BeeGee Comes Home

So I rallied myself to drive to the cremation office and picked up the ashes of BeeGee. The attendant was very "sorry for your loss" over and over and gave me the black gift bag tied with a ribbon, with a metal tag on it with BeeGee's name. He asked if I wanted to sit for awhile in privacy in the inner office. I said no. What am I going to do in the inner office? How will I know when I was over?

So I left, but before leaving the parking lot, I made the mistake of looking through the bag. The wooden box with BeeGee's name on it was there, which made me feel oddly that I needed to get her home right away and not to stop to do other things because she was in the car now.

The paperwork was various cards with maudlin poetry on it, including a little note supposedly from BeeGee telling me not to mourn because she was young and happy where she was now and running around, having a great time, and would see me again. That, of course, immediately made me weep copiously even though I knew it was a computer-generated card everyone got. There was a baby-book type folder with pages I could fill out about Favorite Food and Favorite Things To Do and other memories about BeeGee. Filling that book out is probably a good, healing activity when there are children grieving. But when I got to the last page, I recoiled in part horror and part crushing grief because they had shaved part of BeeGee's fur and put it in a little plastic bag taped to the last page.

This is our first cremated cat. My husband will probably never look inside the bag. Even a month after, he said he wasn't ready, even though his mother's cremated remains are in a jar on the shelf next to where he watches television. I put the bag in the back of the closet, and one day, probably after I am also in a jar on his bookcase, maybe he will be cleaning out the closet and find it and read the poem then.

RIP BeeGee 2018

I have so few photos of BeeGee, she so seldom came out of the closet and  

interacted with the family. I don’t know if she even ever went downstairs.

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.

Current State of the Cats Address

Cat 1 Kira: Picked her up in my sister-in-law’s backyard and took her home. She was full of worms and in failing health after several litters raised in the woods. She was only a kitten herself. She had been abandoned by a girl who had rented a place next to my sister-in-law for awhile. I had already acquired two of her kittens the year before.

Cats 2 and 3, Sulu and Seven: Kira’s sons, acquired when my sister-in-law was renovating her house and they were evicted from her basement. Sulu has always been friendlier and more outgoing than Seven. He came out of the cage first. Seven crawled out later and hid for a long time. Seven had an ear hematoma and it was literally buttoned up. After draining surgery, the vet sewed three buttons in his ear to keep the layers together. He also had what we thought might be a fatal urinary issue, but after one attack, seemed to recover.

Cats 4 through 7, Mackie, Lokai, BeeGee, and Jammer, “the blacks”: All neighborhood strays we fed for a year or more before they finally got beaten down enough by cold weather or heat, or just became familiar enough with us that I could pick them up and take them to the vet and get them fixed. They are all either solid black or black and whites.

BeeGee, aka Black Girl and Baby Girl, was already fixed, abandoned by neighbors down the street who moved and left her behind.

Jammer aka Fat Andy came already fixed, dumped in our neighborhood after being abandoned by the people who adopted him from a rescue group. He even had a chip. We had been feeding another black and white cat, Andy, for many months, when Jammer came around and started stealing his food. I guess Andy thought we were no longer a viable source and we never saw him again. The last time I saw him, I followed him a couple of blocks to see where he went when he wasn't in my yard, and I had to give up after he went over a fence.

Mackie was “the cat in the window” for a very long time, always on the back deck and looking through the window into my husband’s den, wishing he could be inside, but evading our efforts to bring him inside. The first couple of times I tried, he freaked out and we had to let him back out after a day or two. Finally, I just immediately put him in a cage and called vets until one would fix him that day. Even then I let him back out when he recovered, but after that, he didn’t freak out when he was inside, and eventually became reluctant to ever go out. He was in a group of other black and white cats who we never could catch – Sylvester, Whiteface, Andy and Hitler. All those eventually disappeared.

Cats 8-10, Cat Daddy, Jordy, and Odo : The trio from the field. I was leaving for work late and angels told me to take a long-cut, not even a short-cut, through a neighborhood five blocks away that I don’t ever drive through. I passed an open field where I saw three cats walking together. I slowed down, got out of my car, and started walking toward them. The largest and smallest cats ran off, but the middle one came up to me and rolled over. I immediately snatched him up and took him home and put him in the laundry room until I got home from work. His ear was clipped, so we thought a rescue group had already neutered and returned him (catch and release program), but it was a premature clipping because he still had one testicle. Turned out the second had never descended so he needed the female surgery to get fixed. That was Jordy. 

