Trigger Warning: Pet Death
I’m hesitating over my keyboard, mostly because I know I should have written this back in October, when the incident first happened, when my constant companion, a cat named Smeagol, died in my arms on a small black bench in our backyard, his last few moments warm, wrapped tight in his favorite blanket.
I didn’t want to write, which is normally my medicine for all hard things, simply because I didn’t want to feel it again. So I’ve kept these words milling around my head and off the page, for many months. It’s finally time, and I’m ready to tell you.
I was one of those kids surrounded by animals: toads, tree frogs, minnows, snakes. Baby birds, half-alive possums, palm-sized bunnies all seemed to find me. I had tanks of crawdads and a snail named Alphonse. An angel fish named Patricia and a rat named Scooter Bug found me, too, and lived for years under watchful care.
Puppy breath punctuated my childhood, as did litters of Siamese kittens and eventually lambs and goats in a rural 4-H, where I learned to say goodbye at the end of fair season. The litters of kittens I sold to good homes, minus a mother-son pair, who stayed with me for nearly two decades.
I’ve simply always been with animals. Always.
They created my routines, my stars-and-sun-and-moon rotation. My wake up call, my night time warmth, my on-the-lap companions. The common dogs and cats never quite seemed enough for me – I sought the unusual, the unique, the souls that spoke and spoke until I answered and took them in and harbored them.
That’s how I met Smeagol, a hairless cat that could’ve easily been a Craigslist scam. In 2012, I found myself spending far too much time on Craigslist. “Rehoming” animal ads led me to a Dachshund puppy in a Pizza Hut parking lot that was suspiciously un-Dachshund like but so covered in fleas I couldn’t leave him in the cardboard box with his sisters, who, conveniently, weren’t for sale. That “puppy” is with me still, nearly 15 years later, a strange miniature Golden Retriever of sorts, but certainly not a Dachshund. His name is Baxter.
A few months later, another Craigslist ad read: SPHYNX KITTENS. I jumped. I sent the listing to my mother, who squealed on the phone when she read it back to me. Sphynx kittens?! On Craigslist? What a dream! We emailed.
The ad was cryptic…something about a death, which we weren’t sure was the mother cat or the mother of the breeder herself, and how these 7mo old kittens were too old to be properly sold, and how they hadn’t had their shots as the woman who owned them had a sadness that had crippled her from caring from them properly. But they had papers. And there were 5 of them. And they were $75.
I got no email back, but my mother did. “On a teacher’s salary, I could never have afforded to get one of these special kitties for my animal-loving daughter, but I can afford one of yours.”
My mother read the email back to me, a yes from the woman who placed the ad, and I felt like Charlie with the Golden Ticket. We had a pick up date for my Sphynx kitty. My only current pet was that not-quite-Dachshund, Baxter, and my then-fiance wasn’t quite sure about bringing such a strange creature home.
My mom and I went to pick up the kitty and the GPS led us to a strange, dirt-road part of town where RVs and trailer homes lay on crooked lots in a chain-link community. We pulled up to the address and a note flickered on the front door. “Cat on porch, leave cash.”
I rang the doorbell, hoping to thank the person and perhaps get change for the four $20 bills I pulled from the ATM. A man answered, said he wasn’t the breeder and had no change, handed us an envelope full of folded papers for the cat, and quickly closed the door, pointing to a chair where a towel-wrapped lump sat.
The kitten didn’t move. He was wrapped in a Ninja Turtles beach towel, and my first glimpse of him was a storm-cloud colored nose and mauve-gray ears. Blue eyes. Warm skin. Toe beans exposed. He barely opened his eyes at us.
I expected a kennel, as my experience with cats was the wild kitten stage where they’d claw your legs in the car and dart around, but I scooped this kitten up in his towel and set him on my mother’s lap and he just sat and purred and warmed her.
When we got him home, he flicked his back legs and stretched and yawned and touched noses with the Pizza Hut parking lot dog and we started a 12 year relationship of unconditional love.
