Grizzy 2011-2023
Our house panther, Grizzy, lays in a languorous black pool in the heat. She loves being warm, so I’ve turned all the air conditioning off in my office, opened the windows, turned on some fans, and I’m letting her soak up the summer heat. It’s 84F outside, and I was raised without air conditioning so I can do it fairly comfortably today. But even if it had been over 90F today I would still have done it. Today the Kit-Kat, one of her many nicknames, can have anything she wants, and I mean anything. Our Dark Empress is a bit spoiled anyway, but today and early tomorrow it’s going to increase exponentially. Why? Because tomorrow we will take her to her veterinarian for one last consult and if he agrees, if we all agree, then she won’t be coming back with us ever again. We are having to make the incredibly difficult decision to end her suffering by ending her life. That sentence sounds so wrong. I started to type, cross the rainbow bridge, but no euphemisms. She has cancer. It came up very suddenly about three weeks ago, maybe a few days less. She’s only twelve, young for a cat for all you dog people out there. She should have had many more happy years to be our pampered house panther, but instead we’ve come to the difficult choice of letting her continue to suffer, or helping her die before the pain gets worse. There, I typed it. Die. We’re going to hold her in our arms tomorrow and allow the vet to kill her, or we keep her with us and see how terrible the rest of the process will be for her. Those are the choices.
I grew up with dogs, so I’ve heard a dog scream in pain, but never a cat until this last weekend. I didn’t know that cats made a sound like that, but just like with the dog the first time I heard it, I knew exactly what it was. She screamed out in pain twice, then she shook like she was having a fit, then she walked around in circles drooling and meowing in a piteous way. I was crying hysterically and thought this is it, she’s going to choose her own time to go. Then it all stopped, and she went back to being Grizzy. She didn’t look like she was in pain, she looked normal, seemed normal again. She asked for more food as if I hadn’t just witnessed her suffering out loud with no hiding. If that had continued we’d have bundled her up and headed to the veterinarian and helped end that suffering, but how do you decide when most of the time she looks normal? Well, almost normal.
There’s a growth on her forehead which has now grown so large that one of her large, emerald green eyes is completely obstructed by it. The growth was the first sign that something was wrong. It appeared on her forehead three weeks ago, a bump in her black fur above those vibrant green eyes. They almost earned her the name, Esmeralda, but she answered to the name, Grizzy, that her foster mom had given her. When a cat answers a name you don’t change it. Grizzy was short for Grizelda, which means, gray battle maiden. The color was wrong because she’s all black except for a perfectly round white spot on her stomach like a full moon over her womb. She was such a witchy cat; my grandmother would have hated her. She wasn’t a big cat fan anyway, but she was superstitious about black cats. Maybe that’s why I’ve wanted one since I was twelve years old, to defeat parental expectations? Grizelda is the name of a Valkyrie, the winged female warriors that help transport the dead from the battlefield to Valhalla and Folkvangr. Everyone seems to know Valhalla where Odin the Allfather hangs out, but it’s the Goddess Freyja who has first pick of the dead, not Odin. She chooses her half of the fallen, then Odin chooses from what she has left. The Valkyrie help transport the dead for both the Goddess and the God. So why would any rescue name a petite black cat after a winged warrior and chooser of the dead? A hawk caught her for dinner, thinking the small cat would be an easy catch, but Grizzy’s motto was always, fuck around and find out, and the hawk found out. Grizzy came out with a scar on one of her hind legs, and the hawk got to live to hunt another day.
She got the scar during her time at a feral cat colony where a volunteer witnessed the fight, so the tale of the battle followed her and helped her get the name. Her foster mom quickly realized that Grizzy was far too friendly to be feral, so once her medical issues were cleared up the rescue started looking for a forever home for her. They brought her up to PetSmart to be in the glassed-in cat adoption area to hopefully catch the eye of some potential adopters.
Grizzy was at least six years old by then, and a lot of people don’t want to adopt an older cat, they want kittens. I’ve never understood that, because those cute little kittens can grow up into cats that may be very different in personality, just as a human baby is different from the adult they grow up to be. If people are willing to adopt older they still want the youngest cat possible so under a year, or no more than two years, or three years tops, well you get the idea. Grizzy was between six and ten years old. A vet would later say six to eight, but when we saw her that day we knew she could have been as old as ten, a senior cat. On top of her age, she was a black cat, and some people still think they’re bad luck.