When my husband came home from work that day, he said he couldn't find the kitten I told him I had stashed in the laundry room. We looked all over. He finally spotted him on a shelf in the electrical closet, behind a toolbox. Pulling him out was like his birth into our home. Because he had one infected eye, I wanted to name him Geordi after Geordi La Forge, but it was too difficult a name to spell. So, Jordy.

A few days later, while I had him in the backyard in a cage, acclimating him to the sights and smells of my yard for orientation, the smallest cat from the trio in the field, Odo, suddenly appeared sitting next to his cage. They rubbed their faces through the netting as if they knew each other, which is why I felt for sure this was the other cat from the field. "There's his running buddy," my husband said.

I fed the little cat for a month before I was able to grab him by the scruff and get him in the house. Two years later, that is still the last time I’ve touched him. He dodges people, but loves my other cats. Even my husband, the Cat Whisperer, hasn’t been able to touch him. Hence the shape-shifter name of Odo. 

The third cat from the field showed up a few weeks after that, and I fed him in the front yard for months before I was able to grab him and carry him in. Cat Daddy -- because his coloring was so close to Jordy's, he looked like Jordy's daddy -- was weak and had a runny nose. I took him to a clinic, and they ran a blood test and said he was so anemic, that couldn’t promise he’d even make it through the night, and if I took him home without treatment, he’d die. He didn’t look that sick to me, but I left him at the vet, figuring that was the end of him. Two days later they called me to come get him and gave me a bill for $800. I talked them down to $600, since it wasn’t technically even my cat. Then I saw a photo contest on Twitter for How Would You Spend $500? I entered Daddy’s photo and won. So since Daddy mostly paid for himself, I kept him. He now weighs 22 pounds.

Cat 11: Tinker. I just decided the next cat, whoever it was, would be Tinker, and there were three possibilities, not counting Kanga, who I kept in the house twice for a week each time, but he kept trying to bust through the window, so I let him go. Tinker started showing up from time to time. My husband called him Fluffy because of his long, reddish-black-dark brown hair. When he got to the point where he’d take his meals on the front stoop and let my husband touch him, I said, grab him. The two others of a similar size might be his littermates, but they only come by late at night looking for food and run off as soon as I open the door. Tinker and Odo both had testicles, which meant a lot of stalking and staring, and sometimes a wrestling match and a high-pitched chase. Tinker has made no effort to escape the house. He has since had his testicles clipped, with hopes he will not challenge Odo to a duel every time they pass.

How Chatterbox Came to Us

On the evening of his death, Aug. 28, 2018, I looked up his chapter on how he came to us. In the end, at age 15 or 16, he was the victim of a mysterious wound on his neck that would not heal, and it set off a chain reaction of losing weight, and other head wounds, and a hematoma in his ear that required surgery, and he never really recovered from that. An hour after I took him back to the vet to have the stitches taken out of his ear, he died. I kind of blame myself for agreeing to a B12 shot.

A co-worker came to me in tears. She needed a home for her black Persian cat Imani, her $300 kitten which was now a grouchy 6-year-old. She and her sister had bought this kitten and treated it like their baby, complete with a wardrobe and colored claw covers. Then one sister moved in with a boyfriend who didn’t like cats, or was allergic, so Imani stayed with the other sister until she acquired a designer dog. Imani didn’t like the dog and became irritable. For that offense, she was farmed out to the girls’ father and his new wife, where Imani stayed alone and neglected in an unfinished part of the house. Then dad wanted the cat out.

So that’s where I came in. I reluctantly agreed to take the cat. My first Persian! But it wasn’t a very good experience. Imani stayed in a closet for a week, then came out but was always in a bad mood about something. She chased any cat that came near her, scooting across the floor, looking like a black dust mop. The fact that I couldn’t see her eyes or much of her face made it hard to bond with her. She looked like a pile of fur to me. She wasn’t that crazy about me either.

Then she threw up a hairball on the beige carpet in my home office, and that stain never came out even though it was a supposedly stain proof Berber carpet. I began imaging the stain as an evil cancer and Imani was the demon carrier. The more I scrubbed it, the larger the stain grew.

