(no subject)
I guess it's a measure of how much my life has moved to other things that it's been a week since and I haven't posted yet.
When I was in high school my father brought home a thin, undernourished cat who was also a purebred Balinese. The people who owned her were apparently dumber than a box of hair because they paid for a papered cat with long fur and one of the people in the house was very allergic. So, these Rhodes scholars put her outside. In winter. In one of the harshest winters this region had ever seen. She was frostbitten when my father brought her home, and she never really recovered from being cold.
There is a whole 'nother story around this, with the way my father mishandled the situation (as he did with so many others), dumping this frightened animal on my mother and leaving the lion's share of the work to her and to me. He refused to have her spayed at first, apparently having some foolish notion of breeding her or something, but that stupidity led to something both tragic and wonderful.
Five kittens. She got out one night, and met up with who knows how many toms, and when we got back from vacation I was sitting on the couch and realized that she wasn't fat from being in the house for a week. She was pregnant.
August 30th overnight into September 1st, 1994, we were graced with five adorable kittens. A full mixed bag; two gray tigers, one shorthair, one longhaired, one tuxedo, one who never really fit into a type (she was white-furred, but there were gray stripes on her tail and orange tabby markings on her head and gray tips on her ears), and one who came out a ball of off-white fluff. Four girls, one boy (the shorthaired tiger).
I of course mooned over all of them. Kittens are one thing I cannot control my squee around. I am a full-grown woman with a college education, but if you get me around a kitten I find adorable (because I find some more adorable than others) I lose all dignity and sense and I turn into a goobering mush pile.
The little off-white one didn't make an impression at first. I named her Butch because that's what she was; a bully who once, while her brother and sisters were all sleeping in a pile at one end of the bed, blindly pushed her way towards them and plowed into them, waking them up and knocking them all about. It wasn't until her eyes opened and her ears unfolded that I noticed she'd been dipped in ink--Siamese. Started on the tip of her nose and spread, and I was in love. I have always had a complete weakness for Siamese cats, the more angular and talkative the better, doesn't matter.
She was her name. One night I looked up and found her hanging upside down on the bannister, playing with her tail, and I said "Oh you little Monkey!" and her head snapped up as if I'd called her by the name she'd chosen for herself that I'd just stumbled upon. From then on it was Monkey, and from then on she was my cat. Living with my parents and a mama cat and four kids (we'd placed Mirath, the odd one, in a good home and the last I heard, she was queen of her household) meant sharing everything; no one cat belonged strictly to any one human but we all had our favorites and they did too--Baby followed my dad around like a little puppy dog and he loved her and was irritated by her in equal measure, Mooshie (the only boy, the big grey tiger who would die of kidney failure long before his sister) was my parents' baby boy, Loofah (the tuxedo, who got her mother's elegance, soft fur, and speed, but none of her neuroses) was my mother's favorite until she was hit by a car, and then my mother turned to Mooshie, who blunted her grief and gave her comfort until he passed as well.
But Monkey was mine. She would respond to my parents and others once she got to know them, but she acted one way with others and another with me. I've already recounted the time she refused to leave my side when I was sick--or rather, she went under protest and came right back to me. She could be whiny and demanding and she made me angry more times than I could count (especially when she wouldn't come in at night, leaving me up all night worrying only to have her show up at dawn the next day as if nothing were wrong) and I encouraged her to be afraid of people because I didn't want someone to just be able to grab her (if I'd had my way she wouldn't have gone outside at all without supervision but try being a teenager and telling that to parents who think that cats "need" to run free or they'll be miserable, bollocks I say). Somehow she managed to avoid the fate of many of my other feline companions over the years. No run-ins with cars, no snatches, and she finally made it to an age where she didn't want to go far. Going outside became an occasional pleasure, one that filled me with relief, that I wouldn't have to worry about her.
Those were the long years, the years I took her for granted, and then when she got solidly into her teens I realized how lucky I was to have her. She didn't look her age for a long time, and even at the end the reaction was always "She can't be that old!" I took her in and had bloodwork done that revealed her chronic renal failure, put her on a special diet that she--unlike her brother--took to for years, and she remained a stable, healthy cat until this April, when she crashed one morning and I rushed her to the vet. The big E was raised at that time but I wasn't ready to let her go unless the vet felt that there was no chance. Monkey, it turns out, wasn't ready either, so we moved into the stage of pills and fluids and needles and trying to get her to eat anything we could, from chicken breast to baby food, watching her getting thinner and thinner, going from 12 pounds to 8 or 9, then 5, then 4. But she still held on, even through vacation which tore me up something awful when I got a call mid-week that she wasn't doing well and I thought "This is it, I'm going to lose her and I'm hundreds of miles away in another country." But she held on, purring the moment I picked her up and not stopping all day. All that day, every time I came into my room, she would chirp at me. I have it on film, a dim video of me walking into my bedroom, slowly homing in on my bed, where a cat sits on the edge and says "Meowp!"
