Growing Up—and Older—With Our Pets

It is a pattern I have continued in my adult life, although when I move it tends to be across the country and my cats accompany me on the plane. A few years ago as I was writing about the expensive and increasingly extreme medical procedures I sought to save Sam, my Siamese-Burmese cat (also known as Boo Boo Kitty), I wondered just when our pets had become such key fixtures in our lives, and not just our lives but in our homes. I think the answer lies in the peculiarities of the baby boomer generation, of which I am a member, if just barely. My parents certainly loved all of their pet animals and felt profound sadness when one would die. I can remember my father weeping as he buried Penny at the end of her long life. In fact, he wept when he buried each of our pets, which he continued to do long past the time when the passing of a pet was a tool to teach my sister and me a lesson in the cycles of life and death.

But for the generation born after World War II, during the years of America's remarkable transformation into a country of seemingly endless resources and promise, how we view our pets and thus how we treat them is something quite different from the conception of our parents. Our generation is a rootless, transient one, far more apt to move vast distances than our parents might have been, including my own. My family moved often but within a fairly prescribed geographic region. I, like many friends my age, have moved vast distances multiple times to places where I knew few people well and certainly had no relatives. And with no family of my own, my pets became surrogate children, of a sort. I'm not one to lavish ridiculous gifts on then (OK, a few) or to freshly prepare their dinners each evening, although I did consider it a few months ago when contaminated pet food led to the deaths of many cats and dogs. But there is little else I won't do for them.

Boo Boo Kitty had been with me for about 10 years and multiple relocations when he became seriously ill. I pursued aggressive treatment for him, including sending him to a sophisticated specialty hospital for therapies once considered exotic for animals (a benefit of the explosion in treatment options now available to humans). My parents, even if they could have afforded this type of care, would have been content to do what they could with their local vet, and then seen to it that the animal was compassionately euthanized. In the end, of course, even the most advanced treatments could not save Boo Boo Kitty, and finally it was time to let him escape his pain and misery.

It's easy to view all this as evidence of a narcissistic generation with too much money on its hands and easy access to veterinarians and specialists armed with the latest (and most expensive) treatments. Did I make a mistake in doing everything I could to keep Boo Boo alive, even when the prognosis was grim? I don't think so, but of course maybe I'm in denial. Throughout it all I tried to keep in mind not just how much I wanted him to live but also whether it was the right decision for him. That, it seems to me, is the critical question every pet owner must answer when deciding how far to pursue medical care for his or her animal. I would not have pursued aggressive care if it meant extended, serious pain for him, and when it finally did, I knew that it was time to stop.

I wish I could say that my mother, now entering the dark night of her disease, recalled much more about B.C., Penny or the many other pets our family once had, some remembered, most now forgotten to her. Still, as we talked about the small black cat we rescued more than three decades ago, we managed to claim some brief moment, some small island, of shared memory.

© 2007