So I called a cat rescue group that adopted cats from cages at the PetSmart. They had a cage available and thought Imani would be adopted quickly even though the flyer I made warned that she had to go to a no pet, no children home. I didn’t feel too sad taking Imani to the store.

I went to visit her a couple of times a week and she, of course, didn’t recognize me and didn’t seem too disturbed about living in a glass box at a pet store. She just sat there. She couldn’t see the other animals in the cages around her, so maybe she thought she was alone and queen of the room again. Every time I visited, other visitors would be admiring her beautiful long black fur and regal manner. Soon she was gone. I hope she found happiness.

Meanwhile, in another cage was an ugly little gray cat who looked like Neelix’s identical twin. Week after week he was there, small, alone, and unchosen. I finally asked about him and learned the cat rescue people had decided he had to be adopted along with two others because they were attached. The two others, Harry and Blackie, shared a cage, but this one, Chatterbox, was kept separate because he had to eat a special high fiber diet for his irritable bowel syndrome. I have IBS, so I immediately empathized with him, even though I had never heard of a cat with this problem.

Once a day he was allowed in the cage with Harry and Blackie while his cage was being cleaned, and he would hug and lick them; hence, the decision was made that they were all inseparable. I weighed in that I thought the requirement to adopt all three, at $90 a shot, was what was keeping all of them from finding homes. Chatterbox had been a shelter kitten no one wanted, rescued by the cat club on execution day. And then, probably because of his plain looks, chronic diarrhea and Harry and Blackie situation, had spent almost a year in the cage at PetSmart with no takers. He idly passed the time playing with a few toys and was always vocally excited whenever anyone came in to clean up, so they named him Chatterbox.

That crazy gear in my head turned and I was determined to adopt Chatterbox, diarrhea and all, and even pay $90 for him. It took a month of emails and notes pinned to his cage at the PetSmart to convince them to separate him from Harry and Blackie, and it wasn’t until they had someone interested in those two who didn’t want Chatterbox before they finally agreed to let him go separately. Then Blackie’s feline leukemia test came back positive, so all three of them were quarantined for another 30 days until Blackie could be retested, and it turned out to be a false positive.

Meanwhile, I was visiting Chatterbox a couple of times a week, getting into the backroom to hold him and becoming more and more desperate to take him home.

Finally the day arrived and Chatterbox came home and never said a word about missing Harry or Blackie. He immediately took to Neelix and was ready to recreate their lost kittenhood together, even though they were one and two years old. Whenever Neelix went down for a nap, Chatterbox would lick him all over.

It was impossible to keep Chatterbox on his special high fiber diet. He much preferred the other cats’ food, so his bowels went from loose to liquid. We put out more litter boxes, and he tried to make it to them, but didn’t always succeed. You’d pick him up, and feces would drip down your shirt. I tried dosing him with liquid Imodium, which works for me, but didn’t make a dramatic difference with him.

It was only after we packed up the house to move to the next one that I learned the true extent of his problem when I found dozens of dried up puddles of brown inside shoes and behind furniture.

Bobby insisted we keep his PetSmart name, thinking Chatterbox was used to it, instead of giving him a new Star Trek name. I considered Chatterbox his “slave” name. Eventually, I managed to get it shortened to Chatter.

Chatter was just as affectionate to us as he was to Neelix. The girl cats, as usual, wanted nothing to do with him. He slept in our bed with us, which had a bad result one evening when he lost control of his bowels while napping on Bobby’s chest, tail to face. A stagnant pool of brown shot over Bobby’s neck and shoulder and I woke up to yelling. We ran to the bathroom where I had to pull the neck of Bobby’s soiled T-shirt out as far as I could so his head could pass through without rubbing anymore feces into his face. Then he jumped in the shower.

The next day was a Sunday, so my only choice was the emergency vet where they treated the situation like a routine bout of diarrhea, gave Chatter a pill and injected some liquid under his skin to rehydrate him, although that was hardly a problem. After a couple of days without any improvement, I went to my regular vet and told him the whole irritable bowel syndrome story. The vet said that was crazy.

I said Chatter was checked out by the vet servicing the cats at PetSmart. He said that vet was doing the minimum she could get away with since she was donating her time.

He took a stool sample and looked at it under the microscope, came back and said it was the worst case of giardia—intestinal parasites—he had ever seen. A $12 vial of liquid Metronidazole fixed Chatterbox right up, although Neelix managed to catch it, too, and had to have his turn with medication.