She seemed to hold on fairly well through August. On her nineteenth birthday I took her out to PetSmart and she sampled a few pet beds and once again hopped up on the conveyor belt at the checkout as if wanting to know her purchase price (something I sadly never got on film). September rolled on, and right about the time that another stress factor came into play (one that in retrospect doesn't seem irrelevant, exactly, but doesn't seem to hold the same gravity as before), I noticed that Monkey wasn't even eating her baby food, her teeth were black, and her muzzle seemed swollen on one side. I called the vet Friday morning and got an appointment for the afternoon, managed to get the time off work, and raced home to get my sick baby to the vet. The diagnosis was ulcers in her mouth and throat, which happen with older cats with renal failure, so she got a shot and some B vitamins and a new medicine to give her three times a day in addition to all her others, and at this point I'm just wanting her to be okay, but it was pretty clear to me that night and the next day that she wasn't. A lot of the light had gone from her eyes, which she didn't seem to want to close any more, and looking back I'd already lost her before I came home and found out the ill feeling I'd been feeling that day, the sense of Not-Right was real.
Mattie found her in the hallway right outside my room. She was stretched out on her side, and from her position, she didn't suffer. She was cold and starting to get stiff by the time I got there, and I'm thankful that most of Monday night is a blur. I wrapped her in one of my old shirts, one I'd been saving for just that purpose, and a towel, and went out to the back yard. I dug the grave myself, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done. I have to give commendations to Mattie and my mother for helping me that night, by staying out of my way and not making things any harder than they were.
So. The last of that wonderful bunch of kittens is gone, the one closest to my heart, which now has a ragged, Monkey-shaped hole in it. I'm still in the "too tender to touch" stage at this point, but the healing will happen and go on. This is not the first loss in my life and certainly not the last, but it is certainly one of the sharpest and most painful.
RIP Monkey Bear
September 1st, 1994 - September 23rd, 2013
When I was in high school my father brought home a thin, undernourished cat who was also a purebred Balinese. The people who owned her were apparently dumber than a box of hair because they paid for a papered cat with long fur and one of the people in the house was very allergic. So, these Rhodes scholars put her outside. In winter. In one of the harshest winters this region had ever seen. She was frostbitten when my father brought her home, and she never really recovered from being cold.
There is a whole 'nother story around this, with the way my father mishandled the situation (as he did with so many others), dumping this frightened animal on my mother and leaving the lion's share of the work to her and to me. He refused to have her spayed at first, apparently having some foolish notion of breeding her or something, but that stupidity led to something both tragic and wonderful.
Five kittens. She got out one night, and met up with who knows how many toms, and when we got back from vacation I was sitting on the couch and realized that she wasn't fat from being in the house for a week. She was pregnant.
August 30th overnight into September 1st, 1994, we were graced with five adorable kittens. A full mixed bag; two gray tigers, one shorthair, one longhaired, one tuxedo, one who never really fit into a type (she was white-furred, but there were gray stripes on her tail and orange tabby markings on her head and gray tips on her ears), and one who came out a ball of off-white fluff. Four girls, one boy (the shorthaired tiger).
I of course mooned over all of them. Kittens are one thing I cannot control my squee around. I am a full-grown woman with a college education, but if you get me around a kitten I find adorable (because I find some more adorable than others) I lose all dignity and sense and I turn into a goobering mush pile.
The little off-white one didn't make an impression at first. I named her Butch because that's what she was; a bully who once, while her brother and sisters were all sleeping in a pile at one end of the bed, blindly pushed her way towards them and plowed into them, waking them up and knocking them all about. It wasn't until her eyes opened and her ears unfolded that I noticed she'd been dipped in ink--Siamese. Started on the tip of her nose and spread, and I was in love. I have always had a complete weakness for Siamese cats, the more angular and talkative the better, doesn't matter.
