I have so few photos of BeeGee, she so seldom came out of the closet and
She started showing up with the rest of the neighborhood strays around 2012 or so, a full-grown cat we guessed was female because her head was smaller than the tomcats. Of that group I fed for months — we called them Blackie, Black Girl, and Hitler — with occasional visits from others — she and Blackie let themselves be captured and became Mackie and BeeGee.
During the first many months, after eating a safe distance away from the other cats and any people, she would go back down the street. I’d follow at a safe distance and she would cross into the yard of a vacant house and disappear. The house was vacant for years, probably a foreclosure as a rental house would have been rented again. So we imagined the people who lost the house left their cat behind.
We kept waiting for signs of kittens, for her to swell in size, or start carrying them over to our house where the food was, but several seasons passed, and there were no kittens. I am guessing she was adopted as a fixed rescue cat, and because she was so unaffectionate and aloof, never bonded with her humans and so they left her behind. She never really bonded with us, either. Finally, in the fall of 2013, after several attempts to bring her inside — she hid under the desk in my office and ran for the door every chance she got, and if she was let out, she’d be gone for days — she started staying inside longer or coming back sooner. We took her to the vet in September 2013. They shaved a bit of her stomach and confirmed she was fixed. She got her shots and tests. She promoted herself to closet cat.
She chose our walk-in closet to live in, and there she stayed for the next five years except when she ran for the front door so she could go outside and sit in the sunlight in the front yard. She didn’t go to the backyard and didn’t return to her old house. She took her meals in the closet. She would not come out to the kitchen to eat. I put a litter box in there because she was terrified of crossing the path of another cat on the way to other boxes. I made beds on the shelves for her. She slept in baskets and drawers in various nooks of the closet. If she did visit other rooms, she jumped from furniture to furniture, never walking on the floor.
Except for an annual rabies shot, she had few medical issues. In May 2016, she developed a wound on the right side of her anus. We never knew how it happened, but it looked gruesome. My vet shrugged it off, maybe another cat bit her. Other than that, her life was uneventful until she developed what looked like big pimples on her cheek and forehead. I took her to three vets between 2017 and 2018 and they all shrugged it off. A clogged sweat gland. Leave it alone as long as it didn’t get bigger.
The other odd thing that happened was in the summer of 2017, our cat Neelix died. Neelix was a small, problem cat who had ruled our lives and the household for 15 years. After he was gone, BeeGee started venturing out of the closet, even to the point of sitting with me on the arm of my chair in the living room. We couldn’t believe it. Had Neelix kept her in the closet for five years? We were overjoyed at how much she was suddenly enjoying life, spending more time near us, and really making the most of her hours outside, feeling the sun on her back. It was her last summer. Maybe she knew it.
I took her to the vet for her annual rabies shot in August 2018. Her weight was down a pound and a half from her 2015 high, but it went unnoticed. A month later, I was at another vet, still looking for a solution to those pus sacs on her head. Soon after, the lump on top of her head appeared. I thought, another pus sac, only this one is going to break through the skin. Then her behavior started changing, the way cats get when you know they are dying. They pick a new spot and never move. Her new spot was on top of our bookcase headboard. They stop showing up for food and act disinterested when you bring it. They look thinner. They turn their head away from you. They are visibly annoyed if you want to hold them.
I went to a new vet. The young doctor took her away to try to drain the lump on her head and came back and shrugged. There were other lumps on her body, on her leg, by her rib cage. The fluid he had gotten out of the head lump was not good. What can I do? He shrugged. He was offering me nothing. That told me something.
In early November, I went back to my original vet, pretending I had just noticed the lump on her head. They confirmed four lumps and shrugged. She would need X-rays. Her blood work from August had warned there was something amiss, they just didn’t know what. I requested the blood test be sent to the oncology where I had been so often with Neelix. They confirmed all the lumps were cancer. They wanted a new blood test. I went back to my regular vet. BeeGee got so upset at the attempt to draw blood, breathing heavily, we thought she was going to die on the table. I had them call the oncologist and say they couldn’t get it, but give me some painkillers anyway and let’s try something. They reluctantly agreed and phoned in a prescription for Toceranib and Gabapentin, the latter just to sedate her for the next attempt to get blood.
The prescriptions were called in to a compounding pharmacy in New York (I live in Virginia) on a Wednesday night. $188. They didn’t come until the following Monday evening. In the interim, I was in the hospital getting a bowel resection and was away from home and BeeGee five days. My husband reported daily that she was not doing well, not eating, listless, keeping to herself. Sometimes she would get in bed with him and sleep by his side for awhile. Monday night when the pills came, he put on the rubber gloves and gave her one.
Either it was too late or it killed her. I came home from the hospital the following day and she was on the bed, not that interested or excited that I had returned. I gave her a hug and left her alone. That evening I was encouraged that she had returned to the closet and was on tap of the cabinet where she took her meals, pushing around some dry food. Maybe the medicine was working already! She was in the closet when I went to bed that night.
The next morning, my husband woke me up with the news that she was dead. When he got up, he noticed her tail sticking out from under the bed. It didn’t move. When he reached in, he could tell from her level of stiffness she had been dead for at least a few hours. Under the bed was not her place, but she had chosen it to slink away from us. He had already boxed her, and when I went to look at her, I saw that she had passed stretched out, her paws delicately crossed like a lady. I hope it was peaceful. We heard nothing.
My husband and I have buried eight cats together. One at his house when we were dating, another at his mother’s house when we moved in together into a city apartment. The next three were buried in a lovely spot in the woods near his mother’s new house in the country and that was going to be our cemetery. It was elaborately decorated. There was a cat and a dog there, too, from other family members. One cat we had acquired old and sick from a neighbor who was going to put her down, and we only had her two months when she passed away in the middle of a blizzard. The only house we could get to with a yard was an aunt’s and she let us bury Callie there. Then my mother-in-law got ill and had to sell her house, and we lost our country cemetery. At her new house, closer in, we buried two more cats, but that exhausted the available room. When my mother-in-law died, she didn’t even require burial, choosing to be cremated. She cremated all her pets. We didn’t feel like we could keep using the yard.
My husband has dug graves in vicious heat and blizzard conditions.I had just gotten out of the hospital and he’d have to take care of me for a week or more, doing all the household chores, so I didn’t push finding a new cemetery. I agreed to a cremation. I didn’t have a deep attachment to BeeGee because she had been so remote, living in the closet, so I thought it would be easy.
The crematory was a miserable little office in an office park near our house. The chair my husband sat in literally fell apart. The attendant was a retired gym teacher who quickly removed our corpse to a backroom after offering us a good-bye time, which we declined, and went through the contract. We signed and paid the $144. He said the ashes would be ready in 5-7 days. It’s been eight days as I write this and I haven’t heard anything. I suspect they wait until they have a freezer load of bodies and then ship them to another cremation place. I thought they did it there.
I don’t know what else to say. BeeGee was with us about five years in the house and we forget how long she was an outside visitor. She chose to only reluctantly be a housecat.
