névé as snow comes from a climb my partner Steve and I did years ago. Connected by rope, Steve went first as we navigated the complex tumbling terrain of the ice cliff glacier on Mt. Stuart. I took the lead for the upper couloir where, a hundred feet apart, we ascended the snow highway in unison under a bluebird sky.

Our unspoken connection, and what felt right and beautiful in the mountains, didn’t translate to our home and decisions we made a decade later around Névé: the grey tabby orphan kitten who appeared in our lives with a brother and sister. I discovered the three tiny kittens in our clinic, tumbling over each other and bleating pitifully from behind the bars of their kennel, needing a home. Someone had rescued them from a boat in a driveway, mewling for food and attention. After a short discussion, Steve and I took them home, bottle fed them milk supplement, and named them after types of snow: Spindrift, Firn, and Névé. Spindrift—the plume of tiny snowflakes driven by wind off the hard surface of a snowfield—died of aspiration pneumonia just days after we adopted him. We held a quiet ceremony under a backyard tree, and I cried as Steve stoically placed his tiny body into the hole he had dug. How quickly and hard our hearts were already falling.

Névé’s sister, Firn—the flakes and crystals of snow compressed by their own weight into glacial ice—graced our home with the loudest purr in the world. Firn hated being touched, and ran when we came near, but her tractor purr, revving up whenever we glanced at her, always made us laugh. Perhaps, her persistent dodging of our affection predicted what was to come; by her second birthday, we watched helplessly as she mutilated herself with scratching, so itchy that she tore around the house trying to escape her skin. We tried all I knew as a veterinarian, but nothing seemed to help. Eventually Firn was diagnosed with an aggressive kidney cancer that had itchiness as a weird side effect. Steve and I spent a long, serious time discussing treatment options for her, none of them good. Too soon, we fell into the borderlands of goodbye.

Often enough, clients worried about the end asked me, “How will we know the right time?” I witnessed a lot of animal death as a veterinary surgeon, my own and those attached to others, intentional and otherwise. I emphasized the painful privilege of choosing death for another living being, and offered the possibility that they might tell us, or that a person close to them and could know. Those were the best case scenarios, and facing Firn, my abstract words that once seemed wise fell flat. Firn wasn’t exactly sick, but her itchiness came from an alteration in her immune system responding to the cancer in her body—a paraneoplastic syndrome—but watching her scratch and knowing of impending her kidney failure made her suffering almost unbearable. We seesawed between committing to euthanize her the next day, and believing time was still on her side. Purring her huge crazy purr, Firn paralyzed us. How could we end the life of our beautiful feline queen and her blue saucer eyes while she sat there purring?

The final awful night tipped the question into an answer. I lay in bed listening to Firn’s frantic scratching, racing around the room, jumping on the bed, flying out the bedroom door, then the whole cycle starting again. Desperate, I gave her a Benadryl tablet, hoping to gift her with drowsiness and take the itch. But the pill made everything worse. She drooled and gagged from the bitter taste, ran from us, the itchiness, and the drunken feeling of the drug. Each in our own private hell, no one slept as the eternal night crept on. We euthanized her the next day at home. Life fights like hell to stay and letting go never comes easily. Those soothing words I once told clients disturb me a little and I wonder, how often does knowing without doubt come too late? We would have done anything to spare Firn that final night. An impossible choice, I know that letting go too early, without a fight, leaves me wondering, did I love at all? Too long and laced with suffering, I lament instead what love is, haunted by the ubiquitous words I first heard from Sting, “If you love somebody, let them free.”

Névé catapulted the difficulty of loving to an entirely new level. He burrowed hard into Steve’s heart, lying with his body stretched on Steve’s chest and reaching out a tentative paw to touch his beard, he would purr, “Hey. I’m here. Hey. Hey.” But Névé also harbored a wild, elemental nature that could erupt into fury and chaos. Visiting the veterinary hospital sent him out of his mind with fear and rage. Ears flat against his head, teeth and claws flying, to pry him out of his kennel I had to protect myself with thick leather cat gloves. Maybe in those moments something already started breaking between us. By 2014, locked in a battle of frustrated will, Névé peed everywhere in the house, while I, day after day, cleaned and cried, pushing away unthinkable dread and where we seemed to be headed.