We named him Smeagol, but as many pet owners know, those names evolve. He was Smee at the vet, Smeachie to my daughter who was born when he was 3, and Smeachie-con-Peachie-con when we really felt lovey toward our boy.
He was a favorite - greeting guests and friends at our home with lap snuggles and head boops and pleasantries reserved for the most lovely of cats, the ones who don’t hide under the bed but make themselves pieces of living art and conversation starters.
He was stunning to me, regardless of if people thought he was a monkey or the AT&T guy jumped scared when Smee rubbed his head on his work jeans as he lay on the ground working. Smeagol was, quite frankly, a perfect kitty.
But as animal lovers know, pure-bred creatures tend to have shorter life-spans. In 2021, we noticed his breathing was short and shallow, and his once-strong pulse (which you could see in the veins of his neck) beat a different cadence. The vet said he had HCM, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, unfortunately common in cats like Smee. He had a few months, maybe a year to live. He was given a medication that would help him be comfortable.
We held him a bit closer.
In the meandering path of animal ownership in between Smee and his diagnosis, we had acquired the last dog at $25 dog day at the humane society, a strange and undefined terrier of some kind that we named Hugo, who acts more like a sullen 19th-century poet than a dog, and another Sphynx from a reputable breeder during 2020, when everyone got Covid pets. Our then four-year-old daughter waited by the door the day Pippin was delivered. As an only-child, a kitten was a godsend during 2020.
We named him Pippin (yes, another Lord of the Rings name). He is a sweet black-nosed cat with large gray spots like islands on a pink sea of hairless skin. He and Smeagol didn’t exactly get along, to Pippin’s chagrin. He really tried. But our old boy was set in his ways.
So we had 4 animals plus the myriad of baby birds and rabbits and possums and toads and minnows that found their way into our garden, all unique and strange, including Smeagol, who pawed his way into the crook of my elbow each night to settle in, sleeping so hard that our breaths would synchronize, collide like the ocean and the shore, deeply touching in dream land together. He nestled in like a ship in a close harbor. Sweet boy.
I’ll spare you the details of his death on a pink-sky October evening, which was quick and expected but not expected at all, because a soul like his, who made everyone feel special when he chose their laps in that closed-eye way he did, was surely going to outlive us all…? We buried him in the herb garden below the rosemary bush. Our 8 year old daughter made him a little grave stone.
We wept.
The crook of my elbow was strangely empty, my breath no longer matching another creature’s as I slept.
Pippin’s breeder, who mourned with us although Smee was not her baby, invited us over to see the kittens leaving her house that week to new homes. We played with them and fed her horses and marveled at the fact that we’d been gifted a perfect kitty for 12 lovely years.
One kitten wasn’t leaving, however, a small girl they called Kitten Mini.
“Last litter survivor,” Emily told us. None of the other kittens in her litter had lived, and she was a bottle-baby, not really for sale as she wasn’t exactly perfect. She was small, too small, in fact, at nearly 5mo old. She barely weighed 5lbs, hadn’t been spayed, and was the feistiest, boldest little cat I had ever met. My daughter was immediately taken with her – and she looked shockingly like Smee.
Mauve toe beans, cloud-colored skin, baby pink ears, soft peach fuzz, strange worm-tail that curled like a cinnamon roll. She settled onto my daughter’s lap like a little safe ship, harbored, and I knew. I knew she was ours.
A few weeks later I reached out to the breeder. “Give me details on Kitten Mini.”
She had her spayed, and the week of Thanksgiving, we picked her up. She quite dramatically threw up in the car on the ride home, got an immediate toe-flicking bath upon arrival, and nose-touched the old Dachshund, whose gray muzzle is now dotted with age spots.
The little kitten settled our rocking souls. We sought a Lord of the Rings name but couldn’t find one. She became Pearl — a glowing little gem, delicate, strong, radiant.