For me though, none of that mattered, in fact her age was a plus. The moment I saw her through the glass, I knew she was the one. She gave me a glare out of those brilliant green eyes and seemed to think very loudly, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting in this place for a whole week. You knew I was here!” I had. I’d felt this compulsion to go to PetSmart for a week and fought it off. We didn’t need another pet, but of course a cat is always right about such things. We did need another pet, we needed her.
She came with the name Grizelda, Grizzy for short, and I wasn’t a fan of the name. I liked it better once the rescue explained how she earned her name. I mean how could I not love an earned battle name, but there are other Valkyrie names or even female warrior names that I would have preferred, but she answered to it. Not all cats answer to any name, so we kept it. Of course, one nickname wasn’t enough for our Dark Empress. She was Grizzywald, because of a certain movie that came out soon after we got her. Grizzly, Grizzly bear for her deep, raspy torch singer of a meow, and because of her big animal energy. My husband nicknamed her G-Money and it stuck. I added Kit-Kat. Our girlfriend started calling her, The Void, because she was utterly black like a circle of night poured out into pictures. Yes, Friedrich Nietzsche got quoted a lot after that nickname. You know the one, “If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you.”
I thought Grizzy was going to be my cat, my witchy, moon-touched black cat, but she turned out to be my husband’s cat. He’d never had a cat before and didn’t think he was a pet person because he’d never been as enamored of our dogs as the rest of us were, but with Grizzy he suddenly discovered that not only was he a pet person after all, but he was a cat person. She demanded his attention, wooed him, barged into his affections ignoring all the subtle signals that my husband tried to give to let her know he wasn’t her person. But Grizzy knew he was her person and she was his cat. He spoke cat the way I thought I spoke dog. He was a natural at playing with them, reading their body language, in a way that he’d never been able to do with any of the dogs. He loved the pups, but as he blossomed with Grizzy I realized that it wasn’t that he didn’t like animals as much as I did, it was that he was a cat person. He’d never had a cat growing up and he hadn’t really interacted that much with our very first household cat, Éomer aka Meep, who was both his and my first ever cat. I did twenty years of allergy shots to be able to own any cat. I’ll get shots for the rest of my life, and it’s totally worth it. But Meep had been an only kitten, bottle-fed by human foster moms in rescue, so he had missed some of his, how-to-be-a-cat education. Grizzy had been someone’s pampered house pet, gotten lost and fended for herself in a feral colony, then rescued, and she knew everything there was about being a cat. She knew how to be pushy in a charming way, and she hunted my husband’s affections like she was still living outside and had a tasty squirrel in her sights. She was his cat; he just didn’t know it yet.
One night my husband and I were on the couch watching TV, and I heard him utter something romantic and cute. I turned with a smile and found him holding Grizzy. He’d been talking to the cat. I wasn’t even angry, it was adorable. I loved that he’d embraced the fact that he was a cat person and that he was Grizzy’s person. Her love for him freed something inside him so that he realized he understood Meep, and later, that he understood Magnus, our big ginger boy. My husband embraced that he was a natural with cats and it was all due to Grizzy’s persistence. Her second favorite person was our daughter, who now realizes she also is a cat person.
I don’t know what I am anymore. This blog has taken me days to write, and it seems right that I can finally finish it on the day that I’m finally crying. I cried when we held her in our arms while the vet helped her go painlessly, which was more than the cancer would have given her. I cried as I laid my cheek against the warm, black fur of her side that last day, but today I am weeping like something inside me has finally let go. I have been storing up tactile memories of her for the last week as we realized we weren’t going to have months with her, but only days. I have purposefully memorized the feel of her in my arms, the silk of her fur, even as the cancer began to carve her down so I could feel her hip bones and her tiny seven-pound body growing lighter in my arms every day. I memorized the warmth of her, told my fingers to remember how her fur felt, how her body felt alive, warm, pliable with her still moving and – I have had too many pets over the years where I touched them too much after death, but those were sudden losses with no warning. I didn’t know that I needed to collect the feel of them in my hands, my fingers, my skin. I didn’t know it would be the last time, so I didn’t pay attention, as we don’t most of the time. Even those of us that are touched by death at an early age and know the impermanence of happiness, safety, life, we don’t live every moment with that knowledge front and center. I try, but it’s too hard. It’s too great a reminder of the fragility of everything we hold dear, so we forget to hug each other goodbye before work sometimes. We don’t linger over the kiss of the people we love most in the world, because to linger on ordinary days is to admit that any day could be the last kiss, the last touch. And to dwell too long in that knowledge is unbearable. It would break us to live each day like that, but to live any other way dims our lives. Such hard choices: to sleepwalk through our lives or to embrace the ever-present loss as time marches on and over us, and we cannot get it back.