Bobby and I cheered as Chatter’s bowels became progressively more solid, and then indistinguishable from the others. He continues to enjoy eating whatever he wants. He has a whole house to live in now, instead of the confines of a cage, and eventually earned the right to go outside because he comes back when you call him and seldom jumps the fence or leaves the yard. With so much agreeable pleasure in his life, he had less to chatter about, so his name doesn’t fit anymore. For a cat who knew nothing but isolation, first in a shelter and then a pet store cage, he is a perfect, pleasant cat. It seems to defy all the rules about establishing a cat’s personality by how it’s handled as a kitten.

***

Chatter is so sweet, and so accepting of all the other cats, and so willing to share his affection with them, the fact that the worst thing to happen to any of them should happen to him hardly seemed fair.

It was a perfect storm of bad luck, bad decisions, and bad parenting on our part.

One Saturday morning in early October, I let all the cats out that were allowed out without supervision, and as the morning wore on, they all came back to the door as usual. What was not usual was Chatter was the first one who wanted back in.

Later on in the morning, Bobby came shouting up the stairs that Chatter was injured and needed to go to the vet right then. I hate those words because I’m always on the fence about going to the vet. I fear the big bill for something that might have resolved itself in time. I always want to wait. And these things always happen on the weekends when our only option is the more expensive emergency vet.

Chatter didn’t seem injured, but he growled if you touched him and his tail was hanging limp. There was no obvious injury. Did something bite him? I called around the closest vets to see if anyone was open and found one was indeed open for 45 more minutes. Off we went.

When I took Chatter out of his cage in the examining room, there was a little bit of blood in the cage, so he did have a cut.

But now I’ll always wonder if it was something that would have healed by itself if I had stayed home. The young female veterinary assistant shaved Chatter’s tail and nicked it, taking off a nickel-sized layer of skin as well as the hair. Now he was bleeding profusely. When the vet walked in, she immediately assessed that whatever the problem was, they had just made it worse.

But, not to worry! Here’s a band-aid and some antibiotics. Come back Monday during regular hours and we’ll fix him up. That’ll be $75.

Chatter seemed fine, and when we went back, his tail was fine, too. X-rays showed it wasn’t broken. He should wear a big collar so he doesn’t pick at his tail. Here’s some more antibiotics and some cleaner to squirt on the wound every day. The worst case scenario is if he doesn’t regain some movement in his tail, he might not recognize it as his tail anymore and keep attacking it and it would have to come off. Other than that, everything is fine. That’ll be $250.

Chatter kept pulling off the collar, so we came up with the idea of bandaging the tail, a bad idea. Small bandages were pulled off. So we bandaged the entire tail. That worked so well, we forgot about it for a week. Then when we took off the bandage, either the scab came off with it and we were back to square one, or it never healed in the first place. He was bleeding profusely again.

We went back to small bandages. The tail scabbed up again and was stiff as a twig. Or maybe, in retrospective, the whole tail died. We don’t know. One night towards midnight, a month after the initial injury, I was trying to put a fresh bandage on the wound that just wasn’t healing, and Chatter ran away. I heard Bobby yelling those dreadful words up the stairs again, “We have to go to the vet! Chatter’s tail is hanging by a thread!” Literally.

That sounded bad. Bobby tends to exaggerate in a panic, but even if that was an exaggeration, hanging by anything is not good, so I grabbed my purse and the cage. He put Chatter in the box and off we raced downtown to the emergency vet. Chatter was quiet, not even giving a mournful yowl periodically about riding in the car. That wasn’t good either.

At the emergency vet, we had to wait. Young couples with happy dogs were leaving. One of the dogs was wearing a medical cone around his head, but he still seemed happy. A young man was there with a yowling cat wrapped in a blanket. They took him first even though we had arrived before him with a cat whose tail was falling off. Then they came for us, and under the lights of the examining room, Bobby pointed out Chatter’s dilemma. It looked like the two parts of his tail were attached by only a thin white string. What happened to the scabby wound in the middle of the tail? It was gone. The vet came in, a boy so young, his complexion was still splotchy, but he seemed on the ball, ready to do whatever was necessary for the animals who come in the middle of the night. He took Chatter away, cage and all.

We sat in the waiting room for awhile. I thought the yowling I was hearing was Chatter, so I went down to another examining room and peeped through the window. The man who came alone with the yowling cat in the blanket was hunched over it. The cat was still yowling.