Pearl and Pippin were related, and he took to her immediately, cleaning her ears and her face until she pushed him aside and went on her way to do bold kitten stuff: sprinting on her cat wheel, snatching bugs out of the air, sleeping in a cocoon between my husband and I, getting carried around by a little girl who had never known a day in her life without Smee.
She healed us, that little girl. But she was always so small. At her vet check, she weighed 6lbs, but seemed healthy and vibrant and sure.
And here I hesitate again, although my fingers on the keyboard have been thrumming now for an hour or so.
Because what I’m about to type out doesn’t seem real.
She’s gone.
Today would have been her first birthday, July 4. Instead, on Saturday, five days ago, I opened the earth in the herb garden next to Smee and buried her.
The signs weren’t there, not like with Smee, whose HCM was apparent and clear after spending so much time listening to his breath and seeing his heart beat with my own two eyes in his skin-clothed veins.
In fact, when Pearl showed a strange bulge on her belly last week, I thought oh she’s finally putting on weight, our girl’s growing up! But the bulge moved, and moved again, and the vet said it wasn’t a hernia and we left their office with more questions than answers and the next day, when it was worse, and the vet entered the little exam room that smelled like bleach and dog and stress with tears in her eyes and we knew.
We knew again, that this soul we harbored safely was dying. We were given the choice, as her heart was failing fast, familiar words hitting our ears: “Her heart isn’t beating properly… it’s just fluttering…” Was this a punishment of some sort? A curse that the little one to heal our souls was ripped from us, especially from the arms of an 8 year old girl who had experienced pet loss for the first time merely months before…?
The breeder rushed to the vet and looked at the results and the ultrasound and her strange swelling and told us, after a long and mournful pause, that if this were her family’s pet, she would make the decision to euthanize Pearl.
So, wrapped in her favorite blankie, held in the arms of my 8 year old, whose choice was imperative to her own grief process, Pearl took her last breath, hopefully feeling love.
And here I am, as a mother of a child and a pet lover and an animal magnet who gets thrown these creatures to keep safe and love and lean into like they’re infinite… mourning my special kitty Smee, and now this one, and asking so many questions to help rationalize why this happened to us.
Why…? Why were we given a cat who lived 361 days, after losing the last one in the first chill of fall, for summer to come and take another one? Why did we fall so fast for this tiny girl, whose metallic meows are gone from our home, when my child asked me if she could take Pearl to college with her in ten years..?
Because, dear readers, we are the chosen harbors. We open the way for these wandering creatures to come into our lives because we know how. It’s not that we know how to feed them or vet them or take them on walks or clean their litter boxes, it’s that we know how to exist in the same space as something that is finite.
That we are brave enough to accept a short life, that is the gift we give our animals. That no matter how many days we are given, we accept how lucky we are to be loved, to have our laps and the crooks of our elbows warmed at night, for the joyful greetings and squishy toys and pattering of little paws across our floors.
Was she worth it, that little cat who lived 361 days? How savage this life is, sometimes, to mourn so close and feel the absence of something that brought us so much joy. How lovely this life is, always, to know that an animal, who relies on us to make all decisions for their well being, trusted the hands that fed it.
The question of sadness is easily answered. I will always be sad about Smee and Pearl. I will never think of them without a shuddering breath and a pricking in my eyes. I will always go to bed expecting a little nudge from a mauve-colored paw, a warm body that chose me for protection, to be near.
I loved them, irrationally, unguardedly, with an open, brave sail to the horizon knowing that these two little souls chose me, day after day, as I chose them, no matter how many years or days I got to spend with them.
Will we get another kitten? Absolutely. They are welcome here, however long their lives will be. However many little graves dot the yard, however many vet visits or sad days or happy ones or nights together, I will welcome purrs and meows from kittens and old cats, Craigslist dogs and pure-bred anythings, wild animals that wander in and domesticated ones that need us as much as we need them.
Because souls are safe, harbored here.
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