But … this time I knew, so I carved the feel of her fur into my fingertips. I pressed the feel of her liquid warmth in my arms like flowers that I wanted to keep forever. I gazed into those startling green eyes until I thought I memorized the pattern and texture of them. We have pictures that will help, but they won’t show me how it felt for my hand to stroke over the soft dome of her head and play with the delicate point of her ear. She didn’t like me doing that, but these last days I did it anyway and she tolerated it, maybe she knew that I was trying to make memories that would have to last forever. The feather light touch of her paws as she cuddled on top of my husband and I as we lay on our sides spooned together. She was never heavy, but those last two nights she was birdlike, dreamlike, light as a feather, like she was already fading into a ghost cat come back to comfort us. I lay there in the blackness with my husband curled around me and memorized the feel of this, too. Jon and I both knew that it might be the last night, so we lay still and let her settle, and tried to feel that tiny life tucked up in the curve of our bodies. She was so small, dainty, lovely, but she fought off a hawk and bore the scar of her victory. She was fierce and never backed down, never moved out of the way, but stood her ground and forced the world to move around her.
“Though she be but little, she is fierce,” –William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
35 thoughts on “Grizzy 2011-2023”
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Although I’m not a big cat person I hate to hear about an animal suffering and it breaks my heart that you’re loving GRIZZLY is going thru this. I wish you and your family the best in these times of sadness and hope that whatever you decide that you never forget all the fun times you had with your cat.
Best of wishes.
I am so sad for your loss. Your words show how much you are hurting and mourning Grizzy. I pray that you will always remember her and take comfort from those memories and the love she showed you and your family. May her memory become a blessing.
Real love, real loss, my heart breaks for yours. This is what it means to be human and feel all the feelings. The joy is in knowing she found you, and you found her. Thank you for sharing.
I’m so sorry to hear of the passing of your Grizzy. But you have honored her in such a magnificent way that had me remembering all my beloved fur babies who have died. Thank you and your husband for loving Grizzy and thank you for writing this.
I’m so very sorry for your loss… I know exactly how you feel as I too have lost a couple of fur babies… I also have a black cat and he is the most loving and crazy pet I have ever had. Your blog has me sitting here in tears and hugging my fur baby. My heart goes out to you and your family.
I’m so sorry. It’s the most devastating choice we have to make as pet people, and it’s awful every damn time. I’m glad you got some time with her at the end, and that she had such an excellent, loved life with all of you.
Having had this with our tiny, but fighter, calico, with cancer, it was like a nightmare. It just couldn’t be happening!! It was. That she was such a very special cat meant we did not feel like another cat for a very long time. It would be very hard. I read a lot, guess who, and she tapped me on the shoulder, dummy me taught her, an experiment. Well, home alone, no hubs, kids, or dog & reading a paperback. She tapped me on the shoulder. I screamed and threw the book in the air and jumped up. She streaked off. She came right back. I loved her up & I thought she’d never do that again. Well, like with cats, they’re totally unpredictable. She still dit the tap, just picked better opportunities. She was very smart!!! She also was cat with spunk: she outwitted coyotes, dogs, & other cats. She was tiny but she hunted & killed many, many voles, lived on a small ranch. She you scale a 6 foot fence like any cat with claws! That never stopped her. She had been born in a neighbor’s house, and when we moved we took her because my little boys saw her abused & because of that spent all her days at our house with our littlest boy, unusual. We still miss her so much and it has been years. Cat’s are special, and though I have had several dogs in my years, cats are smarter & more intriguing. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back!
