The power of a cat…

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?

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The annual reminder…

It is Mother’s Day this weekend.

I have been a mother for 18 years. Motherless for 44. My mother has been dead more years than she was alive. My children are older than I was when my mother died – they’ve already lived longer with their mother than I ever did.

And even after all these years, I am still conflicted about this day – this Mother’s Day holiday. For too long, it was solely a reminder of what I had lost. Now it is a celebration of my role as mother – but still a reminder of what I had lost. It’s a moment when I think about what might have been… what might I have learned… what might I have better understood about life and raising children. The “what ifs…” rise to the surface on this day, taunting me with questions that will never be answered.

My children are now all teenagers and there are times when it is pointed out that I am the most embarrassing thing to have happened to my children. Teen years are tough. I think they are almost tougher to observe as a parent than to endure as a teenager. My friends and I were so incredibly stupid and reckless as teenagers… (but those are stories for another time.) When I remember my teen years, I remember my friends. The teen years are the time when we move from being dependent children into the growing autonomy that comes with adulthood.

Not long ago, I realized that I have no idea what happens to the parent-child relationship after these teen years. I never had a relationship with my mother when I was a teenager – she died before I became one. And since my father died when I was 22, I never really had a relationship with any parent as a young adult. I graduated from college and became my father’s caretaker for his final days on earth.

Mother’s Day is bittersweet for me. The good news is that it’s moved beyond bitter to include the sweetness of watching my children grow up. I hope I get the pleasure of relating to my children in the near future as one adult to another.

That would be really something.

 

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A death in the family

We just got word that my Uncle Tim died today – he was elderly; he had been ill; his death was not unexpected.

He was married to my mother’s sister – both my mother and her sister died of cancer in their 40s many, many years ago. My Uncle Tim was the repository of stories about my mother’s family. I had wanted him to meet my children but he never did. I had some of the most hilariously funny times at his house when we visited him in Ireland over the years. But I have not been back in a long time.

My parents and all my aunts and uncles and their spouses are dead now. Tim was the only one alive for many years. It’s inevitable but sad all the same. The immigrant’s ties to the family back home are loosened by distance but the ties with Tim remained strong just the same. I was lucky to have Tim welcome us into his home every time we showed up with questions about the family we lost when we were so very young.

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Of Manicures & Motherhood

I recently left the world of freelance for a job in an office. Love the work. Love the people I work with.

Hate the fact I’m not working in my basement any more. Hate the fact that I have to pack A LOT OF ACTIVITY into the weekends, activities I used to be able to spread out during the week. When you work for yourself in the basement, your time is truly your own.

When you work for a company, your time belongs to them. Such is the sacrifice we make for a regular paycheck with decent health benefits…

Thus I found myself last Saturday with two little girls and a vast list of chores to accomplish. And what I REALLY wanted to do more than anything was get a manicure so that I would look kind of groomed when I participated in a major client presentation the following Tuesday.

In dropping off my dry cleaning, I realized the nail salon was open ahead of schedule. I took a peak inside, and they said they’d polish my daughters’ nails for just $3.

A price point I could NOT resist.

Nora was gung-ho from the get-go.

Lindsey, usually the fearless one, wanted to stick to me. But when she saw the darling little flowers the manicurist had put on Nora’s nails, she wanted some of that for herself.

And thus I found myself having a mani-party with my daughters. I loved it. I never had the chance to get a manicure with my mother; but I’ve already had the chance to beautify myself with my girls.

It was a blast. An investment in a manicure that reaps enormous dividends in my memory. Looking forward to doing it again…

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Friends, Facebook and the Absence of Memory

I posted pix on FB recently – and a friend from HS, who I’ve reconnected with thanks to FB, made a comment that my son looks like my dad.

It was an innocuous comment that caught me off guard.

Yes, my son looks very much like my dad. But my father died more than a quarter century ago – and there are very few people I see in my day-to-day life who have any memory at all of my father. He simply does not exist for anyone I’ve met since 1984.

So to have someone note the resemblance my son has to my father is highly unusual. And it made me sad. My son is so very much like my father – but he’ll never really know that because he never got to know my father.

Memory matters. Our memories of people are very powerful. When you lose someone you love, you lose the ability to introduce that person to all the new people who enter into your life as time passes on. My friend’s comment on FB made me realize that my parents, so important to me, are completely absent in the lives and memories of most people I see everyday.

And I realized yet again that the tentacles of loss are very long.

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Lessons of Spring

My mother died when I was 12. It was spring, a lovely day, sunny, warm, a bright day, filled with promise and renewal, the day she died.

It was gray, blustery, stormy, the day we buried her. Terribly windy. Rain came before the priest stopped talking at the grave. We rushed to our cars. I remember the slap slap slap of the windshield wipers as the black limo headed out on the long drive home.

The rain made it feel as if God was prolonging the joke. The joke that had been my mother’s death by cancer. The leeching of her energy, her beauty, her life over time, which is what cancer does.

Of course a storm would rage when we buried her. That’s how we felt, standing there at the grave, looking at her casket, raging with grief, wondering what life would hold for us.

The day I returned to school after her death, I remember sitting in the locker room. I was in 7th grade. All of us were shucking the blue bloomers we were forced to wear for gym, changing back into our school clothes. I remember Ellen S. – the girl voted “most likely to succeed” – a sweet, beautiful girl (the kind you’d want to be if you were stuck back in 7th grade again) – staring at me, tears in her eyes.

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