“Don’t go in there,” the receptionist hissed at me. “He’s saying good bye.” I jumped back. How horrible was that, to be spending your last few moments with your yowling cat before it is put down? This was a place of misery and Chatter was trapped in it. For six years, I had lived in an apartment overlooking the back of this vet’s office, and sometimes I would see them carrying large garbage bags out of the building and load them onto a truck. I suspected the bags were full of dead animals.

The man with the yowling cat came out and spoke to the receptionist. I strained to hear what they were saying, and it sounded like he was going to come back tomorrow. Was the cat going to be fixed and saying good-bye was just for the night? Or was he coming back for the body tomorrow? I was trying to feel bad for him going through this alone, but he didn’t look particularly sad. Maybe he was putting on a brave face.

Whatever…it kept my mind off Chatter, and the huge bill. I was imagining $1,000. So I was almost relieved when the vet came out and gave me the estimate of $650, as if all Chatter needed was some bodywork, like he was a dented car. Fine, fine. We signed the papers and were told we could come back in a few hours to get him. It was 1 a.m. I decided to get up at 5 a.m. as usual and rush back.

Bobby got up, too, and we reclaimed our now bob-tailed Chatter. Bobby called in sick so he could stay home, but I was in the middle of a crisis at work…one person had quit, another had been fired, and the survivors were all walking on eggshells. I was doing my work and the work of the missing, and was afraid to call in sick.

Chatter seemed fine. We had a new pill to give him every day and he didn’t want to wear the collar. After a few days, he perked up enough to pull the collar off and chew off half the stitches in his stump. I heard Bobby yelling again that Chatter had to go to the vet.

I hoped he was exaggerating, but part of Chatter’s stump looked like a jelly donut. So back in the cage he went. We got to Lakeview, the vet that nicked his tail in the first place, right before they closed for the evening. The vet on call was a different one, so we rushed through the whole gruesome story again of how Chatter’s tail came to be missing. She took Chatter away and brought him back with new stitches, a bag of syringes filled with painkiller, and a hard plastic head cone to replace the soft one. That’ll be $100.

He didn’t like the cone, but the painkillers kept him docile enough to deal with it, but when they ran out, he figured out ways to pop the cone off his head and pull at the stitches, and we still had a week to go before they were due to come out.

In the end, we managed. The stump survived and after a long while, the fur grew back. He wiggles his stump with the same expressiveness he did his tail. And when he gets angry or startled, the fur on the stump puffs all out and looks like a rabbit’s tail. But I never went back to that vet.

Neelix 2002-2017

Neelix had made it to his 15th year mark in mid-May of 2017, three and a half years living with nasal cancer, and had one of his better visits with the oncologist. Nothing was wrong; his weight was stable. The tumor was not growing. We were going to buff him up with some Prednisone along with his now just twice weekly chemo pill.

I immediately felt like: this is not good. From long experience, I know animals and people seem to level out at a good place right before they take the final plunge. I had not told the oncologist about the seizure he had six months before where his body just started twisting around. He had immediately recovered from it. Then there was another mild one a couple of months later. I did not tell her about the occasional nosebleeds. I did not want her suggesting we put him down, not as long as he kept eating and walking around. I always blamed the nosebleeds on their examination since they seemed to follow his bimonthly exams.

And so it was this time. It was a bad bleed, too. I’d wake up in the morning and find a trail of blood

spots across the floor, splatters on the wall. He was spending more time in his fortress of solitude, a fabric cube where he felt walled in. During the week of the nosebleed, he stopped eating and I thought, here we go. But the nosebleed subsided after three days and he resumed eating and Memorial Day weekend passed without incident.

My husband said Neelix came out for breakfast the morning of Tuesday, June 6, and when he got home from work, he appeared for dinner and went outside with the other cats. When I came home, he was sitting upright at the edge of the pool, staring into the water. When he heard me walking toward him, he walked toward me, in his usual stiff-legged way. He seemed tired, but he had seemed tired for a long time. In human years, he was in his 80’s. I picked him up, carried him inside and put him down on the floor.

