I wasn’t going to keep her. 7 years ago I had been putting food out on the back deck for several homeless cats that lived in the bushes behind my house. One day, one of them showed up at the food dish with a whole bunch of baby cats. On hindsight, I suppose I was as surprised as I was delighted. It was during a long, cold winter when I began putting food out, and it really hadn’t crossed my mind that cats have kittens. Having been without a cat for some time, and after giving the idea some thought, I decided I’d try catching one of the kittens for my own. I caught one little fellow the next day. He wasn’t real crazy about the whole thing at first, but once he figured out the deal included medical and all the food he could eat, he adjusted quite well. I told a lady working at the vet’s office how I had acquired him, and she asked me if I could catch a couple for her. In the mean time, momma cat had moved the babies, and it wasn’t until about a week later I found them again and was able to catch two more kittens. I called the vet, and much to my dismay, the lady told me she had changed her mind. This left me with what I viewed at the time as being a huge surplus in baby cats. Over the next month I tried to find a home for the extras, without any luck. A lot of thought went into the idea that if I increased my cat limit to two, which of the two it would be: the orange and white one that didn’t strike me as being very pretty, but was a nice little cat, or the tabby who had beautiful markings, but was still rather wild. All three were very shy around people they didn’t know, but had adapted to me quite well. At some point giving either of them up stopped being an option. I didn’t trust a stranger to treat them with the kind of extra care they needed, and putting them through the trauma of having to adjust to a new person in a new place seemed an act of bad faith. When one day someone finally called in response to a note I had put on the cork board at the vet’s office, I told them I’d already found a home for the kittens. As the weeks passed, a kind of pattern seemed to develop. While her brother and sister were playing elsewhere, Chuckles would look for me, then climb up to keep me company. She fell in love with me when she was little and absolutely worshiped me for the rest of her life. I’ve been around quite a few cats over the years, and I have never seen one bond so hard to its person. Her whole world was loving and being loved. As long as she had that, everything in her world made her happy. She loved to sit by the window and talk to the birds - that’s how she got her name. The sound she made was much like laughter. She was an awesome at ping pong ball soccer and it was pure fun to watch her work a ping pong ball from one end of the house to the other at nearly a dead run. As much as she loved to play, her favorite place in the whole world was a spot about a foot and a half from my pillow, or sitting next to me in the big chair to watch a movie. She’d purr for hours non stop at those times and her little pixie smile sparkled like sunshine. As the years passed, while I hadn’t thought she was especially pretty at first, it turned out she was truly the most beautiful cat I’ve ever known. On December 28, 2006, I bought the last food she ever ate. She was hard to spoil because she just plain wasn’t fussy about anything. As close as I could ever tell, she seemed to favor Kroger’s store brand of food in the Turkey Giblets or Mixed Grill flavors, so I went out of my way to stock up on it when I made a trip to Fred Meyer’s. I opened a can when I got home from the store, and was rather surprised when her brother and sister sniffed it and made litter box covering up motions with their paws. Chuckles dug in and polished off half of it, so I just figured the others were being picky for no good reason. That seemed to be the pattern for the next few days, with Chuckles eating the canned food, and her brother and sister eating the dry. By about the 4th or 5th day, no one was eating much of the canned food, and while her forever smile was still in place, Chuckles didn’t seem to have much energy. With three cats it’s sometimes hard to tell who is doing what, but someone was getting sick, and it wasn’t the result of a hairball. I also noticed the level in the water dish was dropping a lot faster than usual. After a week, although she didn’t seem really sick, Chuckles had lost quite a bit of weight and was not very active at all. I took her to the closest vet to my home. He put her on antibiotics but didn’t seem to know what was wrong with her. When her condition didn’t improve after two days, I took her to another vet, who after examining her decided to keep her for the afternoon to run some tests. At about 4 PM I received a call. The vet told me she had lost over 95% of her kidney function and had no more than two days left to live. Heartbroken doesn’t begin to describe what I felt. She’d been perfectly healthy and it just didn’t seem possible she could have gotten that sick, that fast. The vet asked if she could have come in contact with poison and I told him that wasn’t possible as she was an indoor only cat and I was very careful never to leave anything where the cats could get into it. I took her home, spent the last night of her life with her, and she died the next day - 10 days after the last batch of food I bought. I didn’t exactly suspect the food at the time, but had a vague uneasiness about it. I began buying other brands of wet food for my two remaining cats, and somehow every time I started to reach for one of the cans of Pet Pride - I had about 30 cans on hand - I’d stop and open something else. On March 16 I knew what happened. That I poisoned by beloved little Chuckles with my own hand is more terrible than I can bear. Perhaps even harder to take is knowing she might have been saved if we had known the problem was the result of something other than irreversible natural causes. When a one acquires a kitten, knowing that our clocks run at a different rate, there's an awareness that as each day the bond becomes stronger, the time left together becomes shorter. Six and a half years was way too brief a time to share with a person as fine as my little friend Chuckles. She's gone forever. No amount of money will bring her back or make it right. In reviewing this, it struck me that Monster and Buzzer might be perceived as being less important to me than Chuckles. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Cats have such unique, individual personalities, it is impossible to make comparisons. They are not toasters you can replace with an identical item off a store shelf. It's the endearing little differences and quirks that make them uniquely special to us, and like no other. It is only by blind chance I did not lose all my guys in January. My heart goes out to those who did. Update for June 5, 2007: I have received many kind letters on Chuckles’ Story, and would like to publicly thank all those who have written to express sympathy, condolences, or to tell of their own recent losses. At this point I would ask you not to feel sorrow for Chuckles, and not to feel sorrow for me. Shed your tears for an America where such a thing is possible, and for every time we stand down when doing something might make a difference. |