Thank you for sharing. I have lost many house panthers over the years. You have expressed it beautifully. Be well…
I am so sorry. Had to do the cancer walk with a 2 of our cats and 1 dog. I am so very grateful for the time I had with them. Hugs the missing the who they were is always with us. But the leaving has always opened the door for a new someone to love when u are ready. Only with pets is my house my home.
Condolences on your loss
May you always remember the joy and fulfillment she brought to your life.
I can feel your sorrow in your words. I am so sorry for you and your family with the loss of Grizzy.
I’m so sorry, Laurell. I know how horrible and agonizing that experience is, and you have all my sympathy. Grizzy sounds like she was amazing. May her spirit rise and walk the blessed road, as the valiant warrior she was and is.
I so relate to this. I lost two cats between 2021 and 2022. One if them, my beloved tank, changed me forever. Two years since he passed but i still remeber his loud purr beside me at night, earning him the name Mr. Rumble Buckets, how when we went to bed at night how he tucked his paw into my hand and i felt the big roughness of his paw, and it made feel safe and loved. How he jumped on my lap and watched british mysteries with me. Even adding commentary at the right time. How he played editor, loved english tea and booze if i left it unguarded ! He was big, heavy, soft and warm on my legs and in my arms. He saved my life 3 times when i went into diabetic lows by slapping at my face and meowing desperatly. I loved him so much and it hurts even now. Two years later I still have days I cry even though I rescued another fur baby. Each baby is different , each with thier own personality. My first cat was a black kitten who climbed in my lap and claimed me, we bonded immediatly. Know this Grizzy will always watch over you, and there will be times both you and john will swear you feel or see her for a moment. In time john will need another paw baby. He will know the minute he walks among the cages. And so will you. Not all cats are familiars but sometimes J think witchs need stages where they don’t have one. Sometimes you just need a furred chaos baby to love you.❤️ Know that this will be alright with both Freya and Grizzy. After all a whole lot of love even for a short time is better than a ling life of struggle and lonliness. May Freya bless you all and the valkeries keep watch over your entire family whether they walk on two feet or four.
I also lost one of my black cats to cancer.. however his was under his tongue. I had five cats at the time and didn’t notice right away.. it must have grew like hers in about a week or so time because the next thing I new he had become skin and bones because he couldn’t close his mouth and ear really anymore. He had hidden himself from me. I thought he was just fighting with the younger cats and that was why he want laying on the bed with us at night. When I realized what was happening we rushed home to the vet. It was cancer and had spread all over his lower jaw. He would have loved but would have had half his face removed.. we would not have been able to eat and drink on his own. Not clean himself. We decided he needed our help letting go. Not an easy decision. He was already a mess.. I curse the cats needing to hide when in pain or sick. It made me loose that precious time. So I totally understand that pain.
I am so sorry for your loss. I too had to take my Baby in to a vet. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do and still feel that loss today. My thoughts are with you and your family. Hugs!
Your words bring so many memories of loved ones and fur babies. I have learned that we should live as if tomorrow will never arrive. Each smile, purr and bark are my most important possessions. My heart is heavy for you loss and the decision that leaves a mark. The shadow out of the corner of your eyes reminds you of your Valkyrie. Much love your family’s way
Letting go is the hardest part. 💔🐾💔
I’m so very sorry.
Of all the ways to love in the world, the unconditional LOVE of a feline, who has chosen you, is the greatest of all.
Blessed be.
I am so very sorry for your loss. The mini panthers sure find a way to tear into.your heart ❤️
Such a heartbreakingly beautiful way to express the love and loss of a soul. My heart goes out to everyone that was enamored by her.
You are a favorite author. Now a favorite writer. Thank you for taking me into your heart in your pain.
When my son was born my husband and I lived with our girlfriend, her wife and their cats Thor and Toru. Thor adopted my son as his hairless kitten. Always watching over him and judging us harshly if we didn’t jump quick enough when he cried. Thor was not feeling well for a few weeks. Last Monday, I made sure there was a video call between Thor and my now 6 year old son. Thor stared at him as my baby talked to his cat father. Tuesday morning, the day they were going to take him to the vet for the final time, he made his own choice and crossed over.
I feel your pain so hard right now. HUGS
Truly Blessed are those that are loved by a cat.
