Tag: rescue cat

Grizzy 2011-2023

Grizzy looking out from her cat tree
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.

 

A Ginger Cat for Christmas

This is Magnus, and he’s the wrong cat. We adopted him this summer, but we meant to adopt a different cat. We wanted another black cat to go with the reigning dark empress of our home, Grizelda, Grizzy. I’ve never seen my husband so taken with any pet we’ve ever had. Grizzy has chosen him as her “hooman” and she has us all wrapped her dainty black paw. She was at least six years old when we adopted her and she has totally won us over to adopting older cats. They come litter box trained, they aren’t the wrecking crew that kittens can be, and they’re just mellower energy. We are big fans of adopting an older cat, because that is the cat you’re getting, with kittens you have to wait two to three years to see what the true personality is going to be. So, we wanted a cat that was at least two years old, and six to eight on the high end, though for the right cat we were willing to go for ten, since Grizzy could be that old. We thought two older cats would have matching energy levels. We preferred black, because cat or dog, it’s one of the last animals to be adopted. An older black cat, or dog is almost doomed at a shelter. If we could find a cat that had FIV, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus , then that would be the full sweep of hard to place cat.

We had our list and our reasons for it, so we set out to adopt a second cat. We went back to the wonderful rescue that we got Grizzy from, St. Louis Pet Rescue, Stlpetrescue. But a weird thing kept happening, all the cats we were attracted to were young ones. They looked like grown cats and were about the size of our dainty Grizzy, but they weren’t. Seven months, eight, nine, always under a year, so we kept saying, no. Also, most of them were not black. We tried, and there was one very handsome black cat, with long curls, named, Sabbath. Black Sabbath, I mean how could we not love the name? He was a gorgeous cat and he knew it, very confident when we interacted with him in one of the small rooms. He had Grizzy’s confidence when she first walked into our home. Grizelda and Sabbath, nicely witchy and two black cats! My inner twelve-year-old who had wanted a black cat more than anything, was thrilled.

Sabbath bit us, not hard, not to bleed, but it hurt. He’d be rubbing up against us and purring, and then nip. We’d be petting and he’d love it, and he’d nip. The foster mom couldn’t understand it, he’d never done anything like that before. He was only seven months old so he might mellow, but he wasn’t going to mellow at our house. We passed on the handsome rogue.

She had one other cat with her that was male, two years old, sweet and laid back. His name was Sweetpea, and we’d walked right by him in his cage, when we spotted Sabbath. Sweetpea had been everything the other cat wasn’t, quiet, nervous, and not coping well with the chaos of the adoption event. We hadn’t given him a second look. He was a yellow tabby cat, but not dark gold, more pale, dilute tabby I think it’s called, so even for a tabby he didn’t stand out. His gold eyes blended with his face unlike the brilliant contrast of Sabbath’s yellow set in black. His foster even said, “He’s not very pretty,” as she got him out of the cage. But the moment the light him, his stripes showed more, and I instantly disagreed. And he was almost twice the size of the first cat, so double Grizzy’s size. He was a big, Tom cat. We took him back to the same small room where we’d just had the first cat. Sweetpea did not stroll around the room scent marking and owning the space. He sat in our laps, and I mean he sat from my thighs to my husband’s, like I said he was a big cat. He huddled there, startling anytime one of the dogs barked out in the adoption event. He shivered and was so scared. He just seemed to be saying, take me home, take me somewhere safe and quiet, get me out of here. We actually went home and discussed it, before saying, yes, because he was the wrong cat except for his age, he was nothing on our list, but in the end we said, yes.

We changed his name to Magnus Maximus, and within a few days he knew Magnus was his name. He was better with our two dogs than Grizzy, cuddling up with them in big piles. But it wasn’t a perfect fit between him and Grizzy, even though we did everything the rescue sites say to do about keeping them separate and a slow introduction. He was as social a cat as she was anti-social. She loves her humans, but she’d be our only pet if she could manage it. The fights that most cats do to establish territory inside a new place were scary because of his size. He just overwhelmed her. Even when she started it, she was just out of her weight class. We thought seriously about not keeping him, but we loved him. We started cycling them through parts of the house, Grizzy is still the only one allowed in my husband’s office. We still have to use the squirt bottles from time to time, but Magnus has worked hard for Grizzy to let him lay close to him, and she’s even let him groom her head a few times, until she bitch slaps him. He’s been very patient with her, and they can sniff noses without her growling. She even sniffed his tail the other day and when he swished it in her face she put her paw on his butt, like she does my husband when she’s grooming his hair and he moves too much, a tiny prick of claws that says, clearly stop moving. Magnus let her do it, just like my husband does, she really is our dark, bossy empress.

Did I mention that the trip to get Magnus checked by our vet came with a surprise? Vet said Magnus wasn’t two, he was between eight months and a year, so just a really big kitten. His size had made the rescue up his age, and when you have twenty fosters in the same house, who could blame anyone for the mistake? The vet said, he’d easily reach twenty pounds when he matured, so not what we bargained for, but by then, he was ours. There were doubts after that, see above, but we’re so glad we worked through it all and didn’t give up because once a cat goes back into rescue it can be harder to place them a second time, people wonder why they got returned, and usually blame the animal, when it’s usually just normal pet things that people give up on.

I woke up this Christmas morning with Magnus curled next to me purring like a motor under my arm. He sleeps most nights in the bedroom with us. Grizzy shares the bed usually on the other side of my husband away from Magnus, but for her, well, she likes Magnus in a cranky, non social cat way. She’s the house panther to his social lion. I keep threatening that we’ll get another lion for him to play with if she doesn’t start playing more with him, but she gives me that look, the one that says, I’m being ridiculous. I suppose I am, cats do not change unless they wish to, and Grizzy is very cat.

When I was six I wanted a white kitten, by age twelve I wanted a black one, but over the years the cats that have come the closest to being mine have all been ginger cats. One, my grandmother relented on and it fell ill and died before I could even get it a collar. The second belonged to a neighbor and I was still deathly allergic to cats, and we had parrots in our tiny apartment. That Ginger cat was a mighty hunter leaving bunnies and birds and other bits on my doorstep all spring and summer to try and bribe his way into the house. He’d have made short work of our parrots. I grew allergic to them, too, and so in the divorce my first husband got the parrot and I got the dogs. Twenty years of allergy shots and I can have cats! So Grizzy for my inner twelve-year-old, and the ginger cats can stop stalking me, because I have one of my own, at last. Magnus Maximus, Max, Magnus the Magnificent, Mags, Mag wheel, our house lion, our Magnus.

This is his first Christmas as a house cat. He was a stray last winter, a kitten in the snow, picked up in March of 2019 by a kill shelter. He was a big, adult looking Tom cat not flashy, scared and didn’t show well in his cage, if Stlpetrescue hadn’t pulled him in that same month and put him in foster care, he’d have been euthanized and that’s one of the reasons they rescued him, because his time was running out. I’m so thankful that they saved him. Thanks to Barb who fostered both our cats, and thanks to Sabbath for blowing his “coffee date” date with us, so we’d look behind the scared, quiet cat in the other cage and find the friendly, chatty, cat he has grown to be. I finally have a ginger cat for Christmas, now if I can just add that white cat for my inner six-year-old … husband says, no. Grizzy says, never! Dogs don’t care. Our daughter says, yes, please! Magnus says, a playmate, bring it on!