At its bare minimum, life really doesn’t require much. You breathe, you eat, you drink, you go to the bathroom, you sleep. Being able to walk between the bedroom and the bathroom helps, but is optional. Shopping for food and cooking it, cleaning the bathroom, or even working to earn money is another level up..

But that minimum isn’t what life is really about. Life is about having the exuberance to go out and run and dance or play, or the passion to make a difference in the world, or the drive to have a successful and interesting career, or just a wild and crazy dream to follow wherever it takes you.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’m watching how much energy and life is left inside Prussia. When she was younger, she was the picture of that delightful excess, and would run around and play, and jump and try to catch birds or attack any other cats she saw. In the last few years she became an old cat: She wasn’t really into playing and very seldom ran anywhere. We had trained her not to get on kitchen counters, eventually she couldn’t jump there from the floor even if she wanted to. She slept a lot, but cats always do that. Just the same, I thought she was sleeping more. She still wandered all over the house, still hated other cats and let them know it. Recently, we start placing “steps” for her, so she could climb up to places she used to be able to jump easily.

Prussia has been hanging in there at the bare minimum level for about three weeks now. We can clearly see that there is hardly any flesh between the bones and the fluff. But the harder thing is to watch is how little life is left in her. She manages the bare minimum pretty well. She breathes. (And we check to make sure that she continues) She sleeps. (Probably twenty-two hours a day of sleeping, napping, and resting.) She still drinks, but not much, and is pretty dehydrated. She eats, now mostly a little gravy around the catfood. She goes to the bathroom. (with difficulty, and I won’t gross anybody out with details!) She can walk, but she isn’t very steady and doesn’t try very often. Sometimes it looks like she didn’t find the energy to put her tail where it belongs but just sat on it in a un-cat-like way. Her world is getting smaller.

Whenever we see a sign of energy above that bare minimum, we celebrate. Even if it is just her tail twitching in annoyance at us, her mother hens. This morning we woke with her at our feet and heard her purring. And when we offered her food, she ate it. Two or three times in the last week, she found the energy to climb the stairs and check out the upstairs of the house. Once she even walked out the front door and wandered through the yard.(Margaret had to convince her not to crawl under the fence into the neighbor’s yard for fear that she would get in a cat fight that would finish her.) Other times she is just very alert and bright-eyed, looking around at us. I wonder if she remembers jumping to the top of the fridge or the fireplace mantel.

Some people I know aren’t able to live life with all this wonderful excess; they are just able to manage the basics of survival, plus (perhaps) a job of some sort. I know some people are sick, or depressed, or very old and infirm, or just somehow lost, but it saddens me to see life a reduced when it doesn’t need to be. I hope to live with as much of this wonderful excess as I can for as long as I can — maybe even equivalent to Prussia’s ninety-and-counting cat years.

Every morning, I wake up with the cat on my feet. That’s normal, for people who sleep with cats. But it’s become a source of terror for me, and I spend my first few moments contemplating my fear. What happens if I move my foot and the cat doesn’t? Finally, I get up my nerve and slowly slide my foot out from under her inert body. She twitches in response, and I breathe a sigh of relief. We have both lived another day.

Trying to get her to eat is my daily challenge. After a week without food, she finally consented to sip some of that magical elixir, tuna water. We even snuck some tuna into the water, and she ate that. But then she stopped, and we got desperate.

Perhaps the tuna water wasn’t fresh enough. We abandoned the open can in the fridge and opened another. And another. And … We talked with a good friend about the problem. “Try Fancy Feast. I don’t know what they put in there, but any cat will eat that stuff.” It worked for a couple of days. Now the half-full cans of Fancy Feast sit on top of the half-full tuna cans in the fridge. “Have you tried baby food?” asked the checker in the grocery store. Now there’s a half jar of baby food in there, too. Barry remembered a cat that lived to the ripe old age of 25 on cottage cheese. Prussia ate a teaspoon of the stuff. Now she has two shelves of half-eaten food in the fridge.

In the middle of respiratory bug that had me flat on my back for three days, I dragged myself into the kitchen, got out the saucepan, and set to work. I used tuna oil, butter, and flour to make a particularly odiferous (even with a stuffed-up nose) roux. I thinned it with fish and chicken stock and seasoned it with nutritional yeast, Prussia’s favorite. Then I spooned out a small dish of this “kitty gravy,” cooled it slightly, and presented it to the patient. She sighed, stood up on wobbly legs, and turned around, her backside facing the dish. “Suit yourself!” I harrumphed.

