Our cat is nearly thirteen now—an old man by any standard. Lately he’s been struggling more and more with anything that requires chewing, so we took him to the vet, thinking age had finally caught up with his teeth. It had. Several teeth were badly inflamed, with heavy tartar, and they needed to come out. After the procedure, he would really look like a sunken-mouthed old grandfather.
Some people would ask why extraction is necessary at all. Don’t animals know what’s good or bad for them? If anyone asked me that seriously, my answer would be simple: I want him to leave this world with some dignity, and with as little suffering as possible. It is not a gentle answer. It may even sound cold. But it is the truth my wife and I have arrived at.
A cat will die. That is not a question. What can still be influenced is how much pain that cat has to endure before the end, and that part depends on the person caring for him.
When my wife signed the surgical consent form, the feline hospital required her to confirm something very specific: if an emergency happened during surgery, would we forgo resuscitation? She visibly hesitated at that line. I understood why. If “rescue” meant something deeply painful—breathing tubes, drips, a body mechanically maintained just enough to register life—then we would rather let him go.
And yet that checkbox is almost a formality. I doubt many people would openly sign “do not agree” without feeling judged. If those forms were made public, people like us—the ones who hesitate, the ones who think about pain instead of just prolongation—would probably be dragged into a moral trial and treated like villains.
Of course, there is an easy rebuttal: a cat is not a person, and that is why such a choice seems acceptable. If it were a family member lying there, would we still say the same thing?
What looks like coldness in the way I think about my cat’s death, I would rather call preparation. Preparing for death does not mean rehearsing grief scene by scene. It means not allowing the eventual loss to arrive as a total blow that leaves you unable to eat or sleep. I do not try to imagine every possible ending. I only try to establish something like a practical procedure: what to do afterward, how to arrange things, where his ashes would go.
The question of whether to keep a dying loved one alive at all costs or to remove life support and let them go has been discussed endlessly. But it is one of those questions that can never be honestly surveyed in the abstract, because there is no real experiment for it. Most people only ever respond to the idea of it. And when there is no lived reality behind the answer, what fills the gap is emotion, morality, fear, guilt—everything except the moment itself.
My mother once told me, very seriously, that if she ever reached a point where machines were the only thing sustaining her, she hoped I would choose to remove them and let her leave with dignity. That sounds like a clear wish. But even in discussions like this, one important factor is often ignored: instinct.
In 2021, I nearly died from an illness. I remember almost nothing about that period. Later, my wife told me what my body had done. At some point, when the illness and fear crossed a certain threshold, my body stopped behaving like something directed by conscious thought and handed itself over entirely to instinct. Even without awareness, it was still expressing one basic demand: stay alive.
That is what makes all these elegant declarations about a dignified death feel less certain than they sound. When the moment actually comes—when someone who has always said they want to go peacefully shows, under the force of instinct, even the slightest reluctance, even the faintest signal of wanting to remain—would the person beside them still be able to carry out that earlier wish without wavering? Or would they soften in that instant and choose every available intervention just to keep the vital signs going a little longer?
Maybe this is part of why choosing for a cat feels different. A cat cannot clearly tell you he wants to keep living. He cannot lie there and curl a finger around yours in one last involuntary plea. He cannot voice attachment to the world in a way that reaches your conscience. There is something brutal about that silence.
But is there not also something brutal about a human body covered in tubes, able to prove it is still “alive” only through numbers on a monitor?
People who say death is terrifying may, in fact, be even more afraid of the period before it—the waiting, the decline, the unbearable awareness that it is coming. That may be why they cling so fiercely to visible signs of life. As long as someone is still alive, then death remains postponed, and as long as it is postponed, it does not have to be faced.
Sometimes that same fear takes another form. People abandon the old cat with rotten teeth, too frail to eat, and call it practicality. But what they may really be discarding is not the cat. They are discarding the need to stand there and witness his death.