She was her name. One night I looked up and found her hanging upside down on the bannister, playing with her tail, and I said "Oh you little Monkey!" and her head snapped up as if I'd called her by the name she'd chosen for herself that I'd just stumbled upon. From then on it was Monkey, and from then on she was my cat. Living with my parents and a mama cat and four kids (we'd placed Mirath, the odd one, in a good home and the last I heard, she was queen of her household) meant sharing everything; no one cat belonged strictly to any one human but we all had our favorites and they did too--Baby followed my dad around like a little puppy dog and he loved her and was irritated by her in equal measure, Mooshie (the only boy, the big grey tiger who would die of kidney failure long before his sister) was my parents' baby boy, Loofah (the tuxedo, who got her mother's elegance, soft fur, and speed, but none of her neuroses) was my mother's favorite until she was hit by a car, and then my mother turned to Mooshie, who blunted her grief and gave her comfort until he passed as well.
But Monkey was mine. She would respond to my parents and others once she got to know them, but she acted one way with others and another with me. I've already recounted the time she refused to leave my side when I was sick--or rather, she went under protest and came right back to me. She could be whiny and demanding and she made me angry more times than I could count (especially when she wouldn't come in at night, leaving me up all night worrying only to have her show up at dawn the next day as if nothing were wrong) and I encouraged her to be afraid of people because I didn't want someone to just be able to grab her (if I'd had my way she wouldn't have gone outside at all without supervision but try being a teenager and telling that to parents who think that cats "need" to run free or they'll be miserable, bollocks I say). Somehow she managed to avoid the fate of many of my other feline companions over the years. No run-ins with cars, no snatches, and she finally made it to an age where she didn't want to go far. Going outside became an occasional pleasure, one that filled me with relief, that I wouldn't have to worry about her.
Those were the long years, the years I took her for granted, and then when she got solidly into her teens I realized how lucky I was to have her. She didn't look her age for a long time, and even at the end the reaction was always "She can't be that old!" I took her in and had bloodwork done that revealed her chronic renal failure, put her on a special diet that she--unlike her brother--took to for years, and she remained a stable, healthy cat until this April, when she crashed one morning and I rushed her to the vet. The big E was raised at that time but I wasn't ready to let her go unless the vet felt that there was no chance. Monkey, it turns out, wasn't ready either, so we moved into the stage of pills and fluids and needles and trying to get her to eat anything we could, from chicken breast to baby food, watching her getting thinner and thinner, going from 12 pounds to 8 or 9, then 5, then 4. But she still held on, even through vacation which tore me up something awful when I got a call mid-week that she wasn't doing well and I thought "This is it, I'm going to lose her and I'm hundreds of miles away in another country." But she held on, purring the moment I picked her up and not stopping all day. All that day, every time I came into my room, she would chirp at me. I have it on film, a dim video of me walking into my bedroom, slowly homing in on my bed, where a cat sits on the edge and says "Meowp!"
She seemed to hold on fairly well through August. On her nineteenth birthday I took her out to PetSmart and she sampled a few pet beds and once again hopped up on the conveyor belt at the checkout as if wanting to know her purchase price (something I sadly never got on film). September rolled on, and right about the time that another stress factor came into play (one that in retrospect doesn't seem irrelevant, exactly, but doesn't seem to hold the same gravity as before), I noticed that Monkey wasn't even eating her baby food, her teeth were black, and her muzzle seemed swollen on one side. I called the vet Friday morning and got an appointment for the afternoon, managed to get the time off work, and raced home to get my sick baby to the vet. The diagnosis was ulcers in her mouth and throat, which happen with older cats with renal failure, so she got a shot and some B vitamins and a new medicine to give her three times a day in addition to all her others, and at this point I'm just wanting her to be okay, but it was pretty clear to me that night and the next day that she wasn't. A lot of the light had gone from her eyes, which she didn't seem to want to close any more, and looking back I'd already lost her before I came home and found out the ill feeling I'd been feeling that day, the sense of Not-Right was real.
Mattie found her in the hallway right outside my room. She was stretched out on her side, and from her position, she didn't suffer. She was cold and starting to get stiff by the time I got there, and I'm thankful that most of Monday night is a blur. I wrapped her in one of my old shirts, one I'd been saving for just that purpose, and a towel, and went out to the back yard. I dug the grave myself, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done. I have to give commendations to Mattie and my mother for helping me that night, by staying out of my way and not making things any harder than they were.
So. The last of that wonderful bunch of kittens is gone, the one closest to my heart, which now has a ragged, Monkey-shaped hole in it. I'm still in the "too tender to touch" stage at this point, but the healing will happen and go on. This is not the first loss in my life and certainly not the last, but it is certainly one of the sharpest and most painful.
RIP Monkey Bear
September 1st, 1994 - September 23rd, 2013