This morning was quiet. Far too quiet. For the last eight years, I’ve been awakened by a soft insistent “meow” delivered gently to my face by my sweet cat. Not this morning. We said good-bye to Pixie yesterday. She’d been battling kidney and bladder issues for a good long while (urine the color of cranberry juice for the last two years) and the medical problems finally became too much. She will be missed greatly.
She was a rescue kitty, as all of our pets have been. We were told she was one-year-old when we got her. Someone had declawed her then dumped her – when she was found hanging around a 7-11 dumpster in fall of 2010, she weighed all of four pounds. We don’t know how long she had been starved of love and food. We don’t know how someone can declaw a cat and then let it go. The suburbs of Chicago are unforgiving places for house cats without a home, especially when they are declawed.
The sweetest thing ever…
My sister, who ran a hyper-local news site, first told me about her. The rescue organization was going to post a notice in my sister’s news site about her after Halloween. She was a black cat and the organization did not like posting notices for black cats in October. I guess people do weird and violent things to black cats as part of their celebration of Halloween.
We had just lost Moses, our 18-year-old orange tabby cat earlier in the year. Moses was a beloved member of our family but he had a tumor pressing against his eye and in May 2010 we said good-bye to him. In the fall of 2010, we were still adjusting to life without any pets when my sister told me I should look at this cat that was seeking a family. I was not sure. It’s hard to say good-bye to our pets. I was working a demanding job and wasn’t sure I could take on the responsibility of a new pet.
But I knew I missed having a pet around. This one needed a good home. So in early November 2010, we made an appointment for me and my children to meet this cat, who at the time was being called Ashes, at the foster home.
We were told she was shy. My son lay down on the floor and the shy kitty came over and started purring. We knew she’d made her choice. We were hers. And we were so happy. We did not like the name “Ashes,” so we renamed her Pixie. It was, in our opinion, the perfect name.
After moving in with us, she hid under our bed for the first month, emerging only to eat, pee and poop. We were patient. And our patience was rewarded. She would emerge, realize that she was fine and the time she spent with us grew longer and longer. After the first month, she owned the home and our hearts. We would let her come out to our screened in porch and we would witness her become a wild creature as she watched the birds in our back yard. We were always slightly afraid she’d make a move to bust through the screen, though she never did.
In the summer of 2011, she made the cross-country trek with us from Illinois to North Carolina. She was not happy about the move. She pooped in her cage as we drove down our street away from our house for the last time, an appropriate beginning to a very long journey to our new life in the South. We moved into a rental house that was dark and full of mold. Everything was different. Everything.
When we got a puppy in the winter of 2012, Pixie was not happy about the new addition to the family. But she let him know his status (beneath hers) in the home. And he always knew she was the queen.
She knew how to command the best sunspots in the house…
When we moved to our current home, Pixie thrived. She loved the sun. She even grew to appreciate the dog (we think.)
She knew how to lounge very well…
I don’t know when humans began to live with animals as pets. I know that I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life with animals. They fill the home with love and their presence. We don’t “need” pets but they seize our hearts and we grieve them when they die.
Pixie was truly the sweetest little thing. I wish our time together had been longer. She will be missed.
I close with Rudyard Kipling’s tribute to “The Power of a Dog” – but hope you change the words to know I am thinking about the power of a small, once-abandoned cat to tear my heart…
The Power of a Dog by Rudyard Kipling
THERE is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find – it’s your own affair, –
But … you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!),
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone – wherever it goes – for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear!We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent,
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve;
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long –
So why in – Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?