I am so sorry that you’re going through this pain. Having experienced this myself, what you will be doing is the most loving act that you can do for someone you love
My prayers are with you at this time.
A beautiful, loving memorial for a Valkyrie.
I lost my own midnight maiden right after the new year. She had been the neighborhood stray, abandoned by the neighbor two doors down when they moved. The neighbor next door took her in, but they were also renters, and again, she was abandoned. Their landlord threatened to “take her somewhere and get rid of her,” which I simply wasn’t going to stand for, so she became my cat.
She was much too used to fending for herself, and you simply couldn’t keep her in. At times, I was simply a stop over for a quick meal and a cuddle. She even tried to go out during the last snowstorm, but was quickly high-stepping it back inside the house when I “insisted.” Still, when outside she would run to meet the car when I came home from errands, graced my lap every evening after dinner, and heaven forbid there was anything IN my lap when she was ready for it, because it would just have to share.
Then on New Year’s Eve, she started drooling a bit. As all cats will, she hid her discomfort, but you could see that she was a bit off. Granted, she was old, she had been living two doors down when we first moved into the house in 2011, but certainly, it must have been a bad tooth, right? She already had one missing, probably from some fight she had gotten into during her time as the neighborhood stray. She was still eating well, if a bit more messily, but by New Year’s Day even that had tapered off. So, off to the vet we went as soon as they opened back up from the holiday.
Twenty minutes after walking in the door, I found out that it wasn’t a bad tooth, or even stomatitis. My girl had mouth cancer, tucked away underneath her tongue. The vet offered to make her more comfortable and send her home, but I didn’t want her escaping off into the wild and dying under someone’s shed, so I quickly made the only decision I could.
And despite the fact that I didn’t exactly want this cat initially, I cried like a baby when we put her to sleep. I also still think about her every day, and look for her in the eyes of the strays that I see scrolling across my Facebook page. I’ve literally stopped myself a hundred times from getting another. I have four dogs and another cat that were here before her to take care of, I don’t NEED another. Something keeps telling me, however, that eventually, she’ll show back up at my door in another form, and softly wend her way back around my heart.
She went by at least two other names, but to me, she was Raven, and she’s still greatly missed.
I am so sorry for the loss of your family’s companions. Even when we try to prepare for it… it’s still a shock to our lives. Those of us who have lost a pet knows the heartache that comes with it.
You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers.
I feel this, my own pain so recent. Our furbabies leave deep impressions on our hearts and in our souls. May you find comfort in the coming days, weeks and months that Grizzy is still by your side, hidden but there.
Condolences on your loss
May you always remember the joy and fulfillment she brought to your life.
Thank you for the beautiful tribute to Grizzy, and how she left her imprint on your family’s lives. She was a very fortunate cat to have chosen you as her people. I, too, am a cat person who loves black cats. Your writing talent made her story really come to life, as you do with your characters. Thank you for sharing.
I am so sorry. Losing a pet is never easy. It isn’t easy to talk about either. Prayers for your family healing to begin right away.
I am so sorry for the loss of your beloved Grizzy. I am not as eloquent as others here but I wish you strength and comfort as your hearts heal.
I’m so sorry you lost your beloved pet. I lost my last two pets a few years back. One I had to be like you and let a vet give her that end of life shot because of cancer. I remember just like you in that vet office holding her till the last moment. To this day I still want to cry over the lost of my honey bear and her sister two years later. My sister got both of them, she didn’t know she got them from a puppy mill. I was in the hospital at the time. And my sister just wanted to surprise me with these two cute Pom’s.We didn’t know we would only have them a few years. They only got to live 6 and 8 years because of that breeder was breeding them wrong. But they were extra ordinary dogs. Both my sister and I are not healthy enough to take proper care of animals. I don’t believe in getting an animal unless you can take care of one properly. I know what you are going through with your loss. If you have some good pictures of your lost one, keep one near by and just remember all the beautiful times you had with her. The pain of loss will easy with time. But if you have a picture you can remember and be glad you had her in your life even if it was a short time. Devoted fan for over 20 years.
The greatest love is to put someone else’s well-being and happiness over your own. Your love for Grizzy is beautiful
So sorry for your loss
Sorry for your loss. Grizzly will wait for you and your family on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge. Pets are loved and adopted pets return that love three-fold.