Until Rainbow Bridge...
©2008, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008...6:20AM Eastern Time

I was away on business. It had been a fitful night with strange dreams, but for a first night away from home, that was not unusual. I awoke early to make my "wake-up call" back to the house.

I did not at all expect what I would hear when the call was answered.

"We have a real emergency here! Lizzy is dying! We have to get to the vet right now!" my wife Rosemary half exclaimed, half cried.

I didn’t know what to say... what had happened? What... It was as if the world had stopped turning.

"Kieran, get in the car! Thalia, please hurry!" came the directions through the phone, in a desperate voice.

"What happened?" I tried to ask. "I don’t understand..."

"She was fine, and then she was coughing, and then she just passed out, and... we have to go!"

"OK."

I disconnected the call and sat on the edge of the bed in my hotel room, feeling utterly helpless.

.

October 21, 2007

It was almost exactly six months before when I visited the local pet shelter with the intention of adopting two cats. Not one, but two, so that they would have each other for company, was what I had said to Rosemary. I had been to the shelter before and had my heart torn out by the sheer numbers of unwanted pets that the staff of the facility had taken in. The number of cats was just overwhelming. Maybe a hundred, maybe more. Older cats whose owners had passed away. Groups of kittens, entire families. Feral cats found hurt in the wild. Cats turned in by helpful people who had found them along the side of the road. Cats who had become allergens to their owners. Cats who could no longer be afforded. The stories posted with many of the cats were emotionally wrenching.

Within the shelter there is a special room where cats that had been in the shelter for a long time were being kept. The cats in this room were desperately in need of a new home. I sensed that this was where I would find the companions I would bring back with me.

The first one was easy. She was a pretty "torty"—a tortoise-shell cat, mostly black with hints of brown and white and what would later be called a "racing stripe" between her green eyes. That feature gave her a permanent "who me?" look that was precious. Her story was particularly touching. She was brought in in August, not long after my first visit to the shelter, and had been there ever since. That was difficult enough, but was particularly moving was that she had been brought in with a litter of kittens, all of whom had been adopted while their mother had been left behind. I did not subscribe to the theory that only humans felt emotions. I could hardly consider what hers were given her circumstances: no family, strange place, uncertain and tentative future. I knew she was going to have a loving home with us even before I was invited to come in and spend some time in the special room. A quick visit with her confirmed that. I forgave her wanting to spend more time out of reach than near me. Even so, I think she understood that I was here for her. Our eyes met enough times for that to be apparent to her.

The second cat was a more difficult choice, but I did eventually make it. Shadow was another "torty" that seemed to get along with Lizzy. She had much longer hair in brighter shades of color and a sweet "meow" which always gets to me. After some counseling and paperwork, I arrived home with both cats and surprised everyone.

The first task was the selection of more appropriate names, which the kids eagerly accepted. The second cat was given the name Shadow, and the first one became Lizzy.

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April 22, 2008... 7AM Eastern Time

My cell phone rang about 30 minutes after my call home. The caller id noted that it was Rosemary’s cell. At this point I still had hope. Lizzy was only about 18 months old. Perhaps it was more of a bad scare than anything else.

"Talk to the kids," Rosemary asked.

Thalia was handed the phone first. She was in tears. I could understand why.

"You’re being very brave, Thalia," I tried to counsel. "You’re doing a great job and I hope everything will be alright." I said some other things that have already been lost in the fog of... suppression. Thalia could hardly say anything.

Kieran took the phone.

"I’m very proud of you, Kieran. I hope Lizzy will be OK."

And then Rosemary took the phone back.

"How is she?" I asked innocently.

"Didn’t they tell you? Lizzy is dead," Rosemary responded tearfully.

Oh, no.

.

December 25, 2007

Christmas Day.

Lizzy and Shadow had been with us for about two months. They had somewhat defined their territories.

Shadow lived up to her name and followed me into my basement home office on a regular basis, finding and curling up on a chair not far from where I sat. I described her with the term "adjacent cat"—not a "lap cat," but sitting comfortably next to me or in the general vicinity.

