Stella curls deeply into my waist to sleep, sometimes pacing in a circle on my stomach before settling down there. She’d been my husband’s cat (ex-husband’s — always call him your ex, my therapist corrects) and had probably been lying next to him when he died on the last couch we’d picked out together. I feel her breathing, I feel her need to feel my breathing, I feel her need for our bodies to be connected. Now that we know she’ll be leaving hers. Soon.

Every living thing wants connection.

She stays for five minutes, a half hour, maybe more. She’s sleeping on top of a basket in the corner of my bedroom when I wake up some time later.

********

When I’d first met Stella at my husband’s, ex-husband’s, after we’d divorced but were still very much in each other’s lives, That’s the ugliest cat I’ve ever seen, popped in my head. She looked like the all-terrain walker in Star Wars — long arms and legs cascading down from a skinny body, her head moving at what seemed odd angles. She’d spent the first year of her life locked in a restaurant basement with only the mice and rats she could catch for food, until my waiter son and husband, ex, ex-husband, rescued her.

In my ex-husband’s home, once anyone opened the fridge, Stella would try to climb in. She quickly gained weight and turned into the orange fur, hazel-eyed beauty she was with a personality that said, I’ve been to Hell and back, and I’m ok.

And by the way, I own this place.

She announced it calmly with her silent meows, her vocal cords shot after all the meowing she must have done her first year of life. She still opened her mouth, but the sound was on mute.

********

She lived as head cat in my ex’s three-cat household, then as head cat in mine after he passed — for years.

Then she started vomiting.

A few chin scratches and a belly rub would make it better when she could finally settle down. Her paws would wrap around my forearm to keep me there until she decided I was done. The nails were visible just in case I needed a reminder that stopping was not my decision to make. It was definitely hers.

Diagnosed with kidney disease, we began the thrice weekly IV fluids needed to flush them out. Her wobbliness began. Her trying to jump up on the kitchen stools, and missing, then trying again, and making it, because she was that hungry. Always hungry.

After two years of IV fluids, at first given at home, my son handling the needle part, me massaging the IV bag to coax the fluids into her faster, we could no longer do it ourselves, her weight loss making the needle too scary, so I start bringing her to the vet where the vet techs and I bond as they take over the treatments.

On the day the scale said she’d lost half a pound in two days, her once fourteen-pound body now less than seven, I tell the vet, “It’s time.” I’d known it mostly from the clouded look in the eyes that had once sparkled so beautifully before the scale confirmed my suspicions.

But the vet is cleaning her ears, where I have been giving her two transdermal medications a day for nausea, and he tells me her ears are covered with residue.

“The medication hasn’t been getting through,” he says.

“I didn’t know I should have cleaned them,” I say.

“It’s written on the box,” he says.

Now it’s not her time because it’s her time, but because my lack of intelligent care has killed her, though she is not technically dead. Yet. That will be a few minutes later when a port has been inserted into her paw and the vet prepares for her final injection.

When he allows that “Most cats don’t make it two years with kidney disease,” it gives me zero comfort.

Her eyes stare at me as I repeat over and over how much I love her and I am crying and the vet tech is crying and then the vet says, “She’s gone.” The tech says I can stay as long as I want, but Stella is dead, and I want to get away, but not until the tech promises to stay with her body until they…do what they do with it.

********

Weeks later, I will realize the medicine came in the mail in plastic mailers with no box. But it is too late. The two years of trying to keep Stella alive and comfortable were erased as soon as the vet said I should have been cleaning her ears. The very certain labeling of myself as incompetent remained. Remains. My remains.

My last words to my husband, ex-husband, were no one is going to help you. He was coming home from detox, the place I had accompanied him time and time again, and wanted “someone” to help him clean up the mess he’d made while bingeing.

“You need to clean up your own mess.”

He bought a bottle of Hennessy on the way home and died on the couch. Stella was there. Probably nestled into him.

Because our bodies want connection.