My Zuli cat, who survived a bout of pancreatitis last September, is again not doing well. She vomits daily, picks fights with her sister, cries loudly, and sleeps too much and too deeply even for a cat.

On the other hand, she still LOVES to race out the door when I take Rufus on late-night walks. She’ll roll around in the red Georgia dirt, yowl at the moon, chase moths, and follow us down the sidewalk, calling loudly the whole time. Last week Rufus and I sat on the grass for awhile, and Zuli circled, rubbing against our backs but scrambling away if I tried to catch her. She’s fierce and wild, fey, and surprisingly sweet at unexpected times.

She has always been an indoor cat, but when we lived in Seattle, she began to take a fiendish delight in flying out the door when I walked Bishop at night. She would roam the nearby park, calling so loudly that I feared she’d wake the neighbors, but within an hour she would be back, crying and scratching to be let in. In Colorado she also loved exploring the neighborhood and would roll in the dirt of my parents’ garden until she was filthy. After she almost died last fall, I promised her that (despite my concerns about traffic, killer armadillos, foxes, and feral hogs) I would stop trying to prevent her from going out at night, because that seems to be her greatest joy in life. Lately, it seems like the more irritable she is indoors, the more she antagonizes Gorey for no apparent reason, and/or the longer she sleeps in one spot without even changing position, the more she craves and cherishes those nighttime excursions.

She mourned Bishop differently than her sister did; Gorey was extremely affectionate and needy with me, while Zuli spent all her time sleeping on his blanket in his crate. When I brought Rufus home, Gorey immediately tried to smother him, taking the same liberties she always had with Bishop (rubbing his face while he slept, licking his ears, nibbling on his toenails). Rufus, who didn’t seem to have any history with cats, was not okay with this, and they had to establish a sort of guarded truce. Also, he isn’t sure quite how to play with cats OR dogs but wants to try, and he sometimes makes missteps and maybe scares the cats a little. Still, when I watched Zuli rub against him last week, cooing as she did, I realized that she’s grown to love him.

She has always been a one-person cat. She loves me fiercely but isn’t fond of other people. Few of my friends have seen her; when I go out of town, I usually get a text or call from whomever is watching my cats, expressing concern because they haven’t set eyes on Zuli. Since the advent of the pancreatitis, this is a major concern. What if she gets sick again while I’m out of town? How would her caretaker know? And even if they knew, could they catch her without risking physical injury? The few times I’ve boarded her, she’s stopped eating, so leaving her with the vet isn’t a good option.

When she’s miserable and foul-tempered, I think it’s cruel to keep her around. But it feels premature to put her to sleep when she still derives such obvious joy from racing around in the moonlight. She still has good days, days when she’s her usual sassy, tortitude-spewing self. And then I read articles like this, and “It’s better to be a week too early than a minute too late” resonates. Isn’t it worse to wait until she has no more joy in life, until she stops wanting to chase moths or trot down the sidewalk behind Rufus, until she no longer gets that wickedly gleeful look when she sees me walk toward the door and gathers her muscles to spring?
It was very difficult to make the decision to put Bishop to sleep, but I had and still have total peace about the timing. He let me know, during that last week, that he was ready to go (and, regardless of what anyone says, I am also convinced that he graced me afterward with a snapshot of his existence now: joyful, gleeful, free of pain and fear and aggression, racing around fields in pursuit of birds he doesn’t actually want to catch). He was still healthy enough to wolf down his last ice cream cone and Chick-fil-A nuggets, to toss his baseball around in the sunshine, to love on his kitties. I am glad and grateful, not sorry, that he was able to do these things at the end of his life.

(And what I couldn’t know then, of course, was that two days before I said goodbye to Bishop, a terrified, underweight, sweet, mellow dog with a tattered ear and hip dysplasia and heartworms, a dog who looks strikingly like a miniature version of Bishop, received his intake exam for a local rescue. Last night, that dog — who has made such strides in three months that at our most recent training session, I cried at his progress — nestled into my side as we sat on the grass and stargazed.)

So today, after Zuli puked up her entire breakfast, I called the vet’s office. They said that when I think it’s time, they’ll work me into their schedule. I don’t want to let her go too soon, but I don’t want to keep her if she needs to move on. I guess we’ll go day by day; I’m praying for the wisdom and grace to know when it’s time.