Thinking back now, I wonder if I heard the distress cry earlier but didn’t know what it was or the TV

Gone, as if my heart could resuscitate him

was drowning it out. My husband walked in to ask what we planned to do about dinner, and there was another, louder, guttural noise. We looked at each. He ran to the back room and I followed, but he saw it first and was saying, “oh no” by the time I got there. Neelix was outside his cube, having another twisting seizure, but this time his forearm was in his mouth. I thought we just need to pull his paw out of his mouth, but my husband was pushing me back, “Don’t touch him,” and the other cats were trying to get to him to see what was going on, and he started yelling at the other cats, and I’m trying to reach out and grab Neelix, and it was utter confusion for just seconds.

“I have to hold him,” I cried out, and my husband backed off, but only because he said Neelix had stopped breathing. He reached down and pulled his paw out of his mouth. I refused to believe it. Neelix had bounced back from a seizure before. I grabbed a towel from the next room and scooped him up, but my husband was telling me he was gone. His eyes were open, but he was limp. I didn’t know what to do. This isn’t happening. He is going to come back. He always does. I sat at the end of the bed and rocked him, patted his face, pulled his paw. Come on. Come back.

Time passed. I rocked. My husband disappeared downstairs. When I finally gave up and went to join him, I had to turn away. His grief had swollen his face. No one felt like dinner anymore.

All evening I patted and arranged Neelix so he looked like he was sleeping, and the warmth subsided, and by morning he was a statue with fur. Only then I started to accept he wasn't coming back. I could clean his ears and wipe the crust off his nose without him fighting me.

We had lost our great pet cemetery in the woods behind my mother-in-law’s house when she sold

the house to downsize, and the terrain behind her current house was rough, trees and branches down and hard, unforgiving dirt. Pet cemeteries were too expensive. Cremation was another bill, and I didn’t trust anyone to give me the actual ashes of my actual pet. My husband said there was no place suitable to bury him in our small, gravel yard, so we went to my mother-in-law’s and found a tiny clearing behind the shed. It was an ugly and sad grave.

The unknown to me women who had helped pay for about a fifth of his medical bills through a GoFundMe came back for one last round after I posted his passing, and I was left with just a few hundred left to pay.

I haven’t done a picture book yet, which I did after each of the other cats died. Going through the photos, I was struck by the lack of any of him looking happy or peaceful. I found one and had it enlarged to 16x20, but in most of them, he looks annoyed or stressed or aggravated. In most of the photos, he’s asleep, because that’s when he seemed most relaxed. When he was younger, he would sleep stretched out, or twisted around. He probably felt good then and was carefree. I can only imagine he seldom felt that great the last few years. He was always on the lookout for me coming toward him with a dose of amoxicillin or the chemo pill, or Q-tips and alcohol swabs to clean his eyes and nose. He didn’t like any of it. But he kept eating, and walking, and sleeping, and getting up, and walking around the backyard.

So many worries and fears lifted when the worst happened. You live in fear every day that he’s going to die, and then he dies, and the fear is gone. It lifts off your shoulders and you are weightless with equal grief and relief. Every night for 15 years, he got in bed with us at night and I listened to him breathing, calculating how bad his current cold was, or if the cancer was advancing. I felt his wiry body and wondered why he never gained weight like the other cats. All his life, his stomach was flat and firm.

Now we don’t have to worry if we have enough raw chicken on hand, the only thing he would eat. We stopped buying six to 10 bottles of Reddi Wip with the blue cap, which he had to have several times a day. We stopped going to Arby’s to get him classic roast beef sandwiches, hold the bread, his special treat that always picked him up when his appetite was slack.

His head is as big as a lion’s in the giant portrait now framed on the wall, still watching me to see if I am coming at him with Q-tips and alcohol swabs. But in life he was a tiny cat, a sickly little kitten that needed so much nursing and then was always trying to take off on some adventure only to run out of steam and forget where he was going or why.

My husband tells people he was the bravest, strongest cat. I think he didn’t know how to be anything else.

Cat Naps

The Cattery

Neelix – acquired in 2002 as a sick kitten from a co-worker. Now 14, has been living with a nasal 

adenocarcinoma for nearly two and a half years, which has not increased in size. When I mentioned this yesterday to the original veterinary practice that diagnosed him, they were puzzled. “Usually those things grow fast.” He’s been on chemo pills all this time, which may have stopped it from growing and bought all this time, but may have also have made him thin and frail. On the other hand, he is 14, which is like being a 72-year-old man. (Named for the Star Trek Voyager character. Another character in that series named his cat Neelix after Neelix.)

