Fiona Apple's Heartbreakingly Beautiful Letter To Her Fans About Staying With Her Dying Dog

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58. I took in a red kitten because he was insane and no one else would have him.

David was born in what we call a kitty concentration camp, one of those horrible houses you see on TV with Animal Control in hazmat suits carrying out carrier after carrier of traumatized, ill, or dying animals. One of those places where an earnest rescuer has slipped into dangerous obsession.

For the first ten years of his life he was barking mad, and then he gradually, slowly, one stunning breakthrough at a time, became a cat. He died of kidney failure at 14. For the last year of his life he required subcutaneous hydration. I would hold up the bag and the syringe and he would jump into my lap so I could stick the needle under his skin.

When I found him sleeping in his litter box because he had lost all control, I told him we would be going to the vet and I didn't think he would be coming back because he was suffering more than he could endure. Then I spread a tarp over my bed and put a shower cap on my head, and David left the litter box after three days to spend his last night curled around my head. I will never forget the fevered determination as he walked down the hall from the bathroom to my bed. After he died in my hands, he weighed nothing. I don't know how he'd had the strength to walk.