When our foster cat Tilly died, I couldn’t move her body. We were approaching summer, and our dog had pawed at our screen door, breaking it. So, the flies were coming inside, and Tilly was downstairs. Dead. My husband had just bought a stack of cedar, so Tilly’s room smelled like sweet wood, and her shut down body, full of the toxins her kidneys could no longer clear. Cedar, and kidney failure. And me, upstairs, sitting on the floor with my daughter. Me, after spending the night vomitting, sitting there with my head in my hands, while my daughter, age 1.5, watches, “The Unicorn Store” on repeat. Her first real screen time. 

My husband came home, and I asked him to put Tilly’s body into an Amazon box so I could take it to the animal shelter. I could at least do this for this foster cat, deemed a Fospice case (Feline+ hospice. I knew I wasn’t ready for death. How had I missed this?) Tilly, the foster cat who’s skin was so delicate she could only tolerate being groomed with a lint brush. Tilly who took her first few rounds of sub q fluids so well! I’d given my own kidney cat fluids for years before she died. Tilly, I’ll give you fluids every day and you can peck around our ground floor for as long as you like.

If I could move a dead cat, I could do so much more. If I could get through an animal’s pre-death march without kneeling by the toilet, suddenly finding God, praying that I don’t throw up again, I could foster more cats. I could give them up for adoption to whomever the shelter deems fit. I could have my own shelter. I could be a vet, or at this point, at this age, a vet tech (which I did when I was 20, at an animal hospital in Morro Bay, where, if I saw “PTS” on the schedule, which stood for put to sleep, I’d hide in the back, in the kennels, with the boarding dogs.) I could foster old dogs and cats, and give them a family for their last days. 

Or, I could say something to my vegetarian daughter to give her some peace when I hear her scream while watching the latest dinosaur show on Apple TV, the one filmed like a nature show, the one that all her friends recommended. I hear a shriek and run out of the bathroom to see the last baby T Rex in a cute line of swimming baby T rex’s dragged down to the bottom of the ocean by a prehistoric whale. 

“I want to keep watching,” she cries when I reach for the remote. So, ok. We watch together as the remaining babies make it to land, then poke at a dead sea turtle. 

“It’s ok because he’s already dead,” she tells me, recovering. “It’s ok to eat dead things. It’s nicer.” 

So we watch. The little bitty T Rex babies peck at the dead turtle. I’m prepared for gore, but, mercifully, the scene changes. Baby sea turtles! Baby sea turtles flopping their flippers on the sand, to the water. 

I go back to the bathroom, dragging my dog with me because she rolled in something foul and is now in need of a bath when I hear more screaming. I run back out, and the velociraptors have come, and it’s a baby sea turtle massacre, and we can’t find the remote. We look and look and my daughter is on the couch red faced and screaming but she can’t look away and we can’t find the remote and my husband roars, “You had it last,” and he’s right, I did, and this too is my fault because I’m never really paying attention when I put things down or when we are picking a show.

There’s this, and then there’s our dog, in the corner, shaking in anticipation of her bath. She doesn’t like when the children are upset.

I’m going to write Apple TV a letter.