Neelix

Chatterbox – acquired as a one-or-two year old cat from a Petco sometime between 2003-2004. I thought Neelix needed a friend and bought him for $90. He has been a good friend to all my cats except Neelix, who has always gone it alone. He went unadopted for nearly a year at Petco due to gastrointestinal problems (giardia) we quickly resolved, and because they thought he had bonded with two other cats there and the trio needed to be adopted together. Turned out Chatterbox just likes all cats a lot. We’re thinking he might be around 12-13 years old now. (Kept the name given to him by the rescue organization that handled the Petco sale.) Chatterbox had to have his tail amputated after it was cut worse by a vet's assistant while shaving it to clean a smaller cut, and the tail died and snapped off. We thought at the time that $600 was the worst thing.

Chatterbox

Kira – We know she was having kittens in 2005, so she herself may have been born sometime in 2003 or early 2004. She belonged to a girl renting a room next door to my sister-in-law and was just left behind to live in the woods and keep having kittens. In the summer of 2006, after already taking two of her kittens the year before, I saw her in a weakened conditioned in my sister-in-law’s backyard and just took her home. She has been the greatest cat ever, everything you’d want in a cat, equal parts independent, cuddly, and easy to manage. (Named after Deep Space Nine character Kira Nerys because she was so thin at the time we rescued her.)

Kira

Seven and Sulu – Kira’s sons. Born in spring 2004, so they’re both 12, and huge, Maine Coon looking cats. Sulu is extraordinarily mellow but adventuresome and will wander the farthest when he gets outside. Seven is nervous and apprehensive and had an expensive bout with a bladder infection a few years ago. (Named after Star Trek character Sulu because it rhymes with Zulu and his coloring was mostly white with some head-dressy darker head colors, and Seven named after the Star Trek Voyager character Seven of Nine because he was our seventh cat. And eventually we did get nine.)

Sulu (top) and Seven as kittens

Mackie took a year or so to decide to be a housecat

Mackie – aka Blackie. Age unknown. He started showing up at our house looking for food, already an adult, unfixed tom cat. There were cats before him that looked similar – Sylvester, Whiteface, that eventually disappeared, but for two or three years, we had a crowd of black and white toms hanging around in the evening. Mackie was unusual because he would go into the backyard and look through our windows and sleep on the deck furniture. I tried several times to bring him inside when he was in a weakened state, but he was clearly miserable and desperate to get back out. One day I caught him and managed to get him neutered that same day, then let him go again. He came back. Finally, I just moved him into the house and after bribing him with treats and sleeping on the floor with him a few nights, he decided to become an indoor cat. He likes my husband, and he loves some of my other cats, and he sleeps in our bed. But he is still nervous and apprehensive. At least he isn’t outside in the rain and snow, looking in our window anymore. (Named changed from the identifier Blackie to Mackie because Mackie is more politically correct.)

BeeGee – aka the black girl cat. She would come running down the block when I was feeding the
tomcats and want some, too. Then she would return to a foreclosed house that stayed empty for a couple of years. We think her owners just left her behind. She never showed up pregnant or brought any kittens around, and sure enough, when I finally caught her and took her to a vet, she had been fixed already. Her age is also unknown, and she despises all other cats. So she either sleeps in a box in a closet or under the bed, and the rest of the time, she wants to stay outside. She still goes down the

BeeGee has no interest in being a housecat

block to her old house, but comes back to us every day. I have to carry her in because she won’t walk past any other cat. (BeeGee is the first letters of Black Girl, which is how we described her when she was one of many strays in the yard, and Baby Girl, which is what my husband calls all female cats.) May 7, 2016 I noticed with alarm a huge wound near her anus, even though she was displaying no sign of pain or discomfort. I took her to the in-and-out quick vet who was open on Saturday mornings and they couldn't tell me what it was, and just gave me products to clean it. It may be cancer, and I don't have the money to save her, and it's probably too late anyway at this point.

