As I write this, my mother’s cat Maoler is in an animal hospital on the other side of the island from me, in intensive care. A naso-gastric feeding tube was inserted this morning; they couldn’t afford to wait for him to get hydrated and strong enough for the general anaesthesia that would be needed to insert an esophagostomy tube. When he was admitted yesterday morning, he weighed only 1.95kg. He’s weak and frail, and there are no guarantees that he’ll pull through.

Nobody has been able to figure out why Maoler is this way. He’s only about seven years old, far too young for his body to be giving out on him. Blood tests haven’t flagged any major problems. They haven’t found any evidence of cancer. The ultrasound specialist and the scans are apparently inconclusive, but the other vets didn’t see anything that would explain any of this. And yet this cat, usually active and curious, is quiet and lethargic and wasting away.

The only theory at the moment is that Maoler has been grieving. Kiki, the family’s older cat, died at the age of 17 towards the end of July. My mother says that Maoler’s appetite gradually decreased after that, until he stopped eating completely. Nothing has worked: switching up brands and flavours of food, tempting him with treats that he used to love, an appetite stimulant from the vet. He just got thinner and quieter, the decline accelerating in the past week. If this theory is correct, then all we can say is that Maoler has been losing the will to live.

I don’t see Maoler often since I don’t live at my parents’ anymore. But when I stayed over, he would come into the room at night, jump on the bed and try his best to insert himself in front of my laptop or book, demanding attention. He would ask for head pats. He liked to stare at me until I made a fuss over him. He often looked stern, but acted like a baby. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly naughty, he liked to scratch at the door, then run away when I went to open it to let him in or out—his idea of the perfect cat prank. To know that right now, he’s tiny and skinny and unwell and at risk of never being able to go home fills me with a deep sadness that I’ve spent all day trying to process.

But the sadness also has more than one source. Every morning when I wake up and check my phone for news I am inundated with pain and anger and desperation and grief. There are articles and videos and reels and posts about the latest airstrike on Gaza, footage of exhausted, traumatised doctors sobbing or screaming for someone, anyone, to stop the violence, end the carnage. There are joint statements and petitions, urging, demanding, begging for peace and an end to occupation and oppression. So far, they seem to fall on deaf ears.

In the face of so much devastation, it feels disproportionate to be so shaken, so upset, about a cat. There is certainly no equivalence. Yet all the sorrow and helplessness—for murdered civilians, for the toxicity and hate I read online, for Maoler—bleeds together in my head, in my heart, in my body. The grief seeps deep into my bones, making them weigh me down. It sits heavy on my chest and reminds me that there is too much, too much hurt and cruelty in this world, and there is so little—nothing, really—I can do. In a therapy session last month I was reminded to focus on the things that I can control rather than on the things that I can’t. But there is so, so little that I can control, and today that knowledge has been both unforgiving and suffocating. I can save no one, neither human nor cat.

My heart ached all day.