Sarah

Our older cat, Sarah, was nearly twenty-two when she passed away last week. That's ancient, for a cat. She'd been deaf for a couple of years, and somewhat frail, but almost up until the end, she had a vast enthusiasm for her three primary interests in life—food, peeing, and finding a warm body to cuddle next to.

We'd resigned ourselves to losing Sarah last year when all three of our cats were struck by a mystery virus, after we put our house on the market. Despite the fact that she was a crazy mess who couldn't breathe and stopped eating and drinking for two days, Sarah managed to bounce back even before the virus abruptly took our middle cat, Chloe. After that tragedy, any extra time we got with Sarah was more or less a blessing.

Sarah loved the smaller apartment in which we've been living in Connecticut. She had no stairs to climb in order to reach her litter box. The paths from her favorite sleeping places to the water dish and food pan were short and swift. In her last months she took a lot of pleasure in finding unique places to nap. She investigated and made nests in any open cupboard. She would hop on the bed and take a circuitous route across pillows and bookcase shelves and laundry baskets to the tops of the bureaus, where she would nap in the sun, next to the windows.

She also loved to go outdoors, here. Whenever someone would head for the door, she'd perk up and scamper to follow. I'd proscribed Sarah from any of the usual supervised outdoor trips I take with Fred, because she has had a lifelong tendency of vomiting, liberally and copiously, that was only intensified when she ate grass. (Once, notoriously, she stuck her head under the lid of our grand piano and yakked up on the strings.) The courtyard between our house and the church is paved with slate, however, with very little grass. She enjoyed sunning herself on the warm stones, over the summer.

The screen door of our apartment doesn't shut immediately when it's closed; it hangs open at the quarter point, lingers for a while, and then gently closes ten seconds later. In August, Craig left the house for a rehearsal one afternoon and didn't notice Sarah escaping through the screen door behind him. He came back an hour and a half or two hours later to find her sweetly and complacently occupying the stoop outside the door. I'd no idea she'd gotten outdoors and was in the middle of making dinner when the pair of them returned. Craig was both frantic and remorseful, but Sarah glowed with the satisfaction of one who'd enjoyed a secret adventure.

It cheers me up to think she had that one last hurrah.

Sarah started to slow down the weekend before last. She stopped nagging us for food in the mornings; she ceased running for the door when I'd walk out to get the mail. She suddenly wasn't able to hop up onto the bed any longer, and even the much lower sofa was too much of a strain. By that Monday, she'd stopped eating. We kept her close, putting her next to us on the bed at night and keeping her by us during the daytime. She simply seemed to be winding down, like a top spinning in decreasing circles. By Wednesday we had to face a rough decision—was it kinder to have her put down, or simply to keep her by us until the end. We decided on the former. I couldn't bear the thought of her having some kind of terrible, painful medical emergency in the middle of the night or at some time when the vet's office wasn't open. We made an appointment for the afternoon.

We wrapped Sarah gently in a towel and drove to the vet's that afternoon. She passed away in my arms on the way over. And you know, rather than meeting the end on a cold exam table, I'm glad she went that way—quietly, of old age after a very long and happy life, warm, in my arms and surrounded by the two people who loved her most.

Isn't that all any of us could really hope for?

Words from a WoWcaholic

My name is Vance, and I'm a WoWcaholic. I've been WoW-free for about six months, now.

I gave up World of Warcraft, the online multiplayer game that millions play, after a long love affair with the game that lasted over half a decade. My favorite thing to do in the evenings, after the work of the day was over and I had the leisure for it, was to log in, toodle around on one of my characters there, and relax. I played the original game—vanilla WoW, they call it, from close to the original release. I suffered through the indignities of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, as my characters were clad in armor of increasing multi-colored clownishness (for the men) or increasing skimpiness (for the chicks). I plowed through the snows of the Wrath of the Lich King. Then, when the third expansion, Cataclysm, came out . . . well, after a little of it, I was done.

Sometimes when people leave the game and write about it, they have a long laundry list of ills they want to communicate. I really don't. Sure, I was a little underwhelmed by the high-level content in the third expansion, and by the short length of time it took my first character to reach the top level of 85, from the previous cap of 80. I mean, basically all he did was explore the new profession of archaeology with some leisurely digs for artifacts and boom, he was 85 within a week, without having even visited any of the new zones.

And yeah, I had some dissatisfaction with the changes in raiding—the end-game activity that involves large groups of players attacking the same content (over and over, usually for weeks and months) for the game's best treasures. Never mind that for three or four years I'd always been game to be part of other people's groups, often anchoring them as one of the so-called 'tanks' who lead the way and absorb most of the damage from monsters—which I hated, by the way, but agreed to do because someone needed to do it, and the enjoyment of being in a large group outweighed my own reluctance to perform the task. Despite hours and hours over the years doing that, when the changes came out, I was part of no one's group, and there didn't seem to be room for me anywhere, any longer.

No, I had some minor gripes along those lines, but one day I was playing and sending a priest of mine through the desert lands of Uldum, and I thought about all the quests he had yet to do, and the dungeons he'd yet to suffer through the game's random matching system, and then all the crap he'd have to craft, and all the daily quests he'd have to do to get money in order to buy some starting end-game armor for the raids to which I wasn't being invited anyway, and I thought to myself, You know, this is too much like work. The fun had drained out of the game for me.

So I put it away for a week, to see if I felt the same a few days down the road. Then I quietly canceled my account, and deleted the game from my desktop.

That was last April, and I've been WoW-free ever since.

Now, usually people who've quit the game like to pontificate about how much better they are since quitting. They talk about how they now have time for Life. Whatever that is. They manage to make it sound as if now they're not playing a computer game, they have time to finish that novel they were working on, and read Proust, and commit themselves to noble and charitable causes. I'm not going to make those claims, and not only because I completed several novels while still managing to have a great deal of fun with the game. And frankly, what I have more time for now is reading and television. One of those might sound noble, but the other involves a lot of reality shows and Top Model, and I'm not going to claim any superiority for it.

No, primarily I can't say I'm better free of the game because I still miss it. Some parts of that world I knew and liked better than my own neighborhood. I still have dreams about flying on dragon wings over mountain ranges and marshes swarming with gurgling Murlocs. I miss working with real, remote people as part of a group and killing imaginary monsters with our magics and weapons. I made some good friends through the game; it's tough to denounce anything that leads to people enjoying each others' company.

But every time I get the itch to return, I think about all the snake eyeballs and the tiny jewels and magical beans I'd have to collect for the in-game quest-givers, and I think about the accumulated hours I've wasted waiting for people in my groups to get back from bathroom breaks, and I think about the monotony of the repeated quests I'd have to do for money, and I think I'm well out of it.

I miss it. But I don't, at the same time. And for now, I'm good with that.