She was the last of my original three - the cats that found their way into my heart when I was in my teens and early twenties.
Ebony (along with Mollie and Smokey) lived with me in what I like to refer to as the "lean" years. The years where I was single and broke and moving from apartment to apartment in Alberta. The years where they got to eat such wholesome cat food as "Friskies" and "Whiskas" because I barely had enough money to feed myself. The years where we lived in tiny, cramped apartments with walls so thin you could hear your neighbour blowing his nose, where instead of a door on the bedroom there was only a beaded curtain, and where a lady of the evening like to work her trade on the corner just down from our bedroom window. (Her name was Liz and sometimes when I was walking home from work in the cold and in the dark, I would stop at the McDonald's, buy us both a hot chocolate and visit with her for awhile.)
Ebony was brought to me in the fall of 1999 by my best friend's brother. He had found her in his yard playing with his dog. She was eight weeks old and a tiny, bony little thing. She was a spitfire right from the start though. She tormented and teased the two older cats, hung off the beads in the bedroom doorway, climbed the curtains and attacked all three of us in the middle of the night.
She never grew much bigger; she always weighed less than five pounds and visitors often mistook her for a kitten, even after she was fully grown. She had lovely yellow eyes and a silky soft black coat with a tiny patch of white on her chest. She had severe petting intolerance which meant that although she loved to be petted, after a certain amount of time, she would turn and bite you. She varied the amount of time she would tolerate petting just to keep us on our toes.
She survived a nine-hour moving trip to BC in a blizzard so severe that at one point, when I turned to my brother as we were inching through the mountains in the dark and the blowing snow and asked him if we were going to die, he replied gravely, "Probably."
When I married Ben and we moved in with him, she developed a deep hatred for his cat Kaneyko. We spent the next eight years keeping them apart in our tiny house and planning elaborate and detailed ways to give them both the attention and love they deserved without having to re-home either of them. It was difficult, but worth it.
She spent a great deal of her later years in our bedroom. She wasn't fond of the dogs and she was content to sleep most of the day under the covers of our bed.
On Sunday morning we noticed that her balance was off. By late that night she was lethargic, weak and dehydrated. I took her to the emergency vet and for nearly two days they gave her IV fluids to rehydrate her. They did blood work and discovered that her kidney values were off the chart. She was suffering from severe kidney disease.
This morning they called us and said there was nothing else they could do for her. Her kidney values had not come down with the IV fluids and she was starting to vomit and develop ulcers in her mouth. We had her transferred to our own vet clinic and we met her there to hold her one final time and tell her goodbye.
We are so grateful to Dr. Kathy for rearranging her crazy schedule to fit us in. There is comfort in familiarity and in having someone who is not just a vet, but a friend, help us to say goodbye. We are also comforted by the knowledge that Ebony did not suffer, that she went from being good to not good in a very short period of time, and that we had a chance to be with her and hold her before she died.
Cats are creatures of habit and our Ebony was no exception. After thirteen years together, we had our own rituals and habits, her and I. And while her death today was painful and sad, it is the absence of those rituals and habits in the coming weeks that will hurt the most. Never again will she sit in the bathroom and watch me apply my makeup. Never again will I wake in the middle of the night to feel her small body sleeping on my hip, and there will be no more early morning whiskers tickling my cheek as she bumps her head against my face and makes her high-pitched purrs.
Tonight I will open the door to our bedroom and instead of being greeted by a small black cat crawling out from under the covers of our bed and meowing softly, there will be only silence and emptiness.
It is that emptiness, the absence of her and our small but meaningful rituals, that leaves a hole in my heart that will never fully close.
Sleep sweet Ebony. You were a good cat.
No comments:
Post a Comment