Jordy

Jordy – Last summer (2015), I was going in late for work and decided to drive through the neighborhood next to ours just for no reason. There’s an open field across from a cemetery in there, and I saw three cats walking across the field, three different sizes. Big, middle and small. Jordy was the middle-sized one, the only one who didn’t run away when I stopped my car. He let me pick him right up. I took him home. I thought he had already been fixed in a feral catch-and-release program because his ear was clipped, but he still had one testicle. At the vet, we found the other one was undescended, so he had to have the female operation to be fixed. To acclimate him to my yard, so he wouldn’t run back the five blocks to that field, I would keep him in a cage in the yard during the day for an hour or two. He was probably born in the fall or winter of 2014-15. (He had an infected eye when I caught him and I should have named him Popeye because he always squinted, but since we had a Star Trek theme going, he was named for Geordi LaForge, who is a blind Star Trek Second Generation character, but Geordi is an unpronounceable spelling of Jordy. I didn’t want the vets calling out “Geo are dee.” My married last name Jorgenson is always mispronounced as George Jetson or George Johnson. Jordy has issues with getting feces stuck in the dense fur around his hindquarters and screams and fights if you try to clean him, so he had to be shaved. Now he has a respiratory infection he caught from Cat Daddy.

Odo

Odo – Odo followed Jordy. I think Odo was the little cat in the field. A week after I caught Jordy, Odo just showed up in my backyard, sitting next to Jordy’s cage. He hid under the deck for a month before I was able to catch him and bring him in the house, but it’s been nine months now and he hasn’t let me touch him since to get him to the vet. He adores Jordy and Mackie and hangs with them and has never tried to escape. Odo was probably born in the spring or winter of 2015 since he was pretty small when he first showed up, and played like a kitten. He would push a pebble all around the deck. That was his toy. He still looks like a kitten. The big-head and shoulders of a tomcat have yet to happen. We were positive he was a girl and didn’t see his underside until he’d been in the house for a month. (Obviously, the shape shifter from Deep Space Night. He shifted from female to male, here to there, outside to in.)

Cat Daddy – May have been the third, biggest cat I saw in the field. He showed up about a month after Odo, in the fall, sitting in my front yard and yelling loudly every time I came outside, even though he ran from me if I approached. So I would feed him. I thought a very pretty cat I called Fluffy would be the next stray I took in, but Cat Daddy would eat all the food and Fluffy stopped coming around. Another similar cat, Fluffy II, would pass through occasionally. And two more black and white tomcats that look less healthy than all the rest. Lokai, who has one all white leg and one all black leg, has been the most persistent in waiting out Cat Daddy. But then Cat Daddy became deathly ill, so ill, I was able to pick him up and bring him inside. The first vet thought he was just tired, maybe had worms, so I got him shots, wormed, and flea meds. But he was still too weak to go back out, so I took him to another vet, who said his red blood cell count was almost non-existent, he was so anemic, and had a cold virus, too. They kept him and pumped him full of antibiotics for three days. So $800 dollars later, Cat Daddy is still in the house, still kind of lethargic, and still not fixed. He has a great appetite, and another round of antibiotics to go through, but he’s still anemic and I don’t know how he would do as a free-roaming outside cat again. But he doesn’t seem real thrilled to be inside. Age unknown, but was a fully grown adult male when I first saw him. (Named Cat Daddy because his coloring is just like Jordy’s, so we pretended he was Jordy’s father.)

Cat Daddy

Update: After Cat Daddy pulled down the drapes and peeled up the linoleum by the front door, I finally decided to let him back out. He seemed better health-wise, and I assumed he might stay around and I could get him back in at night. Jordy caught his virus, and even Seven has sneezed a few times, so the house was getting toxic with 10 cats. Because he's still unfixed, he has a male cat odor that was permeating the house. So I let him out. At first he stayed in the front yard, but then he disappeared. Maybe he went back to his home, if he has one. They will be surprised to see him again after a month, with a shaved front leg where he got IV antibiotics.

Update January 2017: He came back, we got him fixed. He stays indoors now content, and if he goes out, he doesn't leave the yard. He's getting really big. 

RIP: My cats, Niki and Yoda, who lived to be 18 and 17, grew up with my son, left with me when I got divorced, and were my only companions for six years between the divorce and my next husband.

RIP: Red and Merly, the two one-year-old cats that came with my current husband. Red lived a long, full life to 17, although Merly got cancer when she was around 12 or 13 and died in a couple of months after the diagnosis.

RIP: Arbee, the first cat my current husband and I acquired together. We had her for nearly 15 years. Born feral, she was never a lap cat and almost as impossible to handle or touch as Odo, who is impossible. Because of that, we seldom were able to take her to the vet, and missed whatever made her die, but she was around 16. Might have been a tumor inside her cheek.