It wasn’t exactly Névé’s peeing that broke me. He screamed to be outside, but, raised as an indoor-only cat, Steve and I worried for his safely. When he was younger, we let him out once to see how he might do. He lay in the middle of the road for a while, then climbed our old cherry tree and almost immediately fell out. We watched him venture out on a slim branch, slip and hang, arms extended. Hind legs dangling and kicking, Névé attempted a remount but failed. As he dropped back down and just before letting go, I yelled and Steve ran, arms outstretched. Cradling his 13-pound football, Steve laughed in relief then murmured, “He’s purring.”

Neve also created a problem for urban wildlife. Domestic cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion songbirds every year, and with his drive and focus, we felt certain Névé would rapidly evolve into an efficient feline slaying machine. We tried staking him out in the backyard to keep everyone safe, so he sat on the end of his compromise line, taunted by the local squirrel, his striking blue eyes narrow slits. He registered his complaints by peeing outside his litter box and yelling for freedom, and our frustration grew together. One day, I threw open the door and hissed, “Fine. Go!” A short truce, we soon confronted each other again as I chased him around the yard, a too bold squirrel squirming in his mouth, me screaming “No! Névé! No!” I collapsed on the concrete stairs, overcome by more of life, suffering and death than I could handle, as I watched the squirrel run, trailing blood and one leg up and over the fence.

The domestic and wild were at war in our home, not because of Névé, but because of me. Névé simply wanted to be a cat in the world, but I wanted him to be something else. I don’t know if I should have tolerated Névé’s urinating in our home, but my rigidity and failure to seriously look for alternate solutions, and my imposition of my will on Steve, are what I regret the most. My drastic solution with its terrible lack of creativity was related in part to how overwhelmed and imprisoned I felt, with a need for simple efficient solutions. Horrifically, my veterinary job saving animals became lethal to our beloved cat at home. Caught by should and must, how to behave and what to feel, as a veterinarian, wife, daughter, and contributing citizen, I hated my own domesticity. My girl’s dream to be a veterinarian came true but I was miserable. A standard trope for a midlife crisis, I desperately wanted out but had nowhere to go.

Interestingly, the theme of imprisonment surfaced in another context as well. My first theoretical paper on the human-animal bond after leaving the veterinary clinic was titled: Horses, Humans, and Prisons: An Application of Self Psychology to the Human Animal Bond. The paper examines the docudrama, The Mustang (Goldman, 2019) and applies the concepts of Austrian psychoanalyst Heniz Kohut’s self-psychology to prison inmates and wild horses. This paper, written several years ago, now helps me recognize the impossible tension between domestic and wild and how the wild, whether without or within, needs time and patience, and is anathema to efficiency. In The Mustang, Roland, incarcerated for brutally assaulting his wife, is assigned a wild mustang to break. However, the horse’s will proves greater than his own and the mustang cannot be dominated by Roland, forging instead an improbable path based on necessity, mutual trust, and friendship.

I solved the impossible problem of Neve without any of these qualities. An overwhelming walk through our basement with a black light revealed unbelievable streaks of cat pee on the walls, couches, carpets, electronics, and table. Steve and I went to Portland for the weekend, and I couldn’t get what we had seen out of my mind. Driving home I told Steve I couldn’t take it anymore and that I believed our only viable option for Névé was euthanasia. I knew so many cats without homes, I believed it wasn’t fair to ask anyone to take Néve given his challenges.

Raised in rural Alberta and trained as a veterinarian in the early 1990’s in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I was caught between conflicting values associated with companion animals. Dogs, cats, and horses were transitioning from useful animals and sometimes companions who deserved not to suffer to intimate family members eclipsing efficiency and logic. Some practical part of me decided long ago that euthanasia for behavioral issues could be justified under certain circumstances, but Steve and I had never talked about it. It’s amazing to write about it now as it feels so outdated and simplistic, but willingness to euthanize a cat under such circumstances was a screening question for veterinary school, with the understanding that no almost always meant rejection.

