The Insulin I Carried to My Mother’s Door

The routine

You learn a routine with a diabetic cat, the same way you learn one with a diabetic person.

Seven in the morning, he eats. Then he gets his shot, a tiny pinch of skin between the shoulders, quicker than you can say it. Seven at night, the same. You check his sugar at home with a little meter and a lancet at the edge of his ear. You write it all in a notebook on the refrigerator.

I work three twelve-hour nights a week, seven at night to seven in the morning. So I built my life around his clock.

I give him his evening shot at 6:45, before I leave. I get home by 7:40 and give his morning shot then. A timed feeder gives him a small meal at midnight so his sugar doesn’t drop too low between.

It is not hard. It is just every day.

He stayed thin. Diabetic cats do, even when they’re doing well. He was eleven pounds when he was young and big-boned, and he was eight and a half now. Dr. Lindgren said eight and a half was a good weight for him.

I had never once explained any of this to my mother. She never asked. She had never seen me give him a shot.

The key

My mother has had a key to wherever I live since I was nineteen.

It started when I moved into my first apartment over the hardware store, and she said a mother ought to be able to get in if something happened. I never argued. My dad drives over the road for a freight company out of Grand Island. He’s gone three weeks at a time. Mom is alone in that house a lot.

What I did not know, until later, was how often she had been using that key.

On my work nights, my mother had been letting herself into my apartment. She’d sit on my couch with Tucker in her lap and watch television for an hour or two, then lock up and go home. She never told me. Tucker certainly didn’t.

On one of those nights, the Tuesday before all of this, she noticed the litter box hadn’t been scooped. I’d been running late. She noticed his food bowl was empty, because the feeder only gives him his midnight meal and it was ten. She picked him up and felt his backbone and his hips under her hands.

And she decided, sitting on my couch in the dark, that her daughter was starving her cat.