Lizzy seemed to be much less comfortable. She spent a fair amount of time either under our bed, where she couldn’t be seen; or up high on the top of the couch or on Thalia’s loft bed so that she could see everything else. She was so good at hiding that the first day we had her we thought she had managed to get outside and Rosemary went around the neighborhood with pictures of her. About two hours into this she crept out from a space behind the loveseat that I had no idea she could get into.

Lizzy didn’t like to be picked up at all. When I would occasionally do so anyway, she would struggle to get away and her heart would be beating incredibly fast. I would give her a few kindly strokes on the top of her head and then put her down gently, as if to reassure her that we meant her no harm. I don’t think she was convinced. But we were working on it. I wondered out loud sometimes about what she might have been through before coming to live with us, and shuddered when I did. The way she seemed almost to recoil from a touch sometimes reinforced what I would rather not have believed.

Kieran and Thalia were very excited. Santa had brought gifts not only for the children but for the new members of the family. Each cat received a fleece blanket. Shadow’s was green and Lizzy’s was pink. Neither of them took to it right away, so we placed them on their respective soft beds that we kept on the floor near the loveseat, which they used... when they felt like it. They were cats, after all...

.

April 22, 2008... 7:01 AM Eastern Time

Rosemary was beside herself. "I keep thinking, is there something I could have done? Could I have gotten to the vet sooner? Could I have been faster about it, and she would still be alive?" she said from cell phone to cell phone through what I knew were tears. In the background I could hear both of our children crying.

It was hard enough to answer through my own tears, but I tried. "Was there anything that the vet could tell you?"

"No. Only that she hadn’t choked on something."

"Then it wasn’t your fault... there wasn’t anything you could do." A sudden morbid thought flashed through my mind. "Maybe there was something that we didn’t know about... a birth defect, maybe, maybe something from when she had her litter... Eighteen month old cats do not just die!" I half wept, half demanded to heaven.

"I need you to make some decisions," Rosemary said. "I am not sure what to do and I need you to talk to the vet."

Within a few moments I was presented with some options for dealing with what had suddenly and inexplicably become Lizzy’s remains. I forced down my feelings long enough to consider the choices and made what I thought was the best one under the circumstances. I provided all of the required information and the phone was given back to Rosemary.

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February 8, 2008

The cats were coming into their own at their new home. Shadow had more or less taken over the basement and Lizzy more or less had the upstairs to herself, with the first floor being a kind of Demilitarized Zone. No, that’s being far too harsh; they really did get on well except when it was time for us to go to bed, at which point there would sometimes be a bit of snarling and play fighting. Even domestic cats retain some of their predator genes, which is why indoor cats long to be outdoor cats once in a while. After their exercise, they would often both join us. I would frequently wake up in the middle of the night and find one or both randomly distributed on our bed.

Shadow wears her heart on her sleeve, Rosemary opined, and wrote a short piece for her writing class from Lizzy’s point of view.

It’s my house, even if Shadow walks every hallway and makes a big show of fighting me in front of the masters, knowing she will be caught immediately. I am never caught, though the tacit masters are beginning to see this. At first it was, "don’t hurt Lizzy". "Oh, poor Lizzy." Just don’t touch Lizzy, I said with arched back and a quick escape.

They are like sheep, these masters. Slow and loud and relatively easy to predict. If I allow the children to see me, they pick me up and the adults yell stop. Shadow sees and wonders who is favorite, wonders so obviously that I make sure I will be picked up, just to torture Shadow a bit. They keep wanting to call Shadow a he. It is because she is almost dog-like, obvious, needy, trying so hard to pretend she does not want to be touched or cared about. Were it not for me, there would be no true cats in this house.

My problem is, upon occasion, I need their touch. The trick is to make it clear that I am the one in charge. The best moment is when one of the grown ones is reading. I can insinuate myself in front of the page and watch them unsuccessfully try to gently push me away. Then they see. Lizzy, my god, Lizzy who never comes voluntarily, is here. Sometimes I must literally place my head in the right position relative to their right hand to get the proper fingernail rub. They spend too much time worrying about the book pages. They actually want to resume in exactly the same place they leave off, in their interminably slow, human way. It is amazing really how these grown ones work unconsciously to conserve every once of energy they can. All they do is sit, eat, and sleep! They wouldn’t chase a mouse if it bit them.