Barry and I are like anxious mother hens, using every excuse to go into the bedroom and check on her. She spends most of her days at the foot of our mattress on the floor, sleeping or sitting quietly. I try not to pester her, watching from the door until a twitching tail or ear lets me know that it is still “business as usual.” Occasionally, she gets annoyed with the attention and retreats under another bed. Then I have to get all the way down on the floor to see her tiny dark form. She glances up at me, serene, making me feel like a total fool, groveling on my hands and knees after the cat.

She has always been a proud cat, strutting gracefully with both head and awe-inspiring tail held high. I’m sure that’s the way she’ll want to be remembered. Me, I’m not proud. Maybe I can get her to eat by crawling around on the carpet on my hands and knees with this jar of baby food in one hand and a spoon in the other. The poor cat will probably die laughing. And I’m sure she’ll remember me that way.

Yesterday, we took Prussia to the vet. We’d called ahead, letting him know that we wanted to set up a hospice plan for her.

He was kind, gentle, and nice, and Margaret was coping well at the time; I was almost able to keep my voice modulated normally, and my eyes were just a little moist. He explained that cats are very good at conserving their last energies, and that Prussia had used up most of her reserves by now. “It’s like you’re used to living on a dollar a day, but then you have no income, so you figure out how to live on a penny a day. Now you only have eleven cents in the bank, so you figure out how to live on a quarter of a cent a day.”

On the way home, we stopped at our friend Margaret’s house. We’d lived there for a year with Prussia, and she and Margaret’s cat, Clingon, were mortal enemies. When the van door was opened, Prussia started walking toward it like she was ready for a walk. So I put her harness and leash on. She walked me up the front steps, around the house to the back door. She knew the house, and wanted to be let in. When she saw her nemesis through the glass door, suddenly she showed her old aggressive streak, growling and hissing and almost lunging at him. I said to Prussia “Those eleven cents are yours to spend — do whatever you want with them!” We kept them separated, because this time, he might win the fight.

I don’t like the price I’m paying for all this, but I am amazed at how I have a much better understanding of what really is important. I remember saying a few years ago that I would be really sad someday because Prussia would eventually die, and I’ve been failing to groom her well enough to keep her coat clean and free of mats. (She did the job very well when she was much younger.) I was afraid she would die with her fur all a mess. It would have been easier if Prussia liked being groomed, but she doesn’t. Now I regret that just a week ago, I groomed her until she got mad at me.

Margaret has often told me the story of how this little tiny ball of fluff with a huge voice and every parasite known to feline-kind appeared outside her apartment. Since she had no cat food, Margaret gave her tuna, which figured prominently in her own menu at the time. Prussia has loved it ever since; she always got the water drained off, while Margaret got the fish (sometimes, Prussia got a little of the fish too). Menus have changed, and I never really liked canned tuna, so it’s become a rare treat for her. It took us five days after Prussia stopped eating cat food to realize that it was time to feed her anything she would eat. At first, we tried ice cream, milk, and cheese. People recommended Fancy Feast and baby food. But you should have seen her perk up when we brought a can of tuna to the bedroom and opened it in front of her. She slurped down the water and started eating again. She came into our world with canned tuna. She’s probably going to leave our world on canned tuna, too.

Today, I said it. “Prussia may be dying.” Margaret said, “I was OK until you said it.” An hour or so later, I said, “I was OK until I said it too.”

We have been watching our cat slowly grow older and weaker for three or four years. She can barely jump anymore, she sleeps a lot, she’s getting bad mats in her fur; She has become a finicky eater and is losing weight. Margaret admits she has been preparing herself for a while now, even though she doesn’t exactly say for what. For the last year or two, Margaret gets upset when the cat “sleeps” or “naps” without quite closing her eyes. It would freak Margaret out, so she has taken to watching for Prussia’s side raising and lowering as she breathes.

We have often talked about how inconvenient it is to have such a long-lived cat — we have been planning to sail around the world, and we hear that kitty passports can be a real pain. It also means we can’t go away for long without either taking her with us or finding someone to take care of her. She is eighteen now, and would be nineteen sometime in July; We never really expected her to live this long anyhow. I guess we really expected her to live forever, like you always do.

But five days ago she pretty much stopped eating. I never worry at first when she does that, because she would often go a day or two hardly eating, and then get hungry the next day, and eat a lot of food. Today I said the unspeakable. However hard you try to prepare yourself, there is no preparation, and today I know that.

I am again remembering two things: First, nothing is permanent in this world; in other words, death is a unavoidable part of life. I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life learning this in the true and visceral way, not just intellectually. Second, nothing in life is certain. I have always expected to outlive Prussia, but I have no way of being sure that will happen.

Of course I’m still hoping she will recover her spark and fight her way back to heath…for a few months or years. But I can’t stop my brain from racing around through the other possibility and its consequences for us.