My Cat Would Not Let Me Sleep. My Heart Was Failing and I Didn't Know.

I am seventy-one years old and I live alone, and there is a particular fear that comes with that, the one where you wonder who would even know if something happened to you in the night. I do not wonder about that so much anymore, because I know the answer now. My cat would know. My cat did know.

Her name is Clementine and she is a small calico I got from a neighbor's litter eight years ago. She is not a lap cat. She is affectionate on her own schedule and otherwise keeps to herself. We have a comfortable, low-key arrangement, the way an older person and an older cat can. I feed her, she tolerates me, we share a quiet house.

The night it happened I had felt off all evening. A heaviness in my chest, an ache down my left arm that I told myself was from carrying groceries, a kind of clammy tiredness. I am of a generation that does not like to make a fuss. I decided it was indigestion and a long day, and I took an antacid and went to bed around ten.

Clementine would not have it.

She jumped onto the bed, which she rarely does at night, and started pawing at my face. I pushed her away. She came back and did it again, harder, claws out this time, catching my cheek. I sat up annoyed and she jumped onto the nightstand and deliberately, one at a time, knocked my reading glasses and then my water glass onto the floor, staring at me the whole time. Then she started yowling, this awful insistent sound, right in my face, over and over.

I got angry with her. I am ashamed of it now. I felt terrible, the pressure in my chest was worse, and here was this cat making a racket when all I wanted was to lie down. I tried to shut her out of the bedroom and she threw herself at the door and screamed. And somewhere in that, through the fog of feeling so unwell, a thought cut through. Animals do this for a reason. She is trying to tell me something. And the thing she is telling me is that something is very wrong.