Someday I’ll look back on these days with a sort of rueful sadness, thinking, Remember how awful that time was, how you thought it would never end? Because end it will, sooner or later, for better or worse, but a page will be turned, or even a chapter, and the story will continue.

For now I am in a strange limboland of not there and not here. I left there, California, a week ago to start a new life in Switzerland, but I’m not here yet. I’m in a sad and horrible place of looking after my sick cat, who clearly did not want to leave California.

He had a good life there. He could go outside and hunt, and often proudly brought me birds and mice and even rats. (Thank you, Filou, very kind of you, now look the other way while I toss the corpse down into the ravine). He was popular with the neighbors, and even had a secret life every afternoon with the little boy and girl across the street. His only brush with unpleasantness was a close encounter with a coyote, until he was rescued by a kindly neighbor.

Then it all changed. I was forced to move, and he couldn’t stay behind. Friends offered a temporary shelter to both of us in their house. He had a huge room to himself and all his toys and catnip and a view on the birdfeeder, but it wasn’t the same. It was cold, I was away a lot, he meowed and no one listened. He was ferried back and forth to the vet no less than five times for various shots and microchips and deworming medications that no customs authority even asked for. By the time he was bundled into his cat carrier to fly to Europe he was already sick. You wouldn’t have thought it to hear him vocalizing along the corridors of Charles de Gaulle airport, but he would not drink or eat.

I have taken him three times to the vet this week. Each time he has his subcutaneous drip he gets some energy and seems on the mend, only to curl up ever tighter into a ball by the next morning. The latest visit, complete with x-ray, has not augured well. One more trip to a specialist, next week, will determine whether he will enjoy his retirement in Switzerland, which has no coyotes.

The point, beyond my anguish and grief, is that my life is on hold, suspended between a period of frenetic activity and a new beginning. I eke out my hours watching television adaptations of Our Mutual Friend, or endless replays of the news on the BBC. I sleep at odd times and check email at odder times. This is a kind of antechamber, where I am waiting for one life to end and another to begin. Purgatory, even. It is pointless to argue that if I had stayed in California Filou would not have gotten sick, it just might not have been precipitated by all the vaccinations and rides to the vet’s. And at this very moment it is pointless to assume he will not be with me to begin this new life, but unrealistic not to face that possibility. But it is, to say the least, a strange coming together of circumstances, and animals often reflect or absorb our anxieties and turbulence, in addition to their own sense of loss. Modern technology may provide a few explanations next week, but not any real answers.

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is only two o’clock in the morning, central European time, as I write this, but who’s looking at clock faces in this country of clocks. Someday I will look back and see the strange hole in my life, made by time and space a little animal’s retreat into illness—or perhaps overwhelming sadness at having lost his home.