The level of my frustration with Névé, and its draconian solution, shocked Steve. I was the one who supposedly held animals most closely in my heart. He was the one who struggled sometimes to understand my attachments. I completely upended this story between us. A creative response needed to open the space between me as the professional veterinarian and Steve as an involved and equal partner in loving relationship with our cat. In a decision that involved the family we built and loved together, we needed time to sit in the not knowing, to support each other, to imagine more deeply into what Névé was trying to tell us.

Instead, my certainty and his shock barreled us into a decision that can never be changed. We went to the clinic together in almost total silence. This essay is a response to the haunting I felt by the terror in Neve’s blue eyes as we ended his life. To write it, I took out his box of ashes and placed them on our dining room table. I wept and spoke to Névé, apologizing as I painted his box and felt his eyes staring at me.

(Figure 2. Névé's box of ashes.)

That night, a gift of a dream:

I load my car and, on my way out of town, stop at my my parents’ house to pick something up. Dad wants help with the dishes, implying Mom will be furious if I don’t. I feel stressed about the time it will take but help anyway. Mom sits at the table and watches me clear the plates and glasses which have ice in them. I toss the ice cubes into the sink where they begin to melt. In another scene, Mom finds, loses, and finds again an exquisite turquoise necklace. She loves the necklace, but discovers it doesn’t belong to her and who its owner is. She is deciding what to do when an exciting cardboard box with unknown contents arrives.

This dream strikes me in response to the work I did the night before. Perhaps I'm finally slowing down enough to do the dishes and something stuck and frozen is starting to melt. The turquoise reminds me of Névé’s eyes, a jeweled part of him trapped with me but finally finding its true home. The exciting cardboard box reminds me of his box of ashes which I lovingly painted the day before. Maybe something new and exciting is coming.

The next day, I paint the box, the ice, and the necklace.

(Figure 3. Watercolor of the dream with box, ice, and a turquoise necklace.)

It takes eight days fro the start of my project for a dream where Névé himself visits. He last entered my dreams in 2019, five years after we euthanized him.

Broken glass is strewn throughout the house. Neve's has injured his leg from the glass and he bleeds from his mouth. I panic, trying to protect the other animals in the house. A washing machine in the basement vibrates so much it's falling apart. The dream ends with me bandaging Névé's leg.

In the new dream:

Névé escapes from the flooded basement of my parents’ house. Cat pee and kitty litter cover the basement walls and float in the water. I open the door and he runs out, across the yard, over the fence, and into the neighbor’s yard. He looks surprisingly good. He’s well fed and I especially notice the fluffiness of his tail. I feel relieved and that he’ll be OK, but I tell Steve that Névé escaped and jumped into the neighbor's yard He wants to look for him and so we do, but as we enter the neighbor’s gate, we discover a carnival instead of a house. Névé will not be found here. As Steve and I turn to walk home, a beautiful feeling of connection appears.

(Figure 4. Watercolor of dream the of Névé escaping from the house—a strange tall Dr. Seuss kind of

house with crooked floors and narrow rooms—jumping over the fence, and entering the carnival.)

The dream feels like a final letting go; that Névé is finally free to go and be whomever or whatever is next for him. And so am I.

The other outcome, where Steve and I work out how to keep Névé in the world with us a little longer, is lost to time. But if cultivating the wild and unknown are values within and without—and for me they are—giving my own life more space for less efficiency and more beauty became essential. This piece responds from that place, giving time and attention back to what was neglected and impossible before. Exploring his painful death and writing this confession feels like penance. I have much gratitude for the gifts that came back, and the box waiting to be opened.

References

Goldman, A. (Producer), & de Clermont-Tonnerre, L. (Director). (2019). The mustang [Motion picture]. United States, France, Belgium: Focus Features.

Neve.