One life down

She was gone.

I should have known something was up when I was doing laundry at 4:00 a.m. during a bout of insomnia and she wasn’t yowling in circles around my feet. I should have known when I checked the cat box, and it appeared vastly underused. Mostly, I should have known when there wasn’t a splotch of cat vomit at the base of the stairs lying in wait for my bare feet.

I didn’t even put it together two hours later when, while getting the paper, I noticed blood on our doorstep. “Wow, isn’t that strange,” I thought, “how that looks like wet blood.” My mind raced to my neighborhood and the possibility that I’d slept through gunplay that may have occurred on my front porch. But it was only a few drops of blood.

A knife fight, perhaps? Still… not enough blood. There were four small splotches, enough for a small animal.

It wasn’t until the rest of the family was up, and the kids came to see said blood, and we’d investigated the short trail, that I fully put it together. Sort of.

“Yeah, the cat ran out last night, as my friend was leaving,” our oldest said. We stared at each other. My Homer Simpson-esque brain looked at the blood, then at my daughter, then at the blood, then at…

“Crap,” I muttered. My cat is 14-years-old. She has been on daily thyroid and kidney medication for over a year. She eats everything in sight, is massively underweight, drinks like a fish and sheds like a… shedding…thing. The very thought that this tiny bag of bones old lady would be out all-night long, in sub-40 degree weather was dreadful. And I watch House, so I was aware that bleeding is associated with renal failure. In humans, anyway—and how different can we be from cats?

Still, I didn’t want to face what seemed obvious—that my old girl was dying, and ran away. Everyone always told me that cats run away to die alone. I just didn’t want to believe it.

We proceeded to comb the neighborhood that day, but when she didn’t return that night, nor by the next morning, I knew I had to face facts. Teary-eyed, I searched the neighborhood one more time; then the nearby park. I’d faced my share of loneliness in life; times when I was stranded across the country, away from my extended family, my two boys at their dad’s for visitation. At these times I felt like no one in the universe could understand my sorrow. And then my cat would hop into my lap and lick my chin with her sandpapery tongue, and suddenly I didn’t need to be understood anymore. My cat sated my need for companionship.

She used to sleep on my bed, near my head, her buzzsaw purring quelling my insomnia. Later, she took turns sleeping with all my children; a calm, warm, snuggle buddy.

The very thought that she was out in the cold, dying and alone weighed on me like an anvil.

Finally, by the third day, I realized the cat was not coming back. There was no way. Officially past denial, I was now entrenched in pain and guilt. Occasionally an unfair anger would flair up (why did she let the cat out? IN WINTER?), to be followed by more guilt (it’s not her fault—the cat was quick and there was never any stopping her), and then, by the end of that third day, depression had begun to settle in.

I missed her, my oldest and dearest friend.

That night the family went out to Borders, just to get out and relieve the housebound tension. Naturally we had to take two cars—nine people, go figure. I was almost to the bookstore when my husband called me on the cell. “You’ll never guess who just came walking up to the front door?”

My Homer Simpson brain thought about my mom—what was she doing at my house? She usually calls first—and then about the dogs—how did they get out?—and then—

“WHAT?”

Yep. The cat came back, the (day after the day after the) very next day. Far from renal failure, I could clearly see that she was blood-free, warm and appeared to have been hanging out in a neighbor’s house. Probably eating fresh chicken or salmon or something.

When I got home I found her sitting on my son’s bed, Queen of Sheba that she is, purring like a sawmill.

I could swear she was smiling, my sweet old girl—despite the bored/annoyed look she gave me.

She was back.