I have been seriously thinking this over since seeing the furball of death on the news. I am trying to figure out if to the old people the cat is a comfort or a terror. I suppose that if I knew I was in there and close to dying I would take comfort when the cat laid down with me. I'd want some company and animals have always been good to me when I was lonely. On the other hand, do the residents experience trepidation daily when the cat comes around or are the able to be a little outside of their own experience and find cheer in the cat as he comes to visit and marks that it is not their day? The one geezer I saw interviewed was quite in his right mind and he said everyone loved the cat, he saw it this morning and was glad it didn't stay long!
I suppose in a really extreme case you could wake up in perfectly good health, see the cat who is just on your bed for a moment doing its rounds, think he's there to sit a spell, have a heart attack and then die. The cat would make an interesting literary device, being pretty much an animation of the intangible force of death we all deal with.
Wearing my evil hat I could see me dripping a little tuna juice and catnip oil on the bedding of someone I really didn't like though.
What Riley said about nursing homes is right, I visited a few Minnesota nursing homes to see relatives of the wife's. Places give me nightmares. Predominately women, all the men had Lucky Strike, coffee, and farm cooking heart attacks 20+ years ago, most of them still on the farm. Many of the women had aerial pictures of their farmhouse in the grove, most of them gone as a non-resident farmer knocked down the house and grove for more land to plant. The ones I visited had the old family group photos from the 40's and could name all the already deceased brothers, uncles, and fathers. The contrast between the present and the lives they had made the sense of loss and death so tangible to me. Few there had visitors, the home had a big aviary with finches that was popular. I still give my wife stuffed animals because she loves them and it is a light little expression of our affection. I saw one old woman there who had a teddy bear and the way she clutched it you could tell it was all the companionship she had or could comprehend anymore. How a person could go from a family to being left with a stuffed animal, I don't know, it still hurts me to think about 15 years later. How could her family and friends leave her like that?
My grandfather passed at 92, senile for 10 years or more, didn't know his own wife. She passed a year earlier at 78 I believe, cognizant to the end, just died in her sleep from a lifetime of Pall Malls and the associated congestive heart failure. My father managed to have care for them in their home, they both died there. Somehow I have to do the same for my parents. Me, I hope to stay healthy into old age to be there for my wife. I'll eat a bullet before going to a nursing home myself. I'm glad the cat is there to keep folks company, when I get back home I need to start visiting one of the